Michael P offers inter alia the following:

This text was presented to the Independent Commission of Inquiry to
Investigate U.S./NATO  War Crimes Against The People of Yugoslavia,
International Action Center, New York, July 31, 1999


Translation: a kangaroo court put together by a front group for the
fruitcakes at Worker's World Party and their useful idiot Ramsey Clark,
about both of whom, in the interests of a semblance of balance, more below:

salon.com > News June 21, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/21/clark

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.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Ian Williams
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.
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.) Many former
friends, more in sorrow than in anger, trace his present positions to the
company he keeps: the International Action Center, which proclaims him 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.
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."
In his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,
for instance, he played to U.S. isolationist sentiment, and -- somewhat
ironically for a case originating in Texas, the capital of capital
punishment -- said his client faced execution if extradited. A moment's
research would have established that the international tribunals set up by
the United Nations do not have the death penalty, because most countries,
unlike the United States, regard executions as barbaric. But even then it
seems odd that someone who regards this country so balefully would seek to
exempt it from the clear international law expressed by the tribunal. With a
foretaste of his blasé attitude over Kosovo's ethnic cleansing, he said that
it was "unconstitutional" to extradite someone to the "illegal"
international tribunal. "The international tribunal for Rwanda is an
extension of colonial power in Africa, which can threaten every African
leader. The tribunal is foreign power intervention taking sides to maintain
its control over the majority Hutu through Tutsi surrogates."
Attention to detail is not a major feature of his work. While claiming an
intimate knowledge of events in the Balkans, only this April he addressed a
letter to Bill Richardson as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., telling him
that "the U.S. assaults both Slavs and Muslims to stimulate them to attack
each other and to control both." Of course, if he had been reading
newspapers other than Workers World, he would have noticed that Richardson
has been energy secretary for over a year. Indeed, he may have noticed that
Richard Holbrooke, not unconnected to the region, has been stalled in his
nomination for the post.
His advice to Belgrade to sue NATO for genocide at the International Court
of Justice did not, for example, take into account an existing successful
injunction from 1993 against Yugoslavia to stop committing genocide against
the Bosnians.
What we are reduced to is the idea that human rights are not something
inherent in the individual, but contingent on the politics of the state that
abuses such rights. What Ramsey Clark wants from the city of Philadelphia
for Mumia Abu Jamal (another of his causes) he calls "colonial" justice when
claimed by Tutsis in Rwanda against their erstwhile murderers, or a tool of
imperialism when claimed by Kosovars against their torturers.
In fact, many of these political anomalies make sense in light of his role
as the figurehead for the International Action Center, which in turn is the
front for the Workers World Party. Between them they write his letters and
briefs. Respected by some on the left for their ability to bring out people
for demonstrations, they are reviled by many for bringing the left into
disrepute.
The Workers World Party split from the Socialist Workers Party many decades
ago in support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and it has
remained true to its origins. Oddball Trotskyists morphed to Stalinoids, its
members have since then supported the Chinese government over Tiananmen
Square -- and of course see the current incumbents in Belgrade and Baghdad
as staunch anti-imperialists. By appearing on their behalf, the former
attorney general allows their views a vicarious respectability that they
could never dream of otherwise. Associates take some small comfort from the
WWP's hold on Clark -- it means that he no longer carries water for the
equally oddball Lyndon LaRouche, with whom he flirted in the '80s.
Clark's is a distinguished Southern pedigree. His father was an attorney
general before him and resigned from the Supreme Court to avoid a conflict
of interest when his son joined Lyndon Johnson's administration. There were
few signs of his current leftism: On Vietnam, the obsessive litmus test of
the American left, he failed miserably, supervising the prosecution of Dr.
Benjamin Spock for conspiracy to encourage draft-dodging. When he ran for
the Senate in 1976, he was to the right of Bella Abzug, and even some of his
campaign workers say that by splitting the ticket, he let in Daniel Patrick
Moynihan ("Not a big step forward for progressive humanity," one former
supporter commented laconically.) Ironically, as a candidate he opposed
Israel negotiating with the PLO. Now, he says Islam "is probably the most
compelling spiritual and moral force on earth today" and that the U.S. is
anti-Islamic. However, this benignly spiritual view does not seem to have
extended to the millions of Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia.
Since the 1970s, he seems to have had little contact with the mainstream of
American politics except as an occasional TV pundit invited to speak on the
strength of his former attorney generalhood. "My feeling is that he has to
be a true believer" in the WWP, says a former campaign worker, although
others assume a more opportunistic relationship.
It is not surprising that many of Charles Dickens' eccentric characters are
obsessively involved in litigation. It does something to a man -- and
especially to a former attorney general. If the world is not the way you
want, it must be sued into the right shape. And if conspiracies of the
powerful exclude you from existing tribunals, or they return improper
verdicts, why then you set up your own marsupial court where you can pull
the verdict ready formed from your pouch. Which is why the outcome of his
tribunal in New York is already in before the jury has even been empanelled,
that the U.S. and NATO are guilty of unspeakable crimes, and Slobodan
Milosevic is bathed in the blood of the lamb, not steeped in the gore of
Kosovo.
salon.com | June 21, 1999


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Salon | Search | Archives | Site Guide | Contact Us | Table Talk |
Newsletter | Ad Info | Membership | Shop
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Columnists | Comics | Health & Body
Media | Mothers Who Think | News | People | Technology | Travel

Copyright © 1999 Salon.com All rights reserved.