Clark embraces unusual role
BAGHDAD, Iraq – He wore a headset pushed back from one ear and addressed the Iraqi judge in English, in a genial but stern Southwestern drawl.
“May it please the court,” former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark insisted, his frustration evident even to those who didn’t understand what he was saying Monday. “I just need two minutes. If I don’t get two minutes, we’re going to walk out of the courtroom.”
And so he did, precipitating an abrupt exodus by Saddam Hussein’s defense team in a tumultuous day in the trial of the former Iraqi dictator.
To those who’ve watched his legal evolution over the past half-century, Clark’s latest choice of clients – and his brief protest at the outset of Monday’s proceedings – came as no surprise.
The son of a former U.S. Supreme Court justice who began his practice in the family’s establishment law firm in Dallas, Clark has spent much of the past 30 years well past the reaches of mainstream politics and the law.
Long before he signed on to Saddam’s defense team, the 77-year-old Texan had assembled a client list that included former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, a Rwandan clergyman charged with genocide and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 truck-bomb explosion at New York’s World Trade Center.
Clark’s far-flung legal forays have earned him dubious nicknames such as “the war criminal’s best friend.” Jack Valenti, a former colleague from the Johnson administration, says Clark has drifted so far out on the fringe as to become “amusing.”
Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia University who helped organize the first major Vietnam anti-war protest in 1965, said he listened with admiration to Clark’s anti-war speeches years ago. “I thought he was admirable, but he’s gone haywire politically,” Gitlin said. “He seems to have aligned himself with every tyrant and every war criminal he can find.”
In siding with dubious figures that most other lawyers would shun, Clark asserts, he’s fulfilling a “moral obligation” to guarantee that everyone, no matter how heinous the alleged crime, has a chance at equal justice under the law.
“You do in life what you believe is right,” Clark said Monday in a CNN interview.
His younger sister, Mimi Clark Gronlund of McLean, Va., calls her brother a “man of great courage and integrity” who’s willing to risk public scorn “to try to bring justice to everyone.”’
“If you only bring justice to people who are nice,” she said, “what kind of justice is that?”
Clark has known Saddam for nearly 15 years. He met him on a visit to Iraq before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and returned several times to condemn U.N. sanctions, saying they were imposing hardship on Iraqi citizens.
Although Clark signed on to Saddam’s defense team last January, becoming one of more than 20 lawyers who are representing him, Monday’s proceedings composed the American lawyer’s first substantial performance in the Arab-run courtroom.