[PEN-L:8141] Ian Williams gnaws at Ramsey Clark's ankles

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(complete article is at http://www.salon1999.com/)

Ramsey Clark, the war criminal's best friend

The former U.S. attorney general has become the tool of left-wing cultists
who defend Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Rwandan torturers as
anti-imperialist heroes.

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BY IAN WILLIAMS

June 21, 1999 | In the most morbidly literal way, NATO forces are "sniffing
out" more mass graves than alliance spokesman Jamie Shea ever suspected.
Dog-eaten sticks of bone poke from putrescent pits on television screens.
So it is not surprising that on July 31 New York will see the opening of a
commission of inquiry for an international war crimes tribunal. What may
surprise some is that its target is NATO's war crimes.

Those who know him will be less surprised that the inspiration for this
circus is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whom one long-standing
colleague described as "a good man gone ga-ga -- at least 25 years ago."
Many liberals and leftists cut Clark a considerable degree of slack. For a
start he is almost the only person the American left has had in high public
office since World War II, even if it was a retrospective success, since
his long march leftward only began afterward. His views as the former
attorney general are listened to with a respect that would be accorded to
few others with such eccentric opinions. As a revered spokesman of the
left, he is a perfect symbol for its near-impotence in American politics
today.

Many former friends, more in sorrow than in anger, trace his present
positions to the company he keeps: the International Action Center, which
proclaimed him as its founder but seems entirely in the thrall of an
obscure Trotskyist sect, the Workers World Party. Whoever writes his
scripts, there is little doubt what Ramsey Clark is against now -- any
manifestation of the power of the state he once served at the height of the
Vietnam War. However, many former friends are deeply concerned about the
sound of silence. Everyone who has dealings with Clark uses the word "nice"
to describe him. But he often sides with people whom no one with a full
deck would call nice. (Clark did not respond to a Salon News interview
request.)

At the end of 1998 Clark attended a human rights conference in Baghdad,
Iraq, where in his keynote speech he pointed out how "the governments of
the rich nations, primarily the United States, England and France,"
dominated the wording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
showed "little concern for economic, social and cultural rights." The
social and cultural rights claimed by his Iraqi hosts include the right to
hang opponents in public at the airport, or poison thousands of Kurds and
torture and execute any opponent of the regime. And on the legality of
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the silence is deafening.

When he flew to Belgrade to support Slobodan Milosevic during NATO's
campaign, there was no word about the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at
Srebrenica or the million homeless refugees from Kosovo -- and even less of
those olfactorily eloquent mass graves that NATO is now uncovering. But
then, urging Belgrade to resist NATO, while he was there picking up an
honorary degree, he told his hosts, "It will be a great struggle, but a
glorious victory. You can be victorious."

In Grenada he went to advise Bernard Coard, the murderer of Prime Minister
Maurice Bishop. Other clients include Radovan Karadzic, the indicted
Bosnian Serbian war criminal whom he defended in a New York civil suit
brought by Bosnian rape victims, and the Rwandan pastor who is accused of
telling Tutsis to hide in his church and then summoning Hutus to massacre
them, and then leading killing squads.

His willingness to accept dubious clients is defended by some attorneys.
After all, everyone needs a defense. Others say he has crossed a moral line
by defending Karadzic and overlooking events in Kosovo. But looking at his
legal arguments, one must question the wisdom of his legal counsel, not
just his morals. A prominent international lawyer explains, "He's not
really very well up on international law -- I remember he was asking for
help in some of his early cases."


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)