Ramsey Clark, who served as President Johnson’s attorney general, is now serving as Saddam Hussein’s defense counsel. But in keeping with his long history of anti-American causes, Clark seems at least as passionate about putting President Bush and America on trial as he is about defending the Butcher of Baghdad.
“I personally believe the attack on Iraq was a war of aggression,” Clark said on CNN last week, as he proceeded to implicitly compare U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, Poland and France. “And a war of aggression was found by the Nuremburg judgment to be a supreme international crime.” Clark accused the U.S. of terrorism—“Shock and Awe is a synonym for terrorism”—and described Saddam, who launched repeated tirades at his trial judge, as “calm, thoughtful and reflective.”
When a disbelieving Wolf Blitzer, noting Clark had also defended Moammar Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor of Liberia, David Koresh, Lyndon LaRouche, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, asked, “What attracts you to these kinds of individuals?” Clark took umbrage. “I never represented Moammar Qaddafi,” he said.
The truth is, Clark explained, he had sued the U.S. on behalf of Libyan clients after the U.S. attacked targets in Libya in 1986. What Clark did not say: The U.S. raid on Libyan military and terrorism-related targets was ordered by President Reagan in response to the Libya-sponsored bombing of a Berlin nightclub that killed an American soldier, and a Turkish woman, while wounding 230 people, including 50 U.S. military personnel.
