New York Times - free registration required Still Tilting at Windmills, and Fighting for Rights.
Michael Ratner, as a law student at "Columbia University", was pushed to the ground and beaten by the police in 1968 as he and other students blocked the entrance to a building occupied by protesters.
This would turn out to be one of those defining moments. Mr. Ratner, who would graduate second in his class, got up, looked at his bloodied fellow protesters and decided to become a rebel.
"That night was crucial," he said. "An event like this created the activists of the next generation. I never looked back. I decided I was going to spend my life on the side of justice and nonviolence."
Three decades later, he is still at it.
Mr. Ratner, 59, is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit organization that litigates civil and human rights cases. He has worked or been affiliated with the advocacy group since graduating from law school.
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"The assault on civil liberties is as bad as I have ever seen it," Mr. Ratner said while seated in his cramped offices in Greenwich Village, "and it is not like the 60's or 70's when there were people fighting for civil rights and ending the war in Vietnam.
"What we have now is a frightened population. The government is able to push through draconian laws that are in clear violation of the Constitution. These are the most sweeping changes of our fundamental rights in over 50 years."
The government's open-ended war on terror has, in the eyes of Mr. Ratner and his supporters, condemned the United States to a downward spiral. This struggle, he said, has left him watching while many of the changes he and other liberals fought for over the last few decades have been reversed. And, he says, especially if there is another terrorist attack, things will get worse.
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He ticks off a list of things that worry him, including increased censorship of information, the silencing of dissent, ethnic and religious profiling, the decision to wiretap lawyers and their clients without a court order, and the creation of military tribunals that can mete out the death penalty without appeal.
"The laws they said would only apply to immigrants are now being applied to ordinary citizens," he said. "The military tribunals were set up to detain noncitizens. And now two citizens have been picked up and are being detained infinitely without any right to a court process." [Privacy Digest]
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