Robert Boehm, 92, Leader of Rights Group, Is Dead

Robert Boehm, the chairman of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a Manhattan-based nonprofit group most recently in the forefront of an effort to secure legal rights for military prisoners held by the United States at Guantánamo and elsewhere, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 92.

The death was announced by his family and by the center, of which he was a mainstay since its founding in 1966.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, prompted by the civil-rights struggle, gained support after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. It was started by four lawyers — William M. Kunstler, Arthur Kinoy, Morton Stavis and Benjamin E. Smith — who maintained their private practices while volunteering their time for cases taken on by the center.

Mr. Boehm helped rally financial backing for the organization as the center built its legal support network for the civil-rights movement. He also helped the center branch out to challenge American policies in Central America and assist victims of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines.

He led the center’s legal team in litigation arising from the deadly Attica prison rioting in 1971. He also played an active role in many other organizations with liberal and leftist leanings.

CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
666 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY
10012
Phone :212-614-6464
Fax :212-614-6499
URL: Website http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)'s Visual Map

* Founded by pro-Castro radicals
* Opposes post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) was co-founded in November 1966 by the radical attorneys Morton Stavis, Ben Smith, Arthur Kinoy, and William Kunstler, longtime members of the Communist and radical left. (Kinoy and Kuntsler were well known for their pro-Castro politics.) CCR characterizes itself as an organization that "uses litigation proactively to advance the law in a positive direction, to guarantee the rights of those with the fewest protections and least access to legal resources."

CCR is a core member of the open borders lobby, which seeks to effectively initiate an era of mass, unchecked immigration. In 2002, the Center filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of illegal alien detainees, seeking punitive damages and a declaratory judgment that the detentions were unconstitutional and violated customary international law.

Since 9/11, CCR has focused its efforts heavily on reining in the U.S. government's newly implemented anti-terrorism measures, which the Center depicts as having "seriously undermined civil liberties, the checks and balances that are essential to the structure of our democratic government, and indeed, democracy itself." "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the government's actions," explains CCR, "has been its attack on the Bill of Rights, the very cornerstone of our American democracy."

CCR was a signatory to a March 17, 2003 letter exhorting members of the U.S. Congress to oppose the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, also known as “Patriot Act II,” which was then under consideration. The letter asserted that the new legislation "fail[ed] to respect our time-honored liberties," and "contain[ed] a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers … that would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights." In addition, CCR supports the California-based Coalition for Civil Liberties, which tries to influence city councils to pass resolutions creating "Civil Liberties Safe Zones"; that is, to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act.

On January 17, 2006, CCR filed a lawsuit against President George W. Bush, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and the heads of the other major security agencies, “challenging NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States.” (The NSA program targeted communications between persons in the United States and persons abroad where one party was suspected of having connections to terrorism.)

When law-enforcement agencies attempted, in the wake of 9/11, to conduct voluntary interviews with several thousand Middle Eastern men who were in the United States on temporary visas, CCR denounced such "racial profiling"; it issued this same complaint in response to the government's detention of hundreds of non-citizens from the Middle East for possible terrorist connections. When Attorney General Ashcroft warned in 2002 that visa violators would henceforth be arrested, CCR characterized his comments as "chilling." When new regulations permitted the FBI, CIA, and INS to share information about possible terrorist plots with one another, CCR lamented such assaults on "our privacy."

CCR’s views on the political and psychological roots of anti-American terrorism were summarized in March 2002 by the organization’s President, Michael Ratner, who said: "If the U.S. government truly wants its people to be safer and wants terrorist threats to diminish, it must make fundamental changes in its foreign policies ... particularly its unqualified support for Israel, and its embargo of Iraq, its bombing of Afghanistan, and its actions in Saudi Arabia. [These] continue to anger people throughout the region, and to fertilize the ground where terrorists of the future will take root." Condemning America's post-9/11 “aggression” against Afghanistan, Ratner suggested that as an alternative to war, the U.S. ought to "treat the attacks on September 11 as a crime against humanity, establish a UN tribunal, extradite the suspects, or if that fails, capture them with a UN force, and try them."

CCR has been a strong supporter of radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who in February 2005 was convicted on charges that she had illegally "facilitated and concealed communications" between her client, the incarcerated "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman, and members of his Egyptian terrorist organization, the Islamic Group, which has ties to al Qaeda. CCR called Stewart's indictment in 2004 "an attack on attorneys who defend controversial figures, and an attempt to deprive these clients of the zealous representation that may be required."

In March 2005, CCR joined with the parents of deceased anti-Israel activist Rachel Corrie (the International Solidarity Movement volunteer who was accidentally crushed to death while trying to obstruct the path of a bulldozer that was engaged in anti-terror operations by Israeli Defense Force soldiers in Gaza) in filing a federal lawsuit against Caterpillar Inc., the Illinois-based manufacturer of the bulldozers used for such purposes by the IDF. Arguing that Caterpillar had violated international and state laws by providing the IDF with this machinery, CCR sued the company, marking the first time that American citizens had filed suit against a U.S. corporation for alleged misdeeds in a foreign country.

CCR only defends clients whose political views it supports, among the more notable of whom was Tom Hayden. Other CCR clients have included members of the Black Liberation Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, Women’s Strike for Peace, the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, the Chicago Seven, and the Catonsville Nine. The organization has also taken up the cause of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian rights activist who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975, a crime for which he is currently serving a life sentence in prison.

Regarding international matters, CCR has argued in court that: the Vietnam War was unconstitutional and criminal; bombing North Vietnam was illegal; the Nuremberg war crimes laws should have been applied to Americans involved in the Vietnam War; the American military should have been restrained from fighting in Cambodia; fighting the Communist onslaught in Vietnam was wrong; and the U.S. Navy should not be permitted to use the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for bombing exercises. In addition, the Center attacked America’s anti-Communist foreign policies concerning El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba, and elsewhere in Central and South America.

Characterizing President Bush as a political leader who is "out of control" and engaged in the "reckless abuse of power," CCR in 2006 produced a book titled Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush. This screed accused Bush of "illegally spying on U.S. citizens, lying to the American people about the Iraq war, seizing undue executive power, and sending people to be tortured overseas." CCR exhorted likeminded people to sign its online impeachment petition.

In December 2006, CCR and the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP) jointly petitioned a federal judge to dismiss many of the charges brought against the Hamas-linked organization Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which in 2001 was shut down by the U.S. government because of its terrorist ties. Defense attorneys argued that Executive Order 13224, the statute under which HLF was named as a financier of terrorism, is overly broad.

A member organization of the Abolition 2000 and United For Peace and Justice anti-war coalitions, CCR is supported, in part, by donations from the Ford Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the Samuel Rubin Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Public Welfare Foundation, the New World Foundation, the Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust, the Tides Foundation, and the Vanguard Public Foundation.
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