07/23/15 – Michael Ratner – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
All right.
Our first guest on the show today is Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Hey, Michael, how are you?
Welcome back.
I'm good, Scott.
It's always good to be with you.
Good deal.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry to start your interview this way, but I think it's important we play this clip.
It's a minute and a half here.
Former general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, in fact, Wesley Clark on MSNBC.
General, you know, a lot of people would say you reap what you sow.
So how do we fix self-radicalized lone wolves domestically?
Well, we've got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized.
We've got to cut this off at the beginning.
There are always a certain number of young people who are alienated.
They don't get a job.
They lost a girlfriend.
Their family doesn't feel happy here.
And we can watch the signs of that.
And there are members of the community who will reach out to those people and bring them back in and encourage them to look at their blessings here.
But I do think on a national policy level, we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists.
They do have an ideology.
In World War II, if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn't say that was freedom of speech.
We put them in a camp.
They were prisoners of war.
So if these people are radicalized and they don't support the United States and they're disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine, that's their right.
It's our right and our obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.
And I think we're going to have to increasingly get tough on this, not only in the United States, but our allied nations like Britain and Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.
General Wesley.
All right.
Okay.
So finally that's over.
All right.
So obviously there's a lot to go over there.
But I guess I will add before I turn it over to you, Michael, that he has since defended himself on Twitter, but actually only by doubling down, I think.
He says, you know, I never said Muslims.
So I guess that means, you know, right wing and left wing extremists of whatever color religion in America are just as well up for grabs for him.
That's supposed to be a defense.
He never said internment.
I guess he just meant concentration or maybe death or reeducation or some other summer camp maybe.
And yeah, he said he never called for new camps.
So I guess I'll just reopen Manzanar.
I don't know exactly how that's supposed to be a defense, but that was his defense of what he said.
So I guess I'll ask you whether he has any legal standing here for this kind of argument.
Could they get away with that if the rest of the national security state found that they agreed with him on this?
You know, Scott, we should look at what he said precisely as you started to do.
And, you know, when you talked about how he tweeted this, I never said Muslims.
Well, he did say that people were at war against and they have an ideology.
So the question is, who else did he mean?
And so, but in some sense, you're right when by not saying, by not saying it's not just Muslims, or I never said Muslims, you could say it's left and right.
But, of course, when he meant it, what he said was that people were at war against.
And you're right.
He never used the word internment, but he said segregate people, et cetera.
And then he said he never called for new camps.
Well, you've made the point.
And that means our existing camps, wherever they are, are sufficient.
I want to say before we talk about him and the legality, it is an outrageous statement and completely, you know, ridiculous.
It makes him into just a complete dummy.
This is supposedly a Democrat, was a Democratic nominee, not nominee, but ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004 or so.
He was supposedly a war hero in the Kosovo War, although there's lots to say negative about his role there.
But he's building on a scaffolding that makes his statement not completely off the wall in this country right now.
And the first place we've got to turn is to Obama.
Obama, in a speech a couple of years ago, when he was talking about Guantanamo and closing it, he said, well, there's a separate category of people who we don't have enough evidence against or can't get enough evidence against who we consider to be necessary to preventively detain or detain indefinitely without charges.
So, yeah, sure, Obama is talking particularly about Muslims, in that case, people overseas in Guantanamo.
But it's the same principle.
We can put people into detention without actually having a trial.
And so in that sense, Wesley Clark, you know, yeah, he's completely outrageous about this.
But it's not like without precedent.
And, of course, it's not without precedent from my period in the 70s, when the United States and Hoover had all kinds of indexes, security indexes, administrative indexes, made up of all the people who were subversive, supposedly.
That included Howard Zinn.
It included James Baldwin.
And it goes back even earlier, obviously, to the Japanese concentration camps and the war.
So, yes, the statement is completely off the wall.
But the big question I have, is this really what some people in this country who are in elites are thinking?
And my guess is they are, because we're talking about these people believe that, you know, the Muslim so-called sleeper cells, whatever they call them, or lone terrors, whatever they call them, this is a huge issue that our police departments look at all the time.
They arrest people based on what their thinking is, what websites they visit.
They arrest people, you know, without having committed any crimes.
And they set them up with informants.
And so, not even informants, but people who are, you know, who are pushing them into and trapping them into crime.
So, yes, it's an outrageous statement.
But let's just face it, in this country, as I said, there's a foundation for thinking like that.
I think it will be rejected right now, but you have to say that Obama has not yet rejected it at Guantanamo.
So, that's serious.
And it's hard to distinguish that from what Wesley Clark has said.
Now, the question is, is it legal?
Well, you know, obviously, in my view, Guantanamo is completely illegal.
You can't set up some offshore detention camp and put people in there for now some 13 years, perhaps, or 14 years, and not actually ever charge them.
And in some cases, some have actually, 50 of them have been cleared for release.
So, yes, that's flatly illegal.
Have we been able to get them out of there?
The answer is most of them, no.
A lot of those people remain in there.
So, yes, this is a call, I guess you would say, because this is a call for doing it domestically in the United States against U.S. citizens.
You would have to say that I would hope that a U.S. court would absolutely never allow that.
But, of course, we did have one case during the so-called War on Terror of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen put into detention in the United States.
And finally, before that case got to the Supreme Court, my guess is even this Supreme Court would have held that illegal, the U.S. indicted him and tried to charge him with a crime and convicted him.
So, the answer is yes.
Any decent constitutional lawyer would say the proposal is completely illegal.
It's jailing people because of their thoughts, exact words, as you said, because they're radicalized.
They don't support the U.S.
Well, how many people do we know that that includes?
And they're disloyal.
So, is that a reason for jailing people?
Obviously not.
That's not a crime.
You're allowed to think like that.
And he even says that.
He even says it in that little clip you played.
They have a right.
They have their right to say this, but we have our right to segregate them for the duration of the conflict.
Well, that conflict, the so-called War on Terror, is going to go on essentially for most of our lives.
So, it's an illegal statement.
It's a stupid statement.
The tweet makes it, I think, as you pointed out, perhaps makes it even worse.
And, as I said, it's built on a scaffolding of this kind of jailing of people without charges in this country.
All right.
So, this is the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Michael Ratner.
He's from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
We're talking about Wesley Clark and his proposal to start arresting radicalized, self-radicalized lone wolves and put them in detention camps.
You know, maybe their family is unhappy and their girlfriend broke up with them and they need to be separated.
We'll be right back after this break with much more.
Michael Ratner after this.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm talking with Michael Ratner for and from the Center for Constitutional Rights here.
You know, make sure we get to keep some, a little, maybe.
All right.
So, now, a very important point you brought up there, Michael, is about the Padilla case.
An American citizen arrested on American soil at O'Hare Airport turned over to Rumsfeld and Tenet to be tortured for a few years.
And then, as you said, George Bush ducked.
And right before it went to the Supreme Court, I think they ducked the issue themselves based on standing the first time.
But when it came around the second time to the Supreme Court, he knew he was breaking the law, what he had done to Padilla.
So he went ahead and turned him over to the Department of Justice and had him indicted and prosecuted.
And yet, I don't think there was really any question that Padilla had provided material support to terrorism as far as that goes under federal law.
He was easily convictable along those lines, although, of course, the dirty bomb and the apartment buildings bombing plot and all that was made-up nonsense that they tortured out of poor Binyam Muhammad.
But anyway, the point being they had some kind of charge on Padilla.
But now the way – and maybe he left – maybe Wesley Clark left himself a little wiggle room here where he talked about if you choose ISIS, then we got to lock you up.
I mean that's a very vague term.
Nobody knows exactly what he meant by that.
So – but it sounds like what he's saying is that just maybe if you like him on Facebook or whatever, then they ought to have the power to do to you what they did not have the power to do to Padilla.
I mean what they got away with doing to Padilla for a while but did not have the legal authority to do to him.
They didn't have the legal authority to do it to Padilla from the beginning, but they never acknowledged that, and to this day they haven't acknowledged that.
What they did is rather than go to the Supreme Court and test the legal authority to put someone in prison, a U.S. citizen in particular in this case, to put them in a U.S. – not even a prison, a detention.
He was in a military prison of some sort.
They never acknowledged that they were wrong.
All they did was not go to the Supreme Court and indict him on other charges and finally convict him, which is what they should have done to begin with, assuming they wanted some bad evidence and were going to convict him.
They shouldn't have just said, we can hold him forever.
And the reason they wanted to say they could hold him forever without charges is not because they couldn't convict him, because they obviously could.
It's because they wanted to establish the principle in this country that U.S. citizens who we don't like, who we believe are disloyal, who have connections with people we believe are disloyal, or in some way are, maybe in this case are, you know, hanging out with the wrong people, that we believe we have the right to put those people in jail and prevent a detention, an indefinite detention, for as long as we want.
And that's, of course, exactly the principle of Guantanamo.
The United States, in their view, I guess, hadn't, the courts hadn't reached the point that they would necessarily approve that when they went to the Supreme Court.
We don't know that.
They made a bet that the Supreme Court, it's four conservatives plus, would be Justice Kennedy.
They made a bet that they might not approve that, and therefore they decided to indict him.
It's a scary, scary prospect, and for me the problem is I don't like distinguishing in any way the people held in preventive detention in Guantanamo from American citizens who could technically perhaps be held here or maybe not.
They're all U.S. persons, right?
Right.
They're all human beings.
And since when does the law stop when you're a U.S. citizen and you have to be indicted and tried to be kept in prison?
And when you're not a U.S. citizen, you can simply be picked up by the scruff of your neck, tossed into a prison, never have a trial, and in this case, until we won the habeas corpus proceeding in 2004, Bush was going to deny them any right to go to court at all.
Period.
So I don't separate human beings in that way, particularly when it comes to fundamental rights to have a trial, to have your detention tested by a court.
You just can't say that there's anyone who's exempt from that requirement.
Well, the Bill of Rights doesn't say that anyone is exempt from that requirement, does it?
That's correct.
It does not.
It doesn't.
Certain of those rights have been held to apply no matter what.
All right.
Now, so does it matter or not that it's not a declared war like World War II?
Or would you agree with me that, legally speaking, it's a war on terror like it's a war on cancer?
It's just, to turn a phrase for PR, in real life, you know, we have, I don't know, some police actions and some kinetic operations and this, that, the other thing.
But does that change, does that really make the middle part of North America the battlefield in this thing?
You know, I've argued about this forever.
I don't believe it's a, it's not a real war in the sense that Vietnam was and, you know, you have an enemy like that and all of that.
I've argued for years that this is essentially a form of, you know, police action, which they should have initially gone and tried to arrest the people they believe were involved with the perpetration of the 9-11 attacks.
But they didn't take that route.
They didn't take a law enforcement route.
They just said we're going to war, quote, war on terror, not a genuine war.
Essentially, that's their position right now.
Now, what I think is wrong with that is, so what if it's a war?
Let's say it was a real war.
Does that mean you have a right to put people in jail for their opinions about a war?
You don't.
I mean, the U.S. has tried to do that in the past.
If it had been true about Vietnam, we would have had hundreds of thousands of young Americans go to prison because there's nothing but, and I was involved in it, hundreds of thousands of us on the streets saying end this war or saying, you know, as you got to the more left part of those demonstrations, Ho Chi Minh was the leader of the Vietnamese.
Ho Chi Minh should win.
You know, we had a chance like that.
Does that mean that just because there was a so-called war, even if not a declared war, but that was really, was a war because there was a congressional, you know, there was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and there was a tremendous amount of funding, et cetera.
Well, they have the AUMF of 2001 here.
That's not much different than the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
I would agree with that.
I would agree with that.
That's against, though, the AUMF.
There's two.
There's an AUMF, and that has to do with Afghanistan, and then there's a separate resolution against Iraq.
But that doesn't, those, neither of those, in my view, would allow the United States to engage in, never got authority to bomb Libya, to bomb Yemen, to put troops into, you know, into the Syrian war.
None of those, none of those did that.
So this is, and they did, what they've done, both Barack Obama as well as Bush, they just expanded the meetings, meetings of those, both the AUMF and the Iraq war resolution.
Now, the Iraq war, we've pulled out, so that's, it's technically over, that war.
So now we're back, got a couple, a few thousand there now.
Right.
In terms of the resolution, now it's the Iraq government that's asking us to come in.
Yeah, you're right, which is a different legal technicality there.
Right, a different legal, likewise in Afghanistan.
That war is over.
Right.
And, in fact, our lawyers have actually made, lawyers that I work with have made claims that you can't keep the people at Guantanamo anymore to the extent you were relying on war authority.
You can't do that.
So we're really naked in this situation.
Well, now, what about the NDAA from, was it 2012, the NDAA of 2013, or it was 2011 it was passed and it was regarding 2012, and it said, yeah, you can go ahead.
And this is along the lines of what you're saying, all the outrage about when people, whether they're actual attackers like Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, or whether they're, you know, entrapped by the FBI.
You always have people like Lindsey Graham complaining that these people ought to be taken to Guantanamo as though, you know, being prosecuted in federal court is, you know, like nap time at the daycare center or something, no big deal at all.
And they always have this faux outrage that terrorists are being treated under the rule of law, when of course they should not.
But so, and then the NDAA, a judge said, a federal judge said no, but then was overruled by an appeals court.
And that's where, and then the Supreme Court refused to hear it.
So that's where it stands that they do have that authority now again, just like back in the days of FDR, right?
You know, that is a huge issue, and that's the case.
I remember that Chris Hedges went to court on it and others to try and challenge that provision in the NDAA.
But, you know, the question of, you know, Wesley Clark did try and put this into a war context, but he got his history totally wrong.
He said this is like the Second World War.
He said, trying to analogize it to putting people in prison during the Second World War.
Well, the one big thing we did in the Second World War by putting people in prison without charges was the Japanese.
And that's, which was hundreds of thousands of Japanese were picked up solely because of their nationality, considered disloyal, and put in concentration camps.
And that's considered one of the great embarrassments and wrongs the United States ever perpetrated.
And what he said, what Wesley Clark said, he didn't even mention the Japanese.
He said, well, people who sympathized with Nazi Germany, they were treated as POWs, prisoners of war, and put in camps.
There's no basis for that.
That is not what happened at all.
They did take a certain population because of its ethnicity and put them into a camp.
They didn't say that people couldn't speak out and say, we support Germany.
Yeah, you can say that.
You could have said that.
Like I said, I supported the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
You can say that.
It may not be nice.
People may not like you for it.
And they may want to throw rocks and eggs at you, but you can say it and you don't go to jail for that kind of speech at all.
And there was a Supreme Court ruling on the Japanese internment that said it was legal, that upheld it.
And that still stands to this day, right?
That's never been challenged and overturned so far, has it?
Well, during the war, there was a ruling that essentially did what you said.
It was a ruling on curfews.
And in the body of that, it did do that.
The Supreme Court then, as I recall, Korematsu, who was the main plaintiff during the war, a Japanese man who was put in a camp, then went to the Supreme Court again.
And as I recall, they never said it was illegal, but they did say that it appears that the evidence was falsified that put them into the camps.
And then the U.S. Congress gave compensation to the Japanese.
So the principle, what happened in the case was in the middle of the war, the State Department, not the State Department, the military, I guess the DOJ came in and said, we have evidence that these hundreds of thousands of Japanese, particularly on the West Coast, are plotting and blowing things up and doing all these things.
And we can't figure out who they're going to be.
And this is serious.
And they're like a fifth column in the United States.
And we have to jail everybody because we can't figure out the individuals.
Well, that principle is obviously ridiculous, but you're right.
That principle was not necessarily smashed to pieces.
What was smashed to pieces was that the evidence for that population being, quote, disloyal or more than that, planning attacks was fabricated by the United States government.
So on that, if you want to call it a technicality, they said it wasn't a good ruling.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're over time here.
There's a lot more to cover, but we'll talk again.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
I appreciate it.
I really appreciate you coming on.
It was an important issue.
Have a good one.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's the great Michael Ratner.
He's at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
He's fighting for your natural and constitutional rights.
We'll be right back.
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