It’s not surprising that former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark
is defending the monstrous Saddam Hussein. If Clark’s ever met
an enemy of the United States he didn’t like, he’s managed to keep
the fact a secret.
We owe it all to John F. Kennedy. Ramsey
was toiling in Texas in well-deserved obscurity when Kennedy appointed
him assistant attorney general.
The next step was promotion
to attorney general under Lyndon Johnson. Since then, he’s racked
up a record of anti-American activism few can match.
In 1972,
he journeyed to North Vietnam to participate in the Communist-front
International Committee of Inquiry into U.S. Crimes in Indochina. Not that the forum’s designation suggested any prior conclusions had
been reached or anything.
Clark visited American POWs and declared,
according to the Tribune Wire Services at the time, that the POWs
were healthier than he was “and I am a healthy man.” He claimed
to be “particularly touched” by the hygienic conditions maintained
for American prisoners.
Clark had been duped. After our
POWs returned home, they detailed the torture and inhumane treatment
they’d suffered.
Commander John McCain told U. S. News and World
Report in 1973 that, “When Ramsey Clark came over they (the North
Vietnamese) thought that was a great coup for their cause.” It was.
Years later, a North Vietnamese general admitted: “Visits
to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark
and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face
of battlefield reverses.”
Over time, Ramsey has spread himself
a little thin. So many terrorists to support, so little time.
The Black Panthers, Germany’s Baader Meinhof gang, al Qaeda
members, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, the Attica prison rioters, Yugoslavia’s
Slobodan Milosevic, the Berrigan brothers, Lyndon LaRouche, Nazi war
criminals, the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, all have been the
recipients of Clark’s empathy.
In 1980, 53 American hostages
were held in captivity by Iran. Clark saw duty calling.
He arrived in Tehran to attend the “Crimes of America International
Conference.”
President Carter, who in one of his less lucid
moments had earlier sent Clark to Iran to try to free the hostages,
told the press he thought the former attorney general should be prosecuted
for trying “to prove the criminality of his own country.”
In
1986 the United States bombed Libyan terrorist training locations. Clark flew to Tripoli to extend his personal apology to Mohamar Qaddafi
for this outrageous act of aggression against humanity. He also
sued the U.S. government on behalf of the Libyans.
1992 saw Ramsey
worrying about poor, persecuted Fidel Castro. Clark and fellow
pinkos – and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on that – Harry
Belafonte, Martin Sheen and Ed Asner organized a Peace for Cuba rally
in New York that attracted about 3,000 other uninformed citizens.
One way there could be peace in Cuba would be to end the blatant
civil rights abuses that have gone on for over forty years, but no
one attending the assembly was rude enough to mention that.
Ramsey
Clark has worked with comrades of the Workers World Party, a small
Marxist group that focuses on “workers’ solidarity” and has an affinity
for North Korea’s dictatorship.
A couple of years ago, Clark
said something that, even by his standards, was strange. “The
Christian Church,” he said, “overwhelmingly - there are exceptions
- who (sic) choose to call Mohammed a terrorist. They could
call Jesus a terrorist too.”
One might think this was ignored
by most of the media because Ramsey Clark is considered a crackpot. Yet his calls to impeach President Bush routinely are reported, so
that can’t be the reason.
Now he’s in Iraq defending Saddam Hussein. Trotting out Clark suggests Hussein realizes his cause is irretrievably
lost.
One thing we know for certain is that Ramsey Clark will
use the trial as a way to vent his own disgust for the United States. He will turn it into yet another occasion to despise and ridicule
America.
What is troublesome is how someone like Ramsey Clark
could have ever, ever been made an assistant attorney general. Then, the attorney general. His positions of influence and power
have given him a prominence he never would have had if he’d stayed
in Texas.
Some on the Right blame Lyndon Johnson for this national embarrassment. But it was Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy, who brought him to Washington as part of the New Frontier’s “best and brightest.”
Ah, Camelot.
This appears in the December 8, 2005 Oak Lawn (IL) Reporter. Mike Bates is the author of Right Angles and Other Obstinate Truths.
