Here’s a must-read piece by Rocco DiPippo on the forces behind the effort to give Guantanamo detainees access to the US legal system: Michael Ratner and CCR: Fighting Against the War on Terror.

In order to fully understand CCR’s publicly stated reasons for advocating for prisoners at Guantanamo, which center on the concept of “civil rights,” and to understand its lesser known but much more important reasons for wanting interrogations there halted, it is necessary to briefly examine the history of the CCR and its leadership, the types of clients it advocates for and its political affiliations. And a thorough examination of CCR’s current president, Michael Ratner, who is the driving force behind the Guantanamo shut-down effort, is absolutely vital to understanding the position that CCR takes today regarding the rights of prisoners captured in the War on Terror.

The CCR was founded in 1966 by attorneys Morton Stavis, William Kunstler, Ben Smith and Arthur Kinoy—all members of either the Communist Party or the radical left. Before forming CCR, Kunstler and Kinoy drafted and circulated a detailed memo calling for the creation of a ‘new Communist Party.’ That never materialized. Instead, Kunstler and the other lawyers, some of whom were also members of the National Lawyers Guild, a communist front group,
focused their energies on building the CCR and formulating and fulfilling its main mission of clearing legal roadblocks for leftist revolutionaries and enemies of the U.S. and capitalist economic system.

In candidly describing his life’s work of representing and advocating for violent radicals, CCR founding member William Kunstler once said, “I stay in this profession only because I want to be a double agent, to destroy the whole f*cking [U.S.] system.” Throughout his life, Kunstler made clear that CCR’s main mission was to keep violent leftist revolutionaries and other enemies of the U.S. out of jail and on the streets where they could toil away at destroying the institutions of American democracy.

Beginning in the 1960s, the CCR worked closely with two other “civil liberties” groups with communist and far-left pedigrees; the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which, as stated earlier, shared membership with the CCR, and the ACLU.

Read the whole thing; it’s a real eye-opener.