Posted on 11/23/2001 11:25:40 AM PST by Native American Female Vet
Former U.S. attorney general has made a career of defending the hated
By Lukas I. Alpert, Associated Press, 11/23/2001 14:49
NEW YORK (AP) Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has made a career of defending the despised and dispossessed.
Whether it's representing civilians fleeing falling bombs, or people accused of war crimes, Clark has been a consistent adversary of the U.S. government, the United Nations and other powers he calls arrogant and bullying.
''I have thought all of my life as a lawyer that everyone is entitled to good representation, no matter how unliked they are,'' Clark said in an interview this week with The Associated Press.
That quest has now led Clark to help defend former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who is being held in a Dutch prison while awaiting trial on war crimes charges.
Milosevic, who led Yugoslavia through four Balkan wars in the 1990s, was indicted for a third time Friday by a U.N. tribunal, this time for actions during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. The indictment was the first to include genocide the most serious crime in the tribunal's statutes.
Even before he took on the Milosevic case, critics claimed Clark drifted so far left that he had lost credibility.
The New Republic magazine labeled him ''disreputable,'' while the on-line magazine Salon called him ''the tool of left-wing cultists.''
''Ramsey comes from the tradition of lawyers and judges that always wrote the dissenting opinion,'' said Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine. ''Like many of those, I feel Ramsey will fare a lot better in the eyes of history than how the headlines he receives today portray him.''
Clark, 73, has met with Milosevic several times to provide legal advice. Although Clark is not expected to defend Milosevic before the tribunal, he and British attorney John Livingston were named legal advisers to the former Yugoslav president.
Milosevic has called the tribunal an illegitimate court and a political tool of the Western NATO alliance. Clark shares that view.
''These are the worst type of courts; they are war by other means,'' Clark said. The U.N. tribunals established after civil wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, said Clark, are not independent judicial bodies and their decisions cannot be reviewed.
Instead, Clark argues for the permanent International Criminal Court, as proposed in the Rome Treaty of 1998. The Bush administration has not submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.
''The creation of such a court could be a tremendous advance toward peace and true equality of justice,'' he said. ''As it stands, we now have a court that will only prosecute Hutus and not Tutsis and the same is true in the Yugoslav court in that they will only prosecute Serbs.''
Clark is also defending a Rwandan pastor and son facing U.N. tribunal charges that they set up a safe haven for Tutsis and then called on Hutu militiamen to kill them.
In Clark's eyes, it is a continuation of the fight he has been waging since becoming a lawyer and, at the age of 39, being named attorney general by President Lyndon Johnson.
''Although I like to think I have learned and grown through the years, I don't think my views have really changed,'' said Clark, who now lives in Manhattan. ''I fought for the same causes then as I do now.''
The son of Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, the lanky, soft-spoken Texas native was the second youngest person to be named attorney general.
''It was seen as patronage,'' Navasky said. Clark's appointment ''was overshadowed by the belief that he was his father's son. But in the end, he turned out to be much more of a civil libertarian than anyone could have expected.''
After leaving the post in 1968, Clark went into private practice in New York where he championed civil rights causes and fought the death penalty. In 1976 he took an unsuccessful shot at the U.S. Senate, losing to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Democratic primary.
But Clark has attracted most attention by defending the declared enemies of the United States. When bombs would fall in far-off places, Clark would be there, taking the ''enemies'' point of view and accusing the United States of militarism and arrogance.
He defended an accused Nazi prison camp guard fighting extradition. He took the side of the Palestine Liberation Organization in a lawsuit over hijackers' slaying of a crippled American Jew aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship.
''I know I've always been unpopular,'' he said, ''But I think my views have always stayed firm and that suits me fine.''
The only reason Ramsey Clark became attorney general, was because Ramsey's father was a close friend of LBJ.
Otherwise Ramsey would be a nobody.
He IS a nobody.
Come on. You don't really believe fighting for that you believe, in itself, is any virtue. I won't cite examples. I'm sure you can supply some yourself.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.