Ramsey Clark

Ramsey Clark appears in the news in the past year as an anti-war activist, usually identified, as in this story at NewsMax.com (which should know better) only as "appeasement movement leader and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark...." This really sticks in my craw, as he's much more and much worse than folks are led to believe.

For starters, he was an attorney general nearly forty years ago, during the Johnson administration! That's like calling Jimmy Carter "the former president." It leaves out a lot -- a whole lot that's more relevant than one job decades ago.

You can read a pretty dry biography here. You'll note that during his government time he was pretty active in increasing and consolidating Federal power, and he wasn't a friend of the Second Amendment, either. He was, to his credit, instrumental in civil rights reforms.

Johnson, however, found him to be too timid, for all his leftyness. And in the presidential campaign of '68, when Nixon ran on the "hard on crime" Southern strategy, Clark was so far to the left of Nixon he was an easy target. It helped Nixon to get elected and put Clark out of favor with Johnson. He left government shortly afterwards.

As I said, it's the years since then that really tell the tale. The Washington Post wrote a pretty in-depth feature article on him last year, which you can read here. It's worth the time, but here are the money 'graphs:

These days, for instance, Clark, 74, serves as a lawyer for Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav dictator now on trial for war crimes at an International Criminal Tribunal in Holland. Clark is also defending Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan clergyman charged with genocide in connection with the massacre of Tutsis in 1994.

Over the years, Clark has also served as an attorney for the Palestine Liberation Organization. And for Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb general indicted on charges of genocide in 1995. And Lyndon LaRouche, the American political cult leader convicted of mail fraud in 1988. And Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called "blind cleric" convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role as spiritual adviser to the men who exploded a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993.

But defending clients isn't all Clark does. He also serves as what one former colleague describes as "a one-man opposition State Department" -- flying to Iran, Iraq, Panama, Serbia, Libya and North Korea to denounce the United States for what he calls "war crimes" or "genocide" against those nations. Then he comes home to convene propaganda tribunals, where leftist activists try -- and inevitably convict -- the United States for crimes against humanity.

Pretty astonishing stuff, yes? It certainly changes your perception of the man, casting him in a decidedly less flattering light than "former U. S. Attorney General" does.

Clark is also the founder and leader of the International Action Center, a broad umbrella group for anti-war, anti-US, anti-capitalist activities. Take the time to look around the site a bit, to get its flavor. The IAC was affiliated with the Worker's World Party, which some of you may recognise as the power behind the front of ANSWER, the group that organised and launched the anti-war protests of this year. ANSWER and WWP are both Stalinist groups that are also anti-US, anti-capitalism, and pro-North Korea! It's all a cozy nest, though Clark now disavows ANSWER and WWP.

But you can read all of the above very closely and not find the real jaw-dropper: Ramsey Clark is the paid agent for Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the US! He was hired some time this year, the date isn't available. Go back over the NewsMax and WaPo stories with this in mind and his words take on a new, and very insidious, light.

Want more? CBS anchor Dan Rather is on record as thanking Clark for setting up his famous interview with Saddam Hussein.

As noted in the February 25 CyberAlert, in a February 24 AP dispatch David Bauer reported: “CBS acknowledged that former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is prominent in the global anti-war movement and met with Saddam on Sunday, put in a good word for Rather in helping secure the interview. Clark has known Rather for a long time, said CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius.”

So, next time you hear Ramsey Clark referred to as "the former U. S. Attorney General," just remember all of the above, and worry at the sloppiness of the reporting and journalism that allows this cancer to live and spread.