Creeping Insanity

I wrote about this last December, but hadn't heard any more about it until today. But now that it's poised to become a reality, it seems that Ramsey Clark, one time US Attorney General (1967-69), and long time anti-American activist, has slipped a few more cogs.

Former US Justice Secretary Ramsey Clark is expected to join a legal team seeking to defend former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before a special Iraqi tribunal, the panel’s chairman Mohammad Rashdan announced yesterday.

“Negotiations are under way for Clark’s joining of the team,” Rashdan told Arab News, without going into details.

Clark, an ardent sympathizer with Saddam’s government, will become one of the distinguished members of the panel, that also included former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas and some 20 prominent Arab and non-Arab lawyers who volunteered to defend the former Iraqi leader.

Firstly, there is nothing "distinguished" about Clark. He lost anything resembling dignity long ago. I realize the honorific isn't intended in any specific sense, but it still galls to see Clark's name--a dishonored, disgusting man--anywhere near a term usually used to note a certain level of respect.

Clark, in case you didn't know, is a man who now runs a front organization for left-over communists who wish the Cold War had turned out a little bit differently.

From the end of his time as AG, Clark has been active in anti-war (and, at times, anti-American) organizations and a vocal opponent of American intervention around the world. From an Accuracy in Media report:

Clark traveled to Hanoi, North Vietnam, from July 29 to August 12, 1972, under the sponsorship of the Stockholm-based International Commission for Inquiry, a Communist “peace” front. He was taken on a guided tour and denounced the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. He also visited American POWs held by Hanoi, falsely declaring that they were in good health and their conditions “could not be better.” Such visits by American figures gave the communists the confidence to continue in the face of defeats on the battlefield.

Clark and Kerry were strongly against the Reagan policy of supporting the anti-communist “Contra” freedom fighters in Nicaragua. The policy, though opposed by a liberal Congress, resulted in the holding of elections in Nicaragua, the electoral defeat of the Communist Sandinistas, and an end to the communist insurgency in El Salvador.

It's also worth noting that this man endorses John Kerry for President and was opposed to military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Even an NPR (that hotbed of conservative activism) reporter called Clark "goofy and irrelevant."

Clark's International Action Center works hand-in-hand with ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), itself a front organization for the Workers World Party. The WWP is an admittedly communist organization that is described by Washington Fortnight (a group of libertarians identifying themselves under the pen name Ed Burke):

...it has supported China and its actions in Tiananmen Square; Slobadan Milosevic after the massacre at Srebrenica and Saddam and the Baathist Party in Iraq. It particularly is interested in the last official Stalinist state - North Korea. To gain the party's support, any despot that lays claim to socialism, the abolition of private property and is a virulent anti-American qualifies. It regularly advances the interests of Fidel Castro, the mullahs in Iran, the narco-terrorists in Columbia and the interests of Palestine as defined by Hamas. It supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

These are the kinds of people with which Clark allies himself. These are the kinds of people that are behind the anti-war movement around the world. And the kind of person that Clark is working so hard to defend is Saddam Hussein--a mass murderer who killed his own citizens with chemical weapons, who launched wars of aggression against his neighboring countries, and who thumbed his nose at UN mandates for more than a decade.

Not only is Clark an unsavory fellow, but his choice in compatriots leaves little doubt as to where his sympathies lie, and those sympathies are far from the interests of America.

Read the story.
Read the Accuracy in Media report.
Washington Fortnight Archives.

Posted by zombyboy at August 25, 2004 10:49 AM