If you didn't catch Ramsey Clark's speech yesterday --

[JoMama49]

watch or listen to it here:
http://www.democracynow.org/

You can download and listen/watch to today's show. His speech really says it all!

[robbedvoter]

1. What? Took time from defending Saddam? Sorry, but this guy

had marginalized the anti-war movement for years - I think intentionally too.
Not interested in Mr Cointelpro talking points/

[Voltaire99]

4. Oh, brother

Surely you're kidding? You're not? Sigh.

This way to the Joe Lieberman speech, my friend.

[Sparkly]

6. It's a long way from one to the other

Saying Ramsey Clark is unhelpful to the anti-war movement hardly makes somebody a Lieberman fan. Personally, I think he's a nut in the same way Lyndon LaRouche is a nut, except less amusing and more dangerous.

[welshTerrier2]

nuts?

was it nuts for Clark to speak harshly about the annihilation of Falujah?? bush wiped out an entire city? was everyone who lived there a threat to the U.S. ??

and he talked about the war crimes committed in Abu Ghraib ... he said the orders for torture came "from the top" and that bush and other in the government should be removed from office because of this ... is that nuts?

i only heard the last part of Clark's speech ... perhaps he said something you objected to ... if so, please elaborate ...

what bothers me with your post is that you're quick to highlight the damage you perceive Clark as doing but you didn't point out and support any of the important points he raised ...

[Sparkly]

9. nuts

I'm not saying that everything he says is wrong. I'm saying I don't consider him an ideal spokesman for the causes I care about.

Just by way of example, people like Milosevic or Saddam might say things about Bush that I happen to agree with; but nonetheless, I wouldn't want to align myself with them or have them as my spokespeople because of the rest of what they believe/do/are/say. Does that make sense?

[welshTerrier2]

14. yes, it makes sense ...

i think the objection i had to your post was that it didn't provide any reasoning for the conclusions you drew about Clark ... it also didn't highlight the positive aspects of what he said ...

it's more than appropriate to see someone as a poor spokesman for causes you believe in ... i think your point would be more effective, however, if you had cited specifically what it was you objected to ... otherwise, we're left with just name calling ...

for example, you might have said (if you agree with these points) something like: while i think Clark raised some important points that showed the total failure of bush's policies in Iraq, e.g. points about the destruction of Fallujah and the torture at Abu Ghraib, I think overall he's a very bad spokesman for the anti-war movement ... I think this because blah, blah, blah (whatever your reasons are) ...

i think this is more effective because those who strongly agree with points Clark raised about Fallujah and Abu Ghraib are likely to dismiss your opinion when you characterize Clark in such black and white terms without any shades of gray ... showing that you agree with this point or that point but still reach the "he's a nut" conclusion seems, at least to me, to be a more effective style of presenting your opinion ...

anyway, i do think what you wrote makes sense ... it's more a presentation issue i suppose ...

[robbedvoter]

17. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Ramsey is NOT

representing the majority of this country (and I am talking about the anti-war majority). His affection for every dictator and loon he meets makes him a liability to any credible opposition.

[welshTerrier2]

21. well, i cited 2 examples where he was right yesterday ...

do you disagree with his characterizations of U.S. actions in Fallujah?

how about referring to bush and his administration as war criminals for condoning torture at Abu Ghraib ...

twice in the same day ... imagine that ...

[Sparkly]

22. So if Osama bin Laden had said the same thing, you'd like him, too?

As I said, it's not always true that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. It's possible that neither one is your friend.

[welshTerrier2]

25. this is not a popularity contest

my statement was that i strongly agreed with the comments Mr. Clark made about Fallujah and the hideous crimes of the bush administration at Abu Ghraib ...

i made no reference to Mr. Clark being my friend as your absurd response suggests ... and if bin Laden made the comments about Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, I would 100% agree with those comments ... it has nothing to do with liking bin Laden ...

so, i think i've answered your questions ... but you haven't answered mine ... here they are again:

do you agree with Clark's characterization about how the U.S. wiped out the city of Fallujah? ... and do you agree with his characterization that bush is guilty of war crimes for condoning torture at Abu Ghraib?

i couldn't care less what opinion you have of Ramsey Clark ... it has nothing to do with liking him ... what exactly did he say yesterday that you disagreed with?

[Sparkly]

31. The point is, you can agree with what he says

and in this case I do, but some truly bad people -- members of terrorist organizations, for example -- might well say the same thing. I'd agree with them too. Doesn't mean I think they're great people, doesn't mean I'd cheer them, doesn't mean I'd let it go without comment that these are not people I consider it a good idea to align with.

I wasn't suggesting he's your friend; it's a saying, a frame of reference, like "keep your friends close and your enemies closer," that kind of thing. It wasn't meant literally.

[robbedvoter]

40. They were good examples. Still not listening to broken clocks.

[Zhade]

26. "His affection for every dictator and loon he meets..."

Got anything to back that up? I'm not the most knowledgeable about the guy, personally, but this sounds pretty strong.

[robbedvoter]

41. Some links from BEFORE defending Saddam:

The scary stuff about ANSWER? The controlling group, the
Workers World Party:

- supported the Chinese government's 1989 Tienanmen Square
massacre
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html

- supports the "socialist" North Korean dictatorship of Kim
Jong Il
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0425.php
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0509.php

- *and views Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a beacon of
anti-imperialist resistance
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/iraq0125.html

- defends the genocidal Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic
http://www.iacenter.org/yugo_milosdeligation.htm
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/larry0228.php
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/milosevic1108.php
http://shadow.autono.net/sin001/clark.htm

[Zhade]

47. Um, no offense, but could you maybe back it up from credible sources?

I don't think these could be considered unbiased either way. TIA.

[robbedvoter]

60. The sources were Ramsey&friends themselves - own words

How more unbiased can you get?

[Zhade]

82. Oh, Ramsey said "I support and agree with Hussein's policies"?

Yeah. Don't be offended if I don't believe you. Unless, of course, you can source those remarks...which I doubt.

[Sparkly]

86. LOOK IT UP.... n/t

[Zhade]

87. So you can't support your allegation?

That's okay, if you said it in the heat of the moment I'm not going to tear you down for it. It happens.

Just don't make accusations that you can't back up. That's a pretty reasonable stance, I think.

[robbedvoter]

117. Sadddam Husein is a beacon of anti-imperialism resistance - link

- *and views Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a beacon of
anti-imperialist resistance
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/iraq0125.html

Fifty anti-sanctions activists led by International Action Center founder and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark joined a demonstration in downtown Baghdad at 2 a.m. on Jan. 17 to mark the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led war of aggression against Iraq.

The U.S. delegation joined thousands of protesters chanting "Down, down USA" and "Clinton, Albright, you can't hide, sanctions equal genocide."
Mind you, these chants were going on jan 21, 2001....

[Zhade]

127. Seriously, what part of "credible, unbiased sources" don't you understand?

I've asked politely, yet you keep referring to the same source. Is that all you have to back up your allegations?

[robbedvoter]

142. WWP=IAC=ANSWER=Ramsey. You either believe THEM or you don't

here's the affiliation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSWER

[Tinoire]

68. Would you kindly show your thought process

because nowhere in those first two links do I see any mention of ANSWER, the IAC or Ramsey Clark :shrug:

- supported the Chinese government's 1989 Tienanmen Square
massacre
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html

- supports the "socialist" North Korean dictatorship of Kim
Jong Il
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0425.php
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0509.php

I see a lot of right-wing accusations straight out of the mouths of the likes of Michelle Malkin's mouth amd one accusation from David Corn who's a proponent of a kinder, gentler war.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Workers+World+Party%22+%22Ramsey+Clark%22&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N



Ramsey Clark is pictured above with Kerry and Vietnam phony vet Al Hubbard Who was head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement- Rush Limbaugh.

Why fall short? Why not go to the bitter end of that Limbaughesque accusation and say that Kerry too stands for all of that?

Here's some more propaganda for you. Other than the kind endorsement of John kerry, see how much red-baiting and how many lies you can spot in this article:

Ramsey Clark Endorses John Kerry

One of the leading ""America bashers"" on the political scene today has endorsed John Kerry for president. Speaking to reporters after a February 27 Washington press conference to rally support for Haiti''s Marxist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Ramsey Clark said he''s voting for Kerry because he would take U.S. foreign policy in a new direction.

This is certainly the case. Kerry told the New York Daily News editorial board that he would have intervened ""unilaterally"" with U.S. troops if necessary to save Aristide''s corrupt regime from a popular rebellion. Aristide, who developed a reputation for brutalizing and killing his political opponents, was encouraged by the Bush administration to leave the country.

"I think John Kerry is a great human being,"" Clark told this reporter. ""I knew him when he was I call a youngster in his 20s. I saw him as an extremely caring person, an extremely courageous person, and a person who was deeply concerned for peace and the well-being of other people.""

Clark has been labeled a ""traitor"" for his habit of showing up in countries hostile to the U.S. A lawyer, he has represented accused terrorists and war criminals. He told the Haiti news conference that President Bush should be impeached and the U.S. should pay billions of dollars in reparations to Haiti.

Clark served as LBJ''s Attorney General in the 1960s and then participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the early 1970s with Kerry, just back from the war, who accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes and genocide. Clark was a lawyer for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Kerry was a major leader of the group. A photograph at the time shows Clark on the same stage with Kerry.

Clark traveled to Hanoi, North Vietnam, from July 29 to August 12, 1972, under the sponsorship of the Stockholm-based International Commission for Inquiry, a Communist ""peace"" front. He was taken on a guided tour and denounced the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. He also visited American POWs held by Hanoi, falsely declaring that they were in good health and their conditions ""could not be better."" Such visits by American figures gave the communists the confidence to continue in the face of defeats on the battlefield.

(snip)

http://www.clipx.net/politics/kerryRamseyClark.htm

Amazing. One minute it's everyone close your eyes to obscenities like the School of the Americas and support moderate Dems and the next it's hand-in-hand demonization with the Right wing. Absolutely amazing. When the Left irreparably splits from the Democratic Party, I hope you'll remember why.

[Name removed]

78. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Zhade]

88. When posters start calling YOU a "right winger", you KNOW it's crazy.

I guess some of the corporate propaganda seeps deep, eh?

Truth be told, I can admire some of the posters here for not wanting to associate with people they think consort with dictators. Were that to be true, I'd join them. But so far, no evidence of such has been offered, just misleading articles.

And the SoA denial really bothers me, too.

[Tinoire]

111. Someone called me a right-winger? LOL! Interview w/ Ramsey for you

But you know, not a surprise. I just got a PM from someone in this thread telling me "You sound just like Bush" :shrug:

I'm continually amazed that the leaders of the antiwar movement are accused of (now it's "consorting"?) with dictators when they're the loudest voice against one of the most ghastly dictators this world has to fear.

The same charge made against Ramsey Clark is the same one made against Leslie Cagan and Medea Benjamin, it's mostly the dictators that seem to vary but the charge remains the same. Cuban-Americans are wringing their hands over Leslie Cagan, the co-founder of United for Peace and Justice, and her dangerous "support" of Castro. Amazing.

It's mind-boggling that you're allowed to rubber-stamp Bush's wars, roll over for his appointments and pass his bills but defending people who may have a legitimate legal case against our government is met with shrieks of horror.

Read this... the whole long thing, not just my snippets. I'm trying to get permission from the author to repost the whole thing but in the meantime, read it. It's an interview with Ramsey Clark and gives you a great insight into what he's doing and why.

Peace to you :we need a peace sign emoticon:

After the Gulf War, in 1991, Clark initiated a war-crimes tribunal, which tried and found guilty President George Bush and Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, among others. Clark went on to write a book, The Fire This Time (Thunder's Mouth Press), describing the crimes he says were committed by U.S. and NATO forces during the Gulf War. When asked why he focuses on the crimes of his own country, instead of those committed by Iraq, Clark says that we need to announce our principles and "force our government to adhere to them."

NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY: RAMSEY CLARK ON AMERICAN MILITARISM

Published in "The Sun"

August 2001

(snip)

Jensen: According to the federal government's Defense Planning Guide of 1992, the first objective of U.S. foreign policy is to convince potential rivals that they "need not aspire" to "a more aggressive posture to defend their legitimate interests." The implication seems to be that the U.S. intends not to let other countries actively defend their own interests. To what extent does U.S. foreign policy in action reflect that goal?

Clark: Our foreign policy has been a disaster since long before that planning guide - for a lot longer than we'd like to believe. We can look all the way back to the arrogance of the Monroe Doctrine, when the United States said, "This hemisphere is ours," ignoring all the other people who lived here, too. For a part of this past century, there were some constraints on our capacity for arbitrary military action - what you might call the inhibitions of the Cold War - but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've acquired a headier sense of what we can get away with. Our overriding purpose, from the beginning right through to the present day, has been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible; and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of our foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources. And insofar as any people or states get in the way of our domination, they must be eliminated - or, at the very least, shown the error of their ways. I'm not talking about just military domination. U.S. trade policies are driven by the exploitation of poor people the world over. Vietnam is a good example of both the military and the economic inhumanity. We have punished its government and people mercilessly, just because they want freedom. The Vietnamese people had to fight for thirty years to achieve freedom - first against the French, and then against the United States. I used to be criticized for saying that the Vietnamese suffered 2 million casualties, but I've noticed that people now say 3 million without much criticism. Yet that war was nothing compared to the effects of twenty years of sanctions, from 1975 to 1995, which brought the Vietnamese people - a people who had proven to be invincible when threatened by physical force on their own land - down to such dire poverty that they were taking to open boats in stormy seas, and drowning, to get to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, a place no one in his or her right mind would want to be. They went simply because they saw no future in their own country. I went to North Vietnam in the summer of 1971, when the U.S. was trying to destroy civilian dikes through bombing. Our government figured that if it could destroy Vietnam's capacity for irrigation, it could starve the people into submission.

(snip)

Jensen: Serving us well, in this case, included killing tens of thousands of Iranians just in the year before he left office.

Clark: He certainly killed as many as he dared, especially in that last year, 1978. I've always said it was about thirty-seven thousand that year, but we'll never know exactly how many. I think there were two thousand gunned down on Black Friday alone, that August. There were a million people out on the streets that day, and they came through Jaleh Square, many wearing shrouds so that it would be convenient to bury them if they were killed. Huey helicopters fired on them from a hundred feet in the air with fifty-caliber machine guns.

Jensen: U.S.-supplied Hueys?

Clark: The Hueys were fabricated in Esfahan, Iran, from U.S.-supplied parts. In fact, the fabrication of those Hueys provides an interesting insight into the effects of U.S. influence. In 1500, Esfahan was one of the ten biggest cities in the world, with about half a million people. Culturally, it remained almost pristine until 1955, the year after the Shah took power. As part of the Shah's efforts to fulfill his dream of making Iran the fifth great industrial power in the world, he made Esfahan a center of industrialization. By 1970, the population had increased to 1.5 million, including about eight hundred thousand peasants who had come to live in the slums around this once fabulous city. Once again, the result of U.S. foreign policy was poverty, anger, hurt, and suffering for the majority. While the canal systems that had supported enough agriculture to feed the population for a couple of millennia were going into decay, causing Iran to import most of its food, the country was buying arms. We sold them more than $22 billion in arms between 1972 and 1977 - everything they wanted, except nuclear weapons. Iran isn't the only Middle Eastern nation dependent upon food imports. Today twenty-two Arab states import more than half of their food. This makes them extremely vulnerable to U.S. economic pressure. Egypt is a great example of this. It's the second-largest U.S.-aid recipient in the world, after Israel. Can you imagine what sanctions would do to Cairo? You've got 12 million people living there, 10 million of them in real poverty. The city would be bedlam in ninety days. There would be rebellion in the streets. The same is true of the other Arab countries. They might think they've got wealth because of their oil, but Iraq has oil, and it hasn't helped that country survive the sanctions. There, sanctions have forced impoverishment on a people who had a quality of life that was by far the best in the region. They had free, universal healthcare and a good educational system. Now they're dying at a rate of about eighteen thousand per month as a direct result of sanctions imposed by the United States in the name of the UN Security Council - the most extreme sanctions imposed in modern times. The U.S. helped maneuver Iraq into a position where it was one of those twenty-two Arab nations importing more than half its food, and I have always believed that we maneuvered it, as well, into attacking Iran, in that god-awful war that cost a million young men their lives for no purpose. After the collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979, Iraq thought that Iran couldn't defend itself, but didn't take into account the passion that twenty-five years of suffering had created in the population - a passion so strong that you had fifteen-year-old kids running barefoot through swamps into a hail of bullets, and if they got near you, you were dead. They had a pair of pants and a rifle, and that was about it. Meanwhile, Iraq, which was supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States, had artillery it could mount shoulder to shoulder and armored vehicles with cannons and machine guns. But the war was still a stalemate. In any case, by the late 1980s, Iraq was emerging as too powerful a nation in the Middle East. And, fatally for Iraq, it wasn't reliable enough to be our new surrogate. No one would be as good a surrogate for us as the Shah's Iran had been. So we had to take out Iraq, under the pretense of defending Kuwait. First we bombed Iraq brutally: 110,000 aerial sorties in forty-two days, an average of one every thirty seconds, which dropped 88,500 tons of bombs. (These are Pentagon figures.) We destroyed the infrastructure - to use a cruel euphemism for life-support systems. Take water, for example: We hit reservoirs, dams, pumping stations, pipelines, and purification plants. Some associates and I drove into Iraq at the end of the second week of the war, and there was no running water anywhere. People were drinking water out of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The Gulf War showed, for the first time, that you could destroy a country without setting foot on its soil. We probably killed a hundred thousand, and our total casualties, according to the Pentagon, were 157 - most of them from friendly fire and accidents. The Iraqis caused only minimal casualties. One of those notoriously inaccurate Scud missiles, fired toward Saudi Arabia, came wobbling down and somehow hit a mess-hall tent, killing thirty-seven American soldiers. That's a big chunk of the total casualties right there. We didn't lose a single tank, whereas we destroyed seventeen hundred Iraqi armored vehicles, plinking them with depleted-uranium ammunition and laser-guided missiles. But, as with Vietnam, the sanctions that followed the war have been infinitely more damaging, causing fifteen times the number of casualties. The sanctions against Iraq are genocidal conduct under the law, according to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - which, by the way, the United States refused to endorse until 1988 and explicitly refuses to comply with to this day. The sanctions against Iraq have killed more than 1.5 million people, more than half of them children under the age of five, an especially vulnerable segment of the population. Particularly in their first year, children are more susceptible to disease and malnutrition, and to the malnutrition of their mother. Many Iraqi mothers are now so malnourished that they cannot produce milk. They try to give their children sugar water as a substitute, but because the United States destroyed the infrastructure, the water is contaminated: within forty-eight hours, the child is dead. And that child could have been saved by a rehydration tablet that costs less than a penny, but is not available because of the sanctions. This is in a country that once produced 15 percent of its own pharmaceuticals: now it can't even get the raw materials. We have, in an act of will, impoverished a whole population.

(snip)

Clark: Violence may not be as harmful as greed in the long run, because it's harder to kill people directly than it is to kill them with sanctions. If you killed that many with bullets, your finger would get tired. Colin Powell seems to be a compelling figure, but when he was asked during the Gulf War how many Iraqis he thought the United States had killed, his response was - and this is a direct quote - "Frankly, that's a number that doesn't interest me very much." Now, aside from international law, which requires that all participants in war count their enemy dead, that is an extraordinarily inhumane statement. And then you see a fellow like General Barry McCaffrey, whom Clinton later named as his drug czar, coming in and attacking defenseless Iraqi troops as they withdrew, killing several thousand people just like that. (Snaps his finger.) That's a war crime of the first magnitude. And yet these men are rewarded; they're seen as heroes.

(snip)

http://www.derrickjensen.org/clark.html

[LynnTheDem]

109. Why are YOU speaking for the majority?

Just wondering.

[leesa]

12. Stop up your ears bro. This is one man telling the truth. Saddam was bad

but most of the charges against him have proved to be bullshit. Just because YOU swallowed the propaganda doesn't mean we all have.

[Sparkly]

13. You're defending Saddam Hussein?

Which part of the charges are/aren't "swallowing propaganda" in your view?

I think this goes to the idea of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's just not always the case. Sometimes neither one is a friend! I think that's the case when it comes to Bush and Saddam. So I suggest we be careful here.

[marcologico]

15. Great speech, caught the part about Fallujah this morning, sickening n/t

[sandnsea]

74. Cointelpro

God thank you for that. I thought I was the only one who thought that. What better strategy to keep the left immobilized than create a CIA front group that gathers them all together, but accomplishes nothing. And make sure they spout wacky things once in a while so the vast majority don't take them seriously. Why are they the only group to get the protest permits anyway? I think any anti-war movement or other liberal movement should separate itself from A.N.S.W.E.R. Build a stronger Green Party or something.

[Ellen Forradalom]

76. I always thought it was because they're professional protestors

Protesting is what they do. They're very good at it. They can organize, get permits, and fill buses. That's about it, though, as far as I can see.

[sandnsea]

79. as far as you see

Maybe because you never bothered to look any further. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. This is one of the key groups that makes the left looks like kooks, one of the most far left groups in the country, yet THEY get all the permits. uhuh. That just smells.

[Zhade]

89. Do you have evidence of COINTELPRO-esque connections?

To either A.N.S.W.E.R. or Clark?

If you have any, I will honestly evaluate it. Until then, I don't think your accusations hold much merit.

[sandnsea]

99. It's not just me

First, I didn't accuse anybody of anything. I just expressed a suspicion I've had recently and was glad to see somebody else expess it too. In any event, it's not just me:
http://home.earthlink.net/~silent_no_more99/id18.html

[Zhade]

130. Please understand, I was not accusing or attacking you.

Merely requesting evidence. I like good, solid evidence to pursue, because I don't take anyone's word for gospel truth.

COINTELPRO is still around in some form, no doubt, and it's not beyond possible that groups similar to A.N.S.W.E.R. could be infiltrated - just as it's not beyond possible that rumors of such infiltration could be spread by the government to destroy such groups' reputations.

The blade cuts both ways.

[sandnsea]

135. Was the election stolen?

How come people who explain real solid evidence is required, especially for politicians to say it was stolen, are blasted right out of here. The blade does cut both ways. I am very careful to differentiate suspicious ramblings from carefully researched opinions. I didn't pick this up as any sort of rumor or gobbeldygook from an internet site, it just popped like a lightbulb when somebody mentioned that ANSWER is always the one to get the protest permits. It just occurred to me that it would be nice to have a protest without it being labeled a bunch of communist pinkos. And why does it get labeled that? ANSWER. It's just a thought, nothing more.

[Zhade]

138. You'll note that I'm not one of those "blasting them right out of here".

I think Conyers work is fantastic, and there are a lot of other suspicious activities to warrant investigation. I believe the election was stolen, yes.

I understand your thoughts, which is why I wasn't attacking you.

[welshTerrier2]

2. fantastic speech !!

i heard the last part of Clark's speech on Democracy Now ... this is what the Democratic Party once was ... this is what the grassroots once fought for ... this was the soul of the Party's reform movement ...

we seem to have lost our way ...

on edit: dammit ... tell Democracy Now to offer a format other than the Real Player ... any other format but that ...

is the text of the speech posted anywhere yet ??

[Sugarbleus]

24. Ramsey Clark is fantastic. He has devoted much of his senior

years to human rights and conventional democratic ideals. I've seen him at many many rallies speaking truth to power.

I'm glad someone brought this up. I really admire this man. I almost forgot to check in with that impeach site. Thanks for the reminder.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

3. Ramsey Clarke is truly a good man!

[JoMama49]

5. Check out his Website

at http://www.votetoimpeach.org/
and if you haven't signed the petition, sign it -- it's almost up to half a million.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

7. i signed it long ago and have spent many days in his company at many

peace and social justice conferences...thanks for posting this thread :hi: :7

[Tinoire]

70. Are you laughing too at the propaganda in the posts below?

I was laughing hysterically until I realized that the marginalization of heroes like Ramsey Clark is designed for the sole purpose of trying to shut up the embarrassing anti-war "Left". It's unfortunate we're over 70% of the party.

I only met him once and was totally enthralled. If America had more people like him, we wouldn't be in this pickle.

Happy to see you in this thread :)

[Sparkly]

83. You are NOT the "anti-war left." n/t

[LynnTheDem]

110. When did YOU become the arbiter of who is and isn't "anti-war left"?

Just wondering.

[Bouncy Ball]

148. Who are YOU to tell that poster

he or she is not the anti-war left?

Wow, I didn't know a poster named "Sparkly" was the arbiter of all definitions.

I'll be sure to check in with you next time I want to declare myself part of any group--make sure I pass muster with ya.

:eyes:

[paineinthearse]

8. I'm pleased with DU

I posted Clark info at another forum and could not stir any interest at all.

See yesterday's running thread of CSPAN2 coverage, Clark's articles of impeachment are posted there.

[Tinoire]

10. A really great man!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1516683

*** 1961-1968 Nominated Assistant Attorney General of United States by President John F. Kennedy, served to 1965;
nominated Deputy Attorney General by President Lyndon B. Johnson, served to 1967;
nominated Attorney General, served to January 20. 1969. ***


A GREAT AMERICAN hero who oversaw the passage of civil rights in a society as racist as ours.


You’ll notice that most who denounce Clark support either the neoconservative policies of Bush or the neoliberal policies Clinton.


Ramsey Clark, John Doar, Robert Kennedy, speaking, Roy Wilkins, Arnold Aronson

During his years at Justice:

In the field:

Supervised federal presence at Ole Miss week following admission of James Meredith;

surveyed all school districts in south desegregating under court order (1963);

supervised federal enforcement of court order protecting march from Selma to Montgomery;

headed Presidential task force to Watts following riots.

In criminal law enforcement:

set aside federal funds to finance creation of state criminal justice coordinating agencies;

sought financing and professionalization for local police;

supervised legislative proposal for and organization of federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration;

originated Strike Force concept in attack of Organized Crime; increased annual indictment rate of organized crime figures six fold;

urged strict gun control helping secure first federal gun control law in over thirty years;

reorganized and transferred federal narcotics enforcement creating Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

In Prisons:

authorized first federal technical assistance to state and local prisons; proposed unified federal corrections merging prison and probation service;

reorganized federal prisons to emphasize rehabilitation, early release, health, education, job training, community based corrections;

opened first federal Halfway House;

closed old prisons, opposed construction of new prisons;

established first federal narcotics addict treatment unit.

In civil rights:

supervised drafting and executive role in passage of Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968 containing the first federal open housing law;

argued Johns v. Mayor for US in Supreme Court, first federal open housing case;

authorized first northern school desegregation case;

created massive program for employment and housing discrimination litigation;

authorized prosecution of police in Algiers Motel killing, Orangeburg massacre (South Carolina State College) and police brutality at Chicago Democratic Convention.

In civil liberties:

supervised executive effort at bail reform;

proposed prohibition of wiretapping and electronic surveillance;

required voluntary disclosure of unlawful wiretapping by federal prosecutors in more than 50 cases;

refused to use wiretap authority contained in Safe Streets Act of 1968;

denounced shooting of looters by law enforcement, threatened prosecution;

first Attorney General to propose abolition of the death penalty.

In antitrust enforcement:

filed record number of anti-merger cases (24 in 1968);

opposed ITT acquisition of ABC network;

Penn-Central and Atlantic Richfield-Sinclair mergers;

sued all automobile manufacturers for anti-competition in computer industry.

In judicial function:

supervised executive effort to achieve federal jury selection reform;

urged creation of Federal Judicial Center;

sought expansion of Federal Criminal Justice Act and Neighborhood Legal Services program;

defended controversial Supreme Court decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona.

Since 1968:

Lawyer: General counsel of Alaska Federation of Natives securing largest settlement of native land claims in history.

Lawyer for: Craig Morgan, President of Kent State student government indicted following Kent State tragedy;

Father Philip Berrigan in Harrisburg trial;

Ruchell Magee in Marin Country Courthouse murder-kidnapping indictment;

Charles Pernasalice in Attica prison prosecutions.

Argued, or briefed, first Freedom of Information Act case, various First Amendment, Peace Movement, civil rights and criminal cases in U.S. Supreme Court.

Worked on numerous commissions:

Chairman, Right to Vote Task Force, issuing report THAT ALL MAY VOTE urging Universal Voter Enrollment by the government;

Chairman of Citizens Inquiry on Parole and Criminal Justice, Inc. reporting on parole in New York.

Individually and on behalf of various organizations, sought to end political repression, violation of human rights, torture and violence in international area by seeking protection for Soviet Jewry, abuse of prisoners in Brazil, Greece, Ireland, Spain and elsewhere;

traveled to South Africa to examine and protest apartheid; North Vietnam to examine American bombing, visit U.S. POW's.

Teacher: legal seminars on civil rights planning, law as an effective instrument for social change: Howard University School of Law, Brooklyn Law School.

Writer: Crime in America; The Role of the Supreme Court with Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr.; contributions to collected works on crime control, peace, civil rights, education, civil liberties, violence, etc. Articles: Foreign Affairs, Saturday Review, Life, Nation, New York Times and others; various law journals and reviews; Dictionary of American History, Great Ideas Today, Encyclopedia Britannica Magazine and others.

General: Traveled in more than 80 foreign nations; lectured at more than 50 universities; testified before U.S. Congress, state legislatures and foreign parliaments and legislative bodies on more than 100 occasions on subjects including international and constitutional law, civil rights, housing, employment, selective service, barriers to voting, Presidential emergency powers, juvenile delinquency, environmental protection, right to travel, crime control, balance of payments, international affairs.

Representative Organizations and Institutions: National Chairman, National Advisory Committee, American Civil Liberties Union; Board of Directors. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, New School for Social Research; Federal Bar Association (past president); American Judicature Society (past); Jobs for Youth, Amnesty International; Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund; NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Martin Luther King Memorial Center (trustee); Whitney Young, Jr. Foundation; Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law; International Progress Organization.

and of course INTERNATIONAL A.N.S.W.E.R. the BIGGEST anti-war, pro-justice voice out there.

[Sparkly]

11. I think he had a stellar career for a long time.

But a quick rundown of people he's supported, advised and defended include:

* Branch Davidian leader David Koresh
* alleged former Nazis Karl Linnas and Jack Riemer
* antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan
* Native American alleged political prisoner Leonard Peltier
* Liberian political figure Charles Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia
* Lyndon LaRouche, who faced charges of conspiracy and mail fraud
* Slobodan Milosevic in the International Criminal Court.
* Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader of the Rwandan genocide
* PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair bound elderly tourist who was shot and tossed overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1986
* The state of Iraq, serving as legal counsel for the Hussein regime.
* Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq who was removed from power during a 2003 invasion led by the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey_Clark

[steelyboo]

18. So we should dismiss him because he chose to defend

the indefensible? Last I heard, and this might have changed since law school, but we preach rule of law in this country. That means due process for ALL, even the miscreant pedophile cocksucker no one wants to see live until the next sentence. Jesus helped the thief, remember?(last part in case a passing freeper needs a justification)

[Sparkly]

19. You can answer that question for yourself

and I can answer it for myself. And my answer is "yes" -- I "dismiss him," if you will, as a welcome representative of what I believe. Your mileage may vary.

[Zhade]

52. Thank you for this sane post.

It seems some here would prefer representation and a fair trial go only to those we don't recoil from in horror.

Sorry, that's not justice - that's fascism.

[Zhade]

28. WTF? You're throwing Leonard Peltier in with David Koresh?

Nice. Real nice.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

30. Why Did He Defend Milosevic?

His genocide was no different than Hitler with the exception of scope and target....

[Zhade]

48. I cannot answer the question, as I do not know the context.

I have no idea how true that statement even is. After all, Chomsky once defended a Holocaust denier's right to free speech (a stance I agree with, regardless of how wrong that speech is), and many DUers labelled him an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier himself.

Sorry if I don't just blindly accept what some here say about people on the left. I believe informing myself is a better idea than simply agreeing with people who may very well be conservative anti-leftists (not you, just in general).

So I will refrain from answering a question about which I am uninformed.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

51. I Don't Like Chomsky For The Same Reason I Don't Like Right

Wing Historians, Linguists Turned Historians, And Intellectuals, Et Cetera...


I am a digital not analogue thinker...


Folks like Chomsky have a binary view of America's role in the world....

America is neither Robin Hood or Darth Vader but it is becoming more like the latter with this administration...

[Zhade]

53. I completely disagree with you. I don't see Chomsky in that light.

He's pretty much dead-on about this country. I can understand if you disagree. I did too, for a long time.

[Tinoire]

64. He defended Milosevic for very good reason

Ramsey Clark biggest fight is against the against the Western Imperialism that causes so much misery throughout this world. You call Milosevic a tyrant because CNN told you to. What do you know about the man? What do you know about the people, the history of Yugoslavia other than what the US media told you?

What was the war against Yugoslavia REALLY about? Opening up the country to exploitation by Western capital- something Milosevic flatly refused to do even after we did everything we could to destabilize the country by cutting off IMF credit.

Robin Cook and Hubert Verdine printed that "half-a-million-dead-Iraqi-children-are-worth-it"-Albright had determined the outcome of the Rambouillet talks in advance. Kissinger was pretty clear that some of Nato’s terms (such as the right of Nato forces to move across the whole of Yugoslavia) were designed to be ‘deal-breakers’ designed to ensure that the Yugoslav government would reject Rambouillet. Capitulated to such terms would have been high treason for Milocevic or any leader of a sovereign nation. THAT is why Ramsey Clark is defending him.

Are only those that the our government likes entitled to legal defense? I have no doubt Milosevic did some nasty things but that's NOT why we went to war against him. His crime is that he stood up to the neoLiberal Western powers who succeeded eventually to tear that country apart and make it a part of the new economic order & telling them to go fuck themselves, especially that saber-rattling neo-con Madeline Albright.

Did you ever read the Rambouillet treaty they tried to get him to sign? Pay special attention to the clause that stated: “The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.” As you can imagine, that did not go over well in a Socialist Republic- nor should it have, anywhere!

18 The document that could never be signed

The Americans planned to make the Rambouillet document unsignable by the Yugoslavs. This has been explicitly explained by James Rubin, Madeleine Albright’s right hand man and the US State Department spokesman who took part in the talks at Rambouillet. In a Financial Times article published on 7 October 2000 he said, "Albright had given the Serbs a take it or leave it proposal they could never accept." The proposal was the non-negotiable demand that NATO forces be allowed to occupy the whole of Yugoslavia without restriction or time limit. It was introduced into the document a matter of hours before the scheduled end for the talks at Rambouillet in February.

http://www.justiceyugoslavia.org/supporting_notes.htm

====

The people behind the war against Yugoslavia are the SAME people behind the war against Iraq. You don't think Bush's little friend Tony Blair went from humanitarian angel of peace to neo-con extraordinaire over night do you? In less than 6 years, Blair took the UK to war five times: Iraq in 1998; Yugoslavia in 1999; Sierra Leone in 2000; Afghanistan in 2001; and Iraq in 2003. It’s quite an achievement. “No British Prime Minister and few world leaders come close,” to that record according to Kampfner in his book: ‘Blair’s Wars’.

The war against Yugoslavia was NATO's first war, and it attacked a sovereign country with NO UN authorisation and NO Congressional authority. GEE, what other war does that make you think of??!

"Degraded Capability" is an excellent book for anyone who wants to know more about this.

==

One of the most unpleasant moments for me, and I suspect for many other leftists and anti-war activists, during the NATO attack on Yugoslavia came when I realized that a significant segment of what is usually called the progressive community had swallowed NATO’s propaganda about a humanitarian war.

That hit home most clearly when I posted an announcement of a local anti-war demonstration to a “progressive faculty group” email list and got back a response questioning the wisdom of opposing the U.S.-led attack, which after all was supposed to be humanitarian in intent.

When I questioned the humanitarian rationale and offered a defense of the demonstration (in which I made no reference to the person who raised the question and was quite measured), another faculty member dashed off a note suggesting that I avoid personal attacks on those who disagree with me. That’s when I realized it was going to be a long war.

The war may have lasted only 78 days, but the split in the progressive movement still hangs over many of us, as we ponder why so many left/liberal folks decided to back the latest U.S. imperial adventure. There are no doubt many reasons, but one contributing factor was the way in which the mainstream media blanketed the public with a stream of mis-, dis-, and non-information about the facts on the ground in Kosovo and the reasons that NATO bombers took to the skies.

Did progressives who signed on with the Clinton administration’s “ethical” foreign policy really believe that story? Or did they use the relentless media coverage to cover themselves? Whatever the case, it’s important to understand how the United States and NATO pulled off such an incredible propaganda victory. A current book, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, helps us do just that.

(snip)

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec00jensen.htm

===

Former Soviet boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, also warned the United States of its dangerous “superiority complex” and said that, if the 21st century became known as the second “American Century,” the rest of the world would suffer.

Speaking in New York, Gorbachev criticized Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State, for saying that there were exceptional circumstances in which the U.S. had the right to use military force unilaterally, even if other countries objected. “I don't think the world will accept this approach,” he said, responding to a speech by Abright on Monday night (Apr. 24).


http://www.truthinmedia.org/truthinmedia/Bulletins2000/tim2000-4-8.html

So what did we do? We invented WMDs, burned down the Resichstag, and started a war against another noun, Terrorism, because the last noun, Drugs, wasn't quite cutting it.

The Balkan Action Committee, which surfaced in 1999 to promote the invasion of Yugoslavia, was almost exclusively made up of PNAC members; likewise, the Committee on the Present Danger. Now why would you believe them about Yugoslavia and not Iraq? What a disconnect. These men are liars from A-Z who see "mass graves" and other such crap everywhere. Whatever gets your heartstrings. And with the help of whatever dirty PR agency they can rouse to their cause.

==

The Balkan Action Committee

Today's NY Times has an ad sponsored by a group calling itself the Balkans
Action Committee calling for Nato ground forces in Yugoslavia. It is signed
by an odd mixture of neoconservatives and "leftists" including Bianca
Jagger and "Rabbi" Michael Lerner, the portly editor of Tikkun and
erstwhile 1960s radical. Lerner was "spiritual adviser" to the Clintons for
a brief time about 5 years ago, urging "communitarian" values upon the
thuggish Arkansas president and his wife.

They are window-dressing, however. The real forces behind Balkans Action
are the hardline anticommunists who emerged during the Reagan era. This is
the executive committee, as announced on their website (www.balkanaction.org).

Morton Abramowitz
Saul Bellow
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Richard Burt
Frank Carlucci
Dennis DeConcini
Paula Dobriansky
Geraldine Ferraro
Robert Hunter
Philip Kaiser
Max M. Kampelman
Lane Kirkland
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Peter Kovler
Ron Lehman
John O'Sullivan
Richard Perle
Eugene Rostow
Donald Rumsfeld
Stephen Solarz
Helmut Sonnenfeldt
William Howard Taft
Elie Wiesel
Paul Wolfowitz
Elmo Zumwalt

Except for Geraldine Ferraro, this is basically the same group that made up
the Committee on the Present Danger, which was chaired by the atrocious
Jeane Kirkpatrick and flourished under Reagan. It promoted Star Wars,
intervention in Central America, Afghanistan and Angola and all sorts of
other militantly counterrevolutionary adventures. The point is that the war
in the Balkans is not a "progressive's" war. The most important sector of
reactionary opinion in the United States is represented by this executive
committee and should remind us that the war is a continuation of the
anticommunist crusade launched by Reagan 20 years ago.


Louis Proyect
http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/nato_kosovo/msg00120.html




Letter to the President on Milosevic, September 20, 1998

September 11, 1998

The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing out of deep concern for the plight of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo, many thousands of whom, having been driven from their homes and farms by the latest Serbian offensive, now face the possibility of a winter of starvation. Over 15 percent of the Kosovo population is already homeless. It is inexplicable to us that the West simply watches as this disaster grows daily after watching similar disasters unfold in Bosnia between 1992-95.

Stopping the carnage in Kosovo is essential and requires decisive action by the West. But this will not by itself provide a solution to the continuing Balkan conflict.

Mr. President, the events of recent months, when added to the history of the conflict since 1991, lead to one inescapable conclusion: There can be no peace and stability in the Balkans so long as Slobodan Milosevic remains in power. He started the Balkan conflict, and he continues it in Kosovo. He has caused untold suffering to millions; he has severely damaged his own country. We must face the facts.

We understand that the United States has sought and on occasion achieved Milosevic’s cooperation in carrying out the Dayton settlement; and there is no guarantee that a successor to Milosevic will be significantly more committed to peace. Nevertheless, we believe the time has come for the United States to distance itself from Milosevic and actively support in every way possible his replacement by a democratic government committed to ending ethnic violence. Our “pact with the devil” has outlived whatever usefulness it once had.

At a minimum, the United States should lead an international effort along the following lines:

• First, the humanitarian crisis needs to be addressed urgently. Milosevic must order his police and military forces to stop all violence immediately. However, the crisis cannot be ended without an agreement on a new political status for Kosovo. And that will require massive Western pressure on Milosevic.

• Second, the administration should seek, and the Congress should approve, a substantial increase in funds for supporting the democratic opposition within Serbia.

• Third, the U.S. and its allies must do everything possible to tighten the economic sanctions on Serbia to help undermine Milosevic’s ability to maintain his power in Belgrade.

• Fourth, the administration should cease attempting to strike diplomatic bargains with Milosevic.

• Finally, the U.S. should vigorously support The Hague tribunal’s investigation of Milosevic as a war criminal.

Mr. President, we are under no illusion that the steps we recommend are easy or guarantee success. We are certain, however, that after seven years of aggression and genocide in the Balkans, the removal of Milosevic provides the only genuine possibility of a durable peace. We urge you to act forcefully in this crisis, and we offer you our full support should you do so.

Sincerely,


Morton I. Abramowitz Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage

Nina Bang-Jensen Jeffrey Bergner George Biddle John R. Bolton

Frank Carlucci Eliot Cohen Seth Cropsey Dennis DeConcini

Paula Dobriansky Morton H. Halperin John Heffernan

James R. Hooper Bruce P. Jackson Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

Lane Kirkland Jeane Kirkpatrick Peter Kovler William Kristol

Mark P. Lagon Richard Perle Peter Rodman Gary Schmitt

Stephen Solarz Helmut Sonnenfeldt William Howard Taft IV

Ed Turner Wayne Owens Paul Wolfowitz Dov S. Zakheim

http://www.newamericancentury.org/kosovomilosevicsep98.htm

[bobbieinok]

73. Elie Wiesel???????????

[Zhade]

91. Who is Elie Wiesel?

NT!

[American Tragedy]

94. Famous survivor of the holocaust, wrote a book called Night.

[Zhade]

96. Thanks for the info. Is he considered one of the "good guys"...?

NT!

[American Tragedy]

98. He is by me, absolutely.

That's why I am confused and disturbed to find his name there. It seems highly uncharacteristic.

[Zhade]

131. Indeed, he seems to be. Amazing life.

The inclusion is a c&p from one of the sites linked in this thread, so that's why the name choices seem strange. It's not a DUer's list.

[bobbieinok]

105. one of many google sites

http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/ElieWiesel/ElieWieselBio.htm


Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, now a part of Romania. He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945.

After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps. The result was his internationally acclaimed memoir, La Nuit or Night, which has since been translated into more than thirty languages.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980 he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris based Universal Academy of Cultures. Elie Wiesel has received over one-hundred honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.

....

Elie Wiesel is the author of more than forty books of fiction and non-fiction, including A Beggar in Jerusalem (Prix Médicis winner), The Testament (Prix Livre Inter winner), The Fifth Son (winner of the Grand Prize in Literature from the City of Paris), and two volumes of his memoirs.

For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace (click here to read his Nobel Speech). A few months later, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

[bobbieinok]

108. also he was one of the strongest voices speaking against Reagan's

visit to Bitberg cemetary where he honored the SS dead

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r103:S16FE3-1270:

....

To be sure, Elie Wiesel speaks up on behalf of his people as well, with a voice of unparalleled eloquence. He tried to persuade President Reagan not to follow Patrick Buchanan's obscene recommendation that the American president go to Bitburg to honor the graves of Nazi storm troopers who had played a major role in the Holocaust. By ignoring Wiesel's sage counsel and going to Bitburg, President Reagan contributed to the atmosphere, now rampant in Germany, of legitimizing the SS and what it stood for.

more....

[Zhade]

129. Wow, how did I miss this guy? Thanks for the info!

What a life.

[Name removed]

77. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Sparkly]

32. No, Ramsey Clark did.

I didn't edit the list; I copied it straight from wiki, as linked. You can draw your own conclusions from the variety of names there about Ramsey Clark, whatever you may think of Peltier.

[Zhade]

49. Okay, let me explain why I came to the conclusion I did...

I think he had a stellar career for a long time...But a quick rundown of people he's supported, advised and defended include:

This statement basically indicates that anyone on that list is a terrible person (and indeed, some of them are. Some of them I am unfamiliar with and cannot make any judgement about). Therefore, the inclusion of Peltier's name on that list indicates he is a terrible person for Clark to support/advise/defend.

Since that list is not your creation, I retract my incredulity at the inclusion of Peltier's name.

[LynnTheDem]

112. An interesting thing about Wikpedia most don't seem to know; it's easy

to change/add/delete entries.

Try it.

So putting your faith into anything on Wikpedia is not a very smart move. Just FYI.

[robbedvoter]

39. Ramsey did.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

29. I Would Have Defended Father Berrigan and Possibly Leonard Peltier...

Milosevic, Koresh, and the goons who threw an old crippled guy off a ship were pricks....

[JoMama49]

62. Uh, Sparkly, you know, people ARE allowed to evolve ...

some of us on this board were actually cons at one time -- perhaps Ramsey Clark didn't always support or take peaceful positions, but if you listen carefully to his speech at Thursday's inaugural protest, he certainly does now!

[Sparkly]

63. "Peaceful positions?!"

Defending murderers?! I think he began as a respectable person, but for quite awhile now his actions are about being controversial and attention-gathering. I don't think they're always right, I don't think they're really in the interest of peace or justice, I think they're in the interest of attention via any and all opposition to the "establishment." I think if Hitler had survived to face a tribunal, Ramsey Clark would race to his side to defend him with claims that the holocaust never occurred and FDR is the madman, and many here would be rallying around Ramsey as a hero for the Truth. That's basically what he's doing for other genocidal murderers right now, and some here think it's just dandy because he happens to also criticize the Bush administration right now. He will criticize whatever gets him attention, and defend whatever gets him attention -- the game is to go against the status quo no matter what it is. I can't believe the mindless following he has in the name of so-called "leftism" and "anti-war" -- I am all for socialism but this brand of supposed socialism is neither pro-people nor anti-war nor pro-peace, it's the place where leftism circles back and meets the worst of the far right -- it's bloody, it's murderous, it defends genocide, hatred and the worst forms of violence and it's WRONG.

Sue me. Quote and link whatever you want to. That's the truth as I see it.

[Tinoire]

67. Can you truly not understand why as a lawyer who's pro-justice

he's defending those people?

First we have to get past whatever distaste we have and start digging a little. I tried to explain why I understand him defending Milosevic in a previous post here and I can understand why he's defending Saddaam. Clark is fighting imperialism that cloaks itself as bringing democracy when in fact it's bringing no such thing, only misery and exploitation by the First World powers.

I don't know the particulars of
- alleged former Nazis Karl Linnas and Jack Riemer
- Liberian political figure Charles Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia
- Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader of the Rwandan genocide
- PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer

but from what I know of Ramsey Clark and from what I know about the extremes my government has gone to to demonize and frame, I won't fault him for it before taking the time to research why and what.

Even the nastiest of men deserve legal representation but I don't think that's why Ramsey is defending them. He only defends people whose rights were violated by the US government. He's a smart cookie, not a kook.

Larouche: He argued Lyndon LaRouche's appeal of his conviction on mail fraud and tax evasion charges, on the grounds that he did not get a fair trial. What is wrong with defending a man who did not get a fair trial?

He says he took those cases because high legal principles were at stake - he objects to the government's willingness to throw its weight at organizations with unorthodox political philosophies. "If you can't protect the right to a fair jury trial for somebody who's unpopular," he says, "you can't expect to have one where it's needed the most.

(snip)

ONE OF THE MOST DIVISIVE episodes of Ramsey Clark's career began early in the U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf, when peace activists were staking out positions on how they would respond to the impending war. ((First Gulf War))

Clark had little difficulty deciding where he stood on the issue: He saw the Western powers, particularly the United States, demonizing Saddam Hussein in order to "spread hatred and violence."

So Clark lent his support and his office to the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, an assortment of left-wing groups that saw the U.N. action as an attempt by U.S. imperialists to maintain influence in the Middle East. The group refused to criticize Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

(snip)

"I said to him, 'There are a lot of us who need you and look up to you and need your standing and don't want to see you marginalized.'

"And Ramsey's response was, 'Well, I think I've already been pretty well marginalized.' "

(snip)

"I think it's not only intellectually justifiable, but I think it's morally correct where there's a great danger attached to what you're talking about to address a single aspect of wrongful conduct, particularly when it's your own country. And if you don't, then you're used in the spreading of hatred."

(snip)

"If you believe that we're all human, you don't exclude people," he says. "I've had more problems with the people I've been working with trying to exclude people than any others. They don't like to see the LaRouche people. I don't think you can think a democrat with a small 'd' can be afraid of that. If you agree on the issues, you agree on the issues."

(snip)

"Society has already marginalized people who will take an independent stand on these things because it will require this level of conformity," he says. "Even segments of the peace movement will require this level of conformity."

(snip)

http://www.maykuth.com/Projects/clark91.htm

===
I'm just researching the Leon Klinghoffer bit and I'm not yet finding much except mostly from extreme right-wingers but I did find this strange bit:


The NYT brings word that nearly 12 years after Palestinian terrorists killed a disabled passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, by pushing the wheelchair bound man off the hijacked cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, the Palestinian Liberation Organization has settled for an undisclosed sum a lawsuit brought by the Klinghoffer family. Both sides described the resolution as "amicable," which the Times says is "strange." What is just as strange is that the Times states that the PLO was represented in the case by Ramsey Clark, but doesn't mention that he is a former U.S. Attorney General.

http://slate.msn.com/id/1000378/

"amicable"? What the hell was that?

[bobbieinok]

71. Father Berrigan is a good guy. does not belong on list with Hussein

and Milosovic

[DemocratSinceBirth]

121. Exactly

Father Berrigan was a pacifist...

[klyon]

118. everyone and I mean everyone no matter how despicable

deserve competent representation otherwise the results will alway be suspect.

KL

[robbedvoter]

16. You forgot his defense of the Tianmen massacre

[joni in ok]

20. You got a link for that? Defending a massacre...not Ramsey!

By the way:
Osama Bin Forgotten!
Haven't you heard?

[robbedvoter]

42. here are some links

The scary stuff about ANSWER? The controlling group, the
Workers World Party:

- supported the Chinese government's 1989 Tienanmen Square
massacre
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html

- supports the "socialist" North Korean dictatorship of Kim
Jong Il
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0425.php
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/korea0509.php

- *and views Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a beacon of
anti-imperialist resistance
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/iraq0125.html

- defends the genocidal Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic
http://www.iacenter.org/yugo_milosdeligation.htm
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/larry0228.php
http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/milosevic1108.php
http://shadow.autono.net/sin001/clark.htm

[Tinoire]

69. No mention of Ramsey Clark defending the Tiananmen massacre

Do you even read the stuff you post? Or is it just a sloppy cut and paste job?

[Name removed]

81. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Zhade]

90. You guys are the ones making the allegations. Burden of proof is on YOU.

That is, if you want people to take your arguments seriously - which I would be happy to do, if only you guys would source your evidence from credible, unbiased sources. Otherwise, we don't have a mutual reference with which to discuss the issue.

[Zhade]

92. You're way out of line, Sparkly.

NT!

[JohnOneillsMemory]

136. LOL! Funny links, WW claims the students were armed imperialists!

Here is your Workers World link verbatim--

"During the Tienanmen demonstrations leading up to the June 4 violence, student leaders carefully concealed their political program behind abstract slogans of "freedom and democracy."
>snip<
They were the most vocal expression of a growing bourgeois, pro-imperialist current in China that wanted to end socialism altogether and turn to the capitalist world market."
>snip<
In fact, even bourgeois reporters have admitted there was no such massacre. As early as June 13, 1989, New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof reported that no students were killed in the square-that the fighting occurred in the streets leading to the square. At that time, Kristof wrote that "there is no firm indication that troops fired on students" occupying Tienanmen Square."

"Elaborating on that report, in a Jan. 16, 1990, article, Kristof related how pop singer Hou Dejian, who was present throughout the night as the square was cleared, "had seen no one killed in Tienanmen Square." He said that at 5 a.m. on June 4, the 3,000 students remaining in the square marched out peacefully."

In the same Jan. 16 article, Kristof estimated that hundreds-not thousands or tens of thousands-were killed."
------------------------------------------
Kristoff quotes a pop singer! Only hundreds, not thousands killed. OK.
I guess that takes care of that, no massacre. LOL!
And the students were armed savages who kidnapped unarmed soldiers and burned them alive in buses.



Yikes. WW writes some pretty nasty shit to support the oppressive Chinese regime. Here are some photos of the massacre. Tanks are very hard on human bodies and make quite a mess...
http://museums.cnd.org/June4th/massacre.html

And how does this relate to Ramsey Clark? I'm confused.

[Zhade]

27. Thanks for the sourced comments, Tinoire.

If you feel he's a good guy, that's a great sign of what kind of guy he is.

Off to read.

[T Town Jake]

95. Such an impressive resume...

...for a man who has degenerated into a complete and total loon. What a shame.

[Zen Democrat]

23. Ramsey Clark, former AG, and son of Texas oilman Judge Tom Clark --.

rose above his raising to oppose the Vietnam War and, as a result, encountered the full force of the FBI and government hammer. This made him a champion of the underdog in the federal legal system, and he represented anybody that couldn't get any other representation ... Communinists, Nazis, Fascists, Anarchists, Loonies, political enemies and all the unsavory types you can name. Because he's a lawyer with a different since of justice than his old man had.

Ramsey Clark has had balls.

[robbedvoter]

43. More shining examples:

Clark was complicit with Hoover's COINTELPRO. Following the 1967
riots in Newark and Detroit, he directed the FBI to investigate
whether the unrest was the result of some "scheme or conspiracy." He
instructed Hoover to develop "sources or informants in black
nationalist organizations, SNCC and other less publicized groups."
The result was Hoover's extensive "ghetto informant program."
In 1968, Clark prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock for advocating draft
resistance. "As late as 1968, while campaigning for Lyndon Johnson in
Wisconsin, Clark was shouting at anti-war protesters to take their
grievances to Hanoi rather than Washington," wrote John B. Judis in a
1991 expose on Clark in The New Republic.

Clark also dutifully backed the official findings that Lee Harvey
Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan each acted alone in the assassination of the
Kennedy brothers.

But when LBJ lost in '68, Clark was iced from his farewell luncheon.
The humiliated White House isolated him as King's Resurrection City
protesters occupied the DC mall and Republican candidate Richard
Nixon baited the AG for undermining "law and order." He had become a
convenient whipping boy for both parties.

.

In a 1974 bid for Senate in New York, he played the centrist in the
Democratic primary, with Bella Abzug on the left and Daniel Moynihan
on the right. Moynihan won. Clark, now 46, appeared to burn his
bridges with the establishment at this point.

In June 1980, with America mesmerized by the Iran hostage crisis, he
joined a forum on "Crimes of America" in Tehran-the first of many
such junkets. The '80s saw him globetrotting to schmooze with any
dictator who happened to be on the White House shit-list. After the
US bombing of Libya in 1986, he met with Col.  Moammar Qadaffi in
Tripoli.

Things started to smell really fishy in 1989, when Clark represented
ultra-right cult-master Lyndon LaRouche and six cohorts on conspiracy
and mail fraud charges. The LaRouchies had been bilking their naive
followers of their savings by getting them to cough up their credit
card numbers. Clark (who had been silent when the real COINTELPRO was
conducted under his watch at the Justice Department) now charged that
the LaRouche case was an "outgrowth" of COINTELPRO. He said the case
was manufactured by LaRouche's "powerful enemies within the
establishment" who targeted the cult because of its crusade "to
combat the traffic in so-called 'recreational drugs'...and the
practice of usury."

[Zhade]

50. Any credible evidence to back up your allegations?

No more "worker's world" sites, thanks.

[Sparkly]

55. You don't think Workers World is credible on the topic of Ramsey Clark?

How about the International Action Center, would you give them any credibility?

Maybe you should do some Googling on your own.

[Zhade]

57. No, I don't particularly think that WW is unbiased toward Clark.

I know how to Google. I'm just waiting for you to back up your claims with credible sources, as the burden of proof is on you for making the accusations about Clark.

[robbedvoter]

119. WW=IAC=ANSWER= Ramsey Clark

Links are press releases chronicling the great deeds of Ramsey. Own words, my friend, own words. If you are really "researching" - own words should matter. However, I don't think there's one person on this thread whithout a firmly made up mind - so the demanding of proof is merely an aggresive action, not an actual need to know.

[Zhade]

128. You've got to be kidding me.

Press releases in the organization's own words, "chronicling the great deeds of Ramsey", equates to Ramsey himself admitting to admiring/supporting/agreeing with the ideals of people like Hussein?

That's ridiculous. If Kim Jong-Il came out with a press release praising Dems who refused to demonize his country, would that then mean those Dems agreed with Kim Jong-Il's policies and ideals?

[JohnOneillsMemory]

137. WW claims the imperialist Chinese students massacred soldiers.

Here is your Workers World link verbatim--

"During the Tienanmen demonstrations leading up to the June 4 violence, student leaders carefully concealed their political program behind abstract slogans of "freedom and democracy."
>snip<
They were the most vocal expression of a growing bourgeois, pro-imperialist current in China that wanted to end socialism altogether and turn to the capitalist world market."
>snip<
In fact, even bourgeois reporters have admitted there was no such massacre. As early as June 13, 1989, New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof reported that no students were killed in the square-that the fighting occurred in the streets leading to the square. At that time, Kristof wrote that "there is no firm indication that troops fired on students" occupying Tienanmen Square.

Elaborating on that report, in a Jan. 16, 1990, article, Kristof related how pop singer Hou Dejian, who was present throughout the night as the square was cleared, "had seen no one killed in Tienanmen Square." He said that at 5 a.m. on June 4, the 3,000 students remaining in the square marched out peacefully.

In the same Jan. 16 article, Kristof estimated that hundreds-not thousands or tens of thousands-were killed."
------------------------------------------
Kristoff quotes a pop singer! Only hundreds, not thousands killed. OK.
I guess that takes care of that, no massacre. LOL!
And the students were armed savages who kidnapped unarmed soldiers and burned them alive in buses.

Here are some photos of the massacre. Tanks are very hard on human bodies and make quite a mess...
http://museums.cnd.org/June4th/massacre.html


Now I'm confused about who is discrediting whom and why?

Maybe:
1)Some would call the ACLU nuts for defending the rights of the KKK to march

2)Some think the 60s COINTELPRO accusation against Ramsey Clark has more credibility than the last 25 years of his work.

3)Some don't want to think that Ramsey's indictment of Wesley Clark for war crimes has any merit because the US was a rescuing angel in Kosovo etc.

[Tinoire]

59. Manny Goldstein? Anarcho-communist. FBI Cointelpro?

Lol, I think you just dislike Ramsey for going after Wesley Clark as a war criminal seeing that you have this piece up on your Clark blog.

Before give that article too much credibility, consider this:

Manny Goldstein, LMAO, is the pseudonym based on Orwell's 1984, for an anarchist dedicated to hacking and other forms of techno-subversion from the Anarcho-Communist Clan (ACC) who's been in a pissing contest with the International Action Center and the Workers World Party because the IAC doesn't "want to be associated with the ACC or the Black Block"- they don't trust his little movement and accused some of them of working with the FBI & causing problems at the antiwar marches. The undercover agents posing as "anarchists" should immediately spring to your mind. Manny's piece is nothing more than a hit piece on the WWP (Workers World Party) which, by the way is not Stalinist as he accuses but Trotskyist. A real anarchist, which Manny pretends to be, would at least have at least gotten his terms straight.

Who is Manny Goldberg and more importantly, what is his agenda?

The ONLY other article the mysterious Manny Goldstein is known for is an article about the dangers of militias. Both of his articles reek of COINTELPRO. It's interesting to note that ole Manny has been accused of working closely with the FBI and various police agencies around the country. He admitted, when Clinton was President that he was maintaining a large archive on the various groups on the Right connected with militias. Now that Bush is in power, he's going after the Left. His "article" reeks of the FBI or some other similar government arm trying to discredit the antiwar movement and the WWP. Kind of strange for an anarchist whose biggest claim to fame, after people started asking questions about him, is that he got arrested protesting at the RNC, don't you think?

If you do a search on that article, you'll find that Goldstein himself, plasters it all over the sites where people are gathering to protest the war to try to discourage them from protesting with ANSWER, the largest antiwar voice out there. There's a good example http://members.lycos.nl/vadercats/2001/firstofoctober.htm">here:
where he went to an antiwar site and posted:

by Manny Goldstein 5:03pm Fri Sep 28 '01 (Modified on 8:05pm Fri Sep 28 '01) Former attorney general Ramsey Clark is the International Action Center (IAC) hero. Who is he? What's his history. Be careful around stalinist groups. ----- Nasty, bit of business

and was thankfully jumped on by people who knew his agenda. Just like he's jumped on at Indymedia or anywhere he posts that crap.

Who's really the undercover spook here, Ramsey Clark or Manny Goldstein?
===

"Take a close look and there is something downright suspicious about former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now the darling of certain sectors of the radical left. His journey has taken him from the heights of federal power to outer orbits of the political fringe. In the process, he has seemingly transformed from a shill for the most corrupt elements of the US elites to a shill for any foreign despot who claims to oppose the US elites. Who is Ramsey Clark really working for?"

"What is Ramsey Clark: dupe, kook or spook? Has a well-intentioned but none-too-bright Clark been duped by the WWP cadre? Or has his reasoning become unhinged for reasons of personal psychology? Or, is he a deep-cover spook, whose real Devil's pact is with sinister elements of the US intelligence community, his mission to divide and discredit any resistance to Washington's war moves?

"You decide."

Okay, I will decide. Manny Goldstein is a god-damned snitch-jacket punk

Louis Proyect
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/BillWeinberg.htm

Louis Proyect is a well known, kick-ass, long-time leftwing activist and writer who has spent his life promoting peace and social justice

==

"Manny Goldstein" is Eric Corley, a libertarian who became famous for various hacking escapades involving the phone company, DVD codes, etc. He named himself after the character Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's 1984, who was the chief enemy of the totalitarian state. He also has a show on WBAI that I find a crushing bore. And a website at: http://www.2600.com/ ((devoted to phreaking and hacking)). Here are some of his ruminations on the WTC attack:

"What happened Tuesday was more than an attack on the United States. It was an attack on all humanity and I think humanity as a whole may well be in an unprecedented position to move forward and deal with this once and for all.

I hope we don't underestimate that power because it's probably the biggest weapon we have on our side...

It's entirely possible that the situation will be taken advantage of to our great detriment as a free society. We intend to keep our eyes open. And then there are the many pieces of mail that are coming in insisting that we DO something, as if we somehow had the power to make it all better. We've been informed numerous times that it's our patriotic duty to hack all Arab web sites, to find bin Laden's phone number, to take Afghanistan off the net, to lay down our swords and offer our services to the government. At best these are simplistic suggestions. At worst, they are really destructive. They're all based upon a faulty premise - that hackers somehow work miracles and can find out anything and accomplish any task as long as there's a computer or phone involved somehow. It just doesn't work like that, something we've been trying for years to tell the media and the movie producers. As always, we intend to be open and helpful with technology. And certainly, if we were to stumble upon something that would be useful in this investigation, I doubt any of us would hesitate to share it. But we do so as individuals, just as we do most everything else.

"But I do understand the anger. I understand the flag waving. I even understand all the talk of war. But ultimately, we will win this fight by being rational and uniting with fellow citizens of the world. Or else we won't win at all."

(http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=716)

I think I'll stick with Ramsey Clark.

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002/msg00064.htm

====
Other than the FBI, FreeRepublic, infiltrators at Indymedia (who get beaten up by the Left), the only others I found quoting that article are Reverend Moon's papers to attack the antiwar movement:

In November, WorldNetDaily produced a special investigative report on the controversial ties of major anti-war leadership, including some of those involved in the current push for impeachment. Anti-war activists and a handful of liberal writers complained of the "hijacking of the anti-war movement" by dangerous political extremists. The WND report told of links to Islamic extremist groups and cult-like, radical Marxist/Stalinists, some of whom are pushing for an armed overthrow of the U.S. Some leaders and speakers were shown to be have a history of being supportive of enemy regimes of the U.S., as well as terrorists. Groups mentioned in the article included the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, the International Action Center and an organizational coalition group, A.N.S.W.E.R.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.prophecies.nostradamus/browse_thread/thread/c9a9c32220dd7b09/d9c94c7054377c5e?q=%22Manny+Goldstein%22&_done=%2Fgroups%3Fq%3D%22Manny+Goldstein%22%26start%3D20%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26&_doneTitle=Back+to+Search&&d#d9c94c7054377c5e
===

Manny Goldstein doesn't present a shred of evidence for any of his assertions and one really has to consider why his piece reads a lot like the Cointelpro pieces written by the FBI's pet columnists in the 60s. Whose interests are served if the movement against the US war in Afghanistan & Iraq is disrupted by irresponsible charges made without any foundation against one wing of the movement? Not mine. Not yours. Not peace. Not justice's. I think you get the idea.



Here's more from that skunk, from his only other piece:

When the FEMA martial law plan was conceived, the domestic enemy being targetted was the Central America solidarity and sanctuary movements, and the plan was based on earlier ones such as Nixon's Operation Garden Plot, which targetted the campus anti_war movement and black militants. However, in 1995, the Clinton administration is conveniently using the Militia to justify beefing up the federal police state apparatus. The administration's Anti_Terrorist Bill, written before the Oklahoma City blast and mostly aimed at foreign "terrorist" groups, would unleash warrantless wiretap capabilities, and create a special FBI warchest for "counter_terrorism". Written by the Clinton White House and being plugged by liberal Democrats such as New York's Rep. Charles Schumer, the bill would give the president the power to unilaterally declare any organization "terrorist." Anyone supporting that organization would be convicted of a felony and jailed for up to 10 years. Immigrants accused of "terrorism" would be deported by special secret courts which would use classified evidence from secret sources.
http://mediafilter.org/MFF/S36/S36.MILITIA.html


here's a picture of the guy:

and another one here (but remove the space before jpg - too big to post)
http://www.mccullagh.org/db7/950-10/emmanuel-goldstein. jpg

==
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia ...
Emmanuel Goldstein, 1984

[Sparkly]

84. Let's just dazzle with cut/pastes Tinoire

Cut to the truth. Ramsey Clark is a nut who defends genocidal maniacs, period.

[Tinoire]

104. Naw... let's try reading instead

Reading... It's considered a GOOD thing. Opens the mind up and all that crap. Helps people understand where other people are coming from and why things like, you know, wars aren't such hot ideas for humanity.

[Zhade]

141. Thank you for the information. I think I remember this guy from way back.

Divide and conquer - it's so easy, and it usually works. Sad.

[Q]

33. It's disgusting...

...the way some on this board help the Bush White House dismiss their critics by using the same rhetoric the RWingers would use.

Clark is speaking for himself...just as every poster on DU speaks for themselves. Yet some posters go out of their way to demonize the very few Americans left that are brave enough to speak out.

Judge his words...not what others say about him:

RAMSEY CLARK: Ready to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We have to take the Constitution back, back from crimes against peace, from war crimes, and crimes against humanity. You know, the Nuremberg tribunal called the war of aggression the supreme international crime, and it is. And George W. Bush has waged a war of aggression against Iraq. He has killed more than 100,000 people. Are their lives worth nothing? Can we have a moment of silence in memory of all of the people that have died in Iraq, because the criminal acts of George W. Bush in waging this war of aggression? Every moment of their lives is fraught with danger right now because of us. The world is the most dangerous place it's ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back. We can't wait four more years. There can't be any more Fallujahs. Fallujah is the 21st century equivalent of Guernica. We just went in and destroyed that city, drove the people out, killed them, thousands. We don't know how many. They won't even bother to count who's been killed or how many, or estimate how many. They just keep killing. Almost every day we're reading about another checkpoint where some family got wiped out. Because they didn't do what they were supposed to do according to the military there. Abu Ghraib is unbelievable in the innocent times of 1961. That we would torture people that way and on the instructions of the President of the United States and his highest legal advisers, torture is okay, they said. Go for it, fellas. If we can't renounce that and remove it from office, then the Constitution doesn't work anymore. We have got to do more than take back the Constitution; there has to be accountability for what's happened. The Constitution says that the President, Vice President, and other officials of the United States shall be removed from office upon impeachment for and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors. If you care about the Constitution, you better start talking to your member of the House of Representatives and say impeachment now is now essential to the integrity of the United States government, and to the future of the United States. We've had more than 500,000 people sign on, "Vote to Impeach." We need to get 5 million, and we need to get 5 million on there quick, and then the Congress will react. The Congress understands something when the people demand it. And the power is in the people. Always has been. The question is whether the people have the will to exercise it. I think that the imperative challenge of the American people now is to live up to the Constitution and demand the impeachment of George W. Bush and the other officials of the government responsible for these crimes. Thank you very much.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/21/1531214

[DemocratSinceBirth]

34. I Form My Own Opinions Free From The Shackles Of Ideology

If I want a guru or yoda I'll look in the mirror or become a fundie....

[Q]

35. Guru or yoda?

No one is asking you to follow or worship Clark. To dismiss him as a wannabe Guru or Yoda suggests that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

I'm wondering why so many on this board seem to be against those who are at least trying to get the truth out through the filter of the corporate state media?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

36. Excuse Me...

I don't have to embrace every person on the left side of the spectrum.....

Maybe I should embrace Slobodan Milosevic... After all he did provide national health care

There are greater virtues than a slavish devotion to any ideology....

That was my point....

Ramsey Clark was right about some things .... Wrong about others, as many in this thread have noticed...

[Q]

37. Never asked you to support him or anyone else...

...but you're getting a bit carried away with your hyperbole.

Did you read the speech? He talked about SUPPORTING THE CONSTITUTION, the fact that war crimes are being committed in Iraq and that the Bush White House has committed high crimes.

It sounds as if you would rather smear and call names than support your argument with logic and common sense. You and a few others are trying to discredit what he said in THIS speech by bringing up the past unsupported by facts. It reminds me of when RWingers would say that Clinton couldn't be trusted on any issue because he once lied about sex.

Critical thinking could be your friend.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

38. I Think Some Folks Are Saying It Is Not In Our Interest To

Align Ourselves with someone who has aligned himself with Slobadan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and the goons who threw an old crippled, Jewish fella from his wheel chair off the Achille Lauro and into the Mediterranean...


Can you please explain to me how it is in our interest to align ourselves with those folks?

[robbedvoter]

44. Right. We have United for peace, Code Pink and other credible

groups. When are we going to ditch mr Cointelpro?
Did we learn anything from Bev Harris taking Florida off the election theft table?

[Sparkly]

45. I think there's a desire to divide people into two camps

The "good" and the "bad" -- the people who agree with us, and the people who don't. So a total nut could say "Bush should be impeached" and some would say "Yay!! That one's in the Good Camp!!" Know what I mean? :shrug:

[Tinoire]

66. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink is a great admirer

of Ramsey Clark and works very, very, very closely with him. When you boil it down, they're all nasty red communists ;) Code Pink is co-founded by Marxist Leslie Cagan, a card carrying member of the American Communist Party. The United for Peace coalition includes Socialist Action and the Socialist Party USA. And they're all defenders of the Socialist governments who have been railroaded by Western imperialism.

Wow, you keep going like this & pretty soon everyone's going to be up shit's creek since the the big anti-war movements in this country are all, gasp, communist-relatted commie lovers and defenders.

The Right has already started smearing the Code Pinko movement as a Castro/Milosevic lovers organization. How many of the strong anti-war voices are we willing to help shut up?

We're either for peace or we're not. And we CAN'T be for world peace and pro-imperialist at the same time. The two concepts are incompatible.

===

We unconditionally support ANSWER’s right to be part of the movement, and we welcome its full participation at every level in building February 15.

The crookedest trick in the Times article is to present our coalition, United for Peace and Justice, as some kind of “okay,” safe and sane “alternative” to ANSWER. Leslie Cagan’s statement, made repeatedly in all kinds of contexts, that we assume speakers on February 15 will relate their perspectives to their opposition to the war in Iraq is presented as a kind of attack on ANSWER or criticism of January 18 or as indicative of a desire to keep ANSWER at a remove from the February 15 action.

United for Peace and Justice is not an “alternative” to ANSWER but an attempt to build a broad, united network of antiwar forces, including ANSWER and anyone else who sees the need for broad united action.

The Times’s attempt to disrupt and divide a young and growing movement needs to be firmly countered.

Among other things, this requires, in my opinion, firm action by United for Peace and Justice to reach out to our sisters and brothers in ANSWER and involve them fully in the preparation and building of a united action. We have to take affirmative action right now to make it clear to ANSWER that they are not merely free to join the action—which they have already endorsed—but that we strongly desire their full participation at every level. A deliberate and conscious effort to reach out to ANSWER is also necessary to establish clearly in the public mind what UFPJ really is—an effort to strengthen the unity of the WHOLE antiwar movement—and also what it is not (a coalition of the, as far as I know nonexistent, “right wing” of the antiwar movement).

I know that we aren’t going to fall for the New York Times bait. That goes without saying. But I think that we should counter the crude trap set for us by moving aggressively to advance the perspective of including ANSWER in a prominent, public, and, I might even say, defiant way in a genuinely and fully united action against the war on February 15.

http://www.laborstandard.org/Iraq/Feldman_Jan24.htm


===
Here's some shit from the Right:

John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee was a featured speaker at the Workers World Party “peace” rally, as was former Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Representative Charles Rangel, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee sent a letter of support. In a sister demonstration in San Francisco, also organized by the Workers World Party, California State Senator, Democrat John Burton, told the protesters that the President of the United States was “full of s___” and was “f---ing America.”

So appalling were these demonstrations that older members of the left disassociated themselves from this movement in articles that appeared in leftwing magazines like Salon.com and the L.A. Weekly (the latter article was written by David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation).

On February 15, an anti-war protest will be held in New York City, organized by a new group called “United for Peace and Justice.” This group is headed by Leslie Cagan, a Sixties Marxist with a long history of supporting Communist causes. She was a member of the Venceremos Brigades organized by Cuban Intelligence. She was a member of the Committees for Correspondence, a faction of the Communist Party USA, and she is co-chair of the National Network on Cuba an organization whose purpose is propaganda and political support for the Castro dictatorship. Cagan has warned that, “If marches do not work, we will escalate. We will have to do things to disrupt the normal flow of life in this country.”(NYTimes, 2/04/03) This threat of sabotage should not be taken lightly given the history of more than 1,000 domestic bombings during the Vietnam War.

The agendas of the so-called “peace movement” are pro-Communist and anti-American. Its organizers have worked with America’s enemies in the past and are continuing to do so in the midst of this war. This is the very definition of a political “fifth column.” Honest dissenters and Americans concerned about the future of their country should take a hard look at these protests and those who support them.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Content/read.asp?ID=31

[Sparkly]

85. I don't care if Eleanor Roosevelt was a great admirer

The man is defending murderers, and you're defending him. Period. Thus you are hardly the peace-loving leftist you claim to be, Tinoire. As far as I'm concerned, you're an imposter of what the left has historically been about and what it's striving for today.

[Tinoire]

107. Of course you don't care

How could you? You bought the media lie that carbonizing Serbs with 15,000 tons of NATO bombs and littering the country of Yugoslavia was a "humanitarian mission". How could you care? (( Not to mention that the original point is that it's kind of ludicrous to call for disassociating from ANSWER because we have Code Pink and United for Peace & Justice since those groups are just as smeared as ANSWER by people who don't care (unless the intent is to shut up the antiwar Left by marginalizing them one by one).)

And yet you expect people to take you seriously when you slam leaders and organizations of the antiwar movement.

I've noticed some Wesley Clark supporters have a real problem with ANSWER and Ramsey Clark because he went after Clark as a war criminal for waging an illegal war that had neither Congressional nor UN approval against a sovereign nation that in no way threatened us because the SAME PNAC neo-cons wrote a letter saying to do so.

GEE, where did I hear that exact same story repeated? IRAQ maybe????

And hence the discomfort among some and the necessity for all sorts of nuances and waffling.

As far as you're concerned about me Sparkly, well I really couldn't care less what you thought of me. I have to live with my own opinion of myself. Not yours. I don't give a rat's ass about your opinion of me. So save your breath to write up a defense of the School of the Americas or how the good-hearted National Endowment for Democracy is really interested in spreading nothing but the purest democracy in the First and Second World.

It's truly enlightening to see how you only believe in legal representation for the people YOU think are worthy of it. Is that the kind of "democracy" you expect more Left-leaning Democrats to help you build? Wow.

[LynnTheDem]

113. I can't find where it says murderers shall not be defended.

Now I can see rightwingnuts thinking & saying murderers shouldn't be defended...but that really doesn't seem a very PROGRESSIVE stance.

Could you point out for me just where in the USC it says only the innocent shall be entitled to defense and murderers not? TIA.

[sherilocks]

125. Are you seriously quoting David Horowitz here

for a legitimate biography of Leslie Kagan?

While searching for a more balanced view of Kagan's politics, clearly not one from David Horowitz's perspective, I came across this Boston.com article from 1991.

On the peace front, 2 major US groups are waging a war
Differences prevent a single big rally
By Ross Gelbspan, Globe Staff, 01/14/1991

While a groundswell of antiwar sentiment is finding expression in hundreds of local antiwar demonstrations, vigils and protests around the country, a number of organizers are concerned that a major split in the national peace movement is confusing new peace activists and diluting the impact of the movement in Washington and elsewhere.
Several organizers cite that split as a major reason for congressional support of the president's war initiative, noting that the country's two largest peace umbrella groups are holding separate rallies in Washington a week apart, taking different political tacks and appealing to different constituencies. "To have two demonstrations a week apart is generating enormous confusion. Each group is promoting a different line, but they're going to the same groups for funding. The situation is disorienting and demoralizing people. To have two separate national demonstrations and two separate groups is a major gift to the Bush administration," said a veteran organizer who asked not to be named.
<snip>

<snip>
The coalition, which is headed by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and is generally seen as promoting a more radical political line, alienated some activists by refusing to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and opposing the UN-imposed sanctions.
"We oppose the sanctions as being another form of warfare which, by depriving them of food and medicine, leads to the deaths of innocent civilians," said Phebe Eckfelt, coordinator of the New England chapter of the coalition. "We want the troops home, but they can't come home if they have to enforce the embargo."
The National Campaign, by contrast, headed by Leslie Kagan, a veteran antiwar leader, is seen by many as having a more mainstream liberal orientation similar to the SANE/Freeze groups. The campaign has condemned Saddam Hussein's invasion. It has taken no public position on the sanctions.


<snip>


http://www.boston.com/news/packages/iraq/globe_stories/011491_antiwar.htm

Read it, just for fun.

[Tinoire]

139. How did "here's some shit from the Right" fly right over your head?

Or was that just a hasty knee-jerk response from skimming too rapidly?

Please re-read that paying careful attention to the caveat"here's some shit from the Right". The emphasis is on SHIT. The intent was to show that they will always vilify.

[Zhade]

54. That would make sense, were it true.

So far, there has been zero evidence presented that Clark has "aligned himself" with any of those he chose to defend. Maybe he just believes everyone deserves a fair trial?

If you can provide some credible evidence that Clark not only defended, but supports and agrees with their ideologies, I'll happily listen to what you have to offer. At this point, no one has offered such evidence beyond a list of people Clark defended.

[robbedvoter]

61. IAC center link (former name for ANSWER) not good enough for ya?

http://www.iacenter.org/yugo_milosdeligation.htm (International Action Committee)
And are you denying that World Workers party are IAC/Answer?
here they are, calling tianmen "a battle, not a massacre"
http://www.workers.org/ww/tienanmen.html

You can refuse to believe - but it's them speaking.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

140. Woah!! Read the IAC link. It describes the same scene as Iraq/Iran!

Check this out folks, because it isn't a defense of Milosevic!
>>IT IS AN INDICTMENT OF NATO FOR DOING TO YUGOSLAVIA WHAT BUSH IS DOING TO SADDAM!!<<

Get it? We know the scam of supporting Saddam, weakening him, and then knocking him off by playing White Hat Rescue Jesus, RIGHT?? RIGHT??!!

And we are NOT Saddam supporters, for gawds sake!!

Read this and you will also get a different view of Wesley Clark for his role. Understand that the Geneva Conventions outlaw destroying civilians and civilian infrastructure, especially with depleted uranium weapons, something we all want to see Bush* in the Hague for, right?.

>snip<

""With this trial," said International Action Center (IAC) representative Bill Doares from Amsterdam, "Washington and its NATO allies hopes to pin the guilt for the 10 years of civil war in the Balkans on the Yugoslav leader. The goal of these big powers is to shift the blame for the war they fomented onto the victims, the Serbian people and all the other peoples of Yugoslavia."

>snip<

"Confused about why the U.S. bombed Yugoslavia? That's because you never heard about the hidden agenda behind the dismemberment of this multiethnic country.

Washington and NATO strategists invoked humanitarian principles to justify their war. But they practiced the divide-and-conquer tactics used by empires since the days of imperial Rome.

Behind the façade of concern for self-determination, they sliced away most of the republics of Yugoslavia, one by one, through economic pressure, political threats and, finally, outright warfare.

This book presents evidence gathered by dozens of nongovernmental hearings in 1999 and 2000 that the NATO countries engaged in a decade-long conspiracy to foment war in Yugoslavia in order to split it up.

Now NATO has military bases all over the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. They are the Roman legions for Western transnational corporations and Big Oil.

In the 40+ essays presented here, leading anti-war activists and analysts from many countries take up The Hague Tribunal, the occupation of Kosovo, media lies, war crimes and the blatant illegality of NATO aggression. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark writes on "Blaming the victim."

>snip<

Wars are almost ALWAYS, ALWAYS for economic reasons and Tinoire's citing of the unacceptable treaty NATO offered that demanded 'free-market' economic rape that the IMF, WTO, and White House use to conquer regions seems to be in play here and Ramsey Clark was way ahead of us after seeing it from the inside during the 1960s.

I think Ramsey shows us just what a Trojan Horse Wesley is in the 'Battle of the Clarks.'

[T Town Jake]

100. Ramsey Clark is a loon - it's as simple as that...

...and quite evident to everyone who reviews his "career" from 1969 on with an IQ above that of your average fifth grader. Excluding special pleaders and ideological Axe-grinders - both of which you obviously are - regarding the issue of this idiot savant, of course.

[LynnTheDem]

114. T Town Jake is a loon -it's as simple as that...

Heh. That IS much easier than actually seeing and discussing and researching into all the existing shades of grey in the real world!

[Name removed]

101. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ArtVandaley]

46. Fuck him

ANyone on the legal team of a murderous dictator deserves to lose any credibility.
He would have defended Hitler if it boosted his profile.
He makes the left look crazy, we need to disown him.

[Zhade]

56. Is justice only available to those we deem fit?

Silly me, I thought the right to representation and a fair trial was a universal right we all agreed on.

Many of the people Clark apparently defended were so evil that no one would defend them. It appears that Clark sees upholding the rule of law more important than the opinions of those who don't quite get that EVERYONE accused of a crime deserves a defense, no matter who they are.

It does make it easy for the rightwing to spin his defense of horrible people into his "support and approval of dictators", but then the rightwing are cowardly liars who spin everything anyway.

I actually have to admire someone who can risk everything the way Clark has for a higher ideal. That takes a lot of courage, IMHO.

[ArtVandaley]

58. Courage and stupidity are two very different things

Think of all the time he will have to do preparing Saddam's defense. If he is such a noble person, why doesn't he spend that time working for the ACLU, trying to protect our civil liberties? Why doesn't he do some work for mentally retarded people who are on death row, trying get them off of it? Why doesn't he take the case of a mother who was blocked from getting the medicine her sick children needed by greedy HMOs? Why doesn't he . . . yada yada yada, you get my point.
If preserving the way of law is so important to him, try helping people who deserve help. Of course, everyone deserves a fair trial, I won't argue with that. I just CANNOT understand how anyone can think that giving Saddam a fair trial is more important than any of the other things I listed. I think it's just Clark's way of getting in the spotlight and saying fuck you to the establishment, which is truly sick. And people call Nader an opportunist with no moral, christ.

[Zhade]

80. Are you 100% certain he's NOT doing these things?

NT!

[fujiyama]

65. Clark is nuts

He's the type that is willing to defend (and not just in a court of law) any dictator around the world. He has a knee jerk tendancy to blame the US for absolutely everything. He may be right about Abu Grhaib, the war, and the way the US has recently behaved.

That said, I don't think he'd be a good communicator for the left or the anti war movement. Here's an interesting paragraph from an article in common dreams, written by David Corn:

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1031-08.htm

"The IAC, another WWP offshoot, was a key partner with ANSWER in promoting the protest. It was founded by Ramsey Clark, attorney general for President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. For years, Clark has been on a bizarre political odyssey, much of the time in sync with the Workers World Party. As an attorney, he has represented Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a political cult. He has defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, who was accused of participating in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Clark is also a member of the International Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosevic. The international war-crimes tribunal, he explains, “is war by other means” — that is, a tool of the West to crush those who stand in the way of U.S. imperialism, like Milosevic. A critic of the ongoing sanctions against Iraq, Clark has appeared on talking-head shows and refused to concede any wrongdoing on Saddam’s part. "

[marcologico]

72. Corn is an MSM wanna-be so I wouldn't take his word. Anway it was a good

speech and nobody's asking us to vote for the guy.

[bobbieinok]

75. Corn has written some pretty weird articles...IMO he's not 100% reliable

[Leilani]

97. He even defended the blind Sheik Rahman

who was convicted in the First World Trade Towers bombing, an act of terrorism, here in our country.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9908/20/sheik.rahman/

& from what I've read, Rahman was behind the plot to blow up the Lincoln & Holland Tunnels.

What a great guy Ramsey Clark is for defending him.

[bobwhite]

103. Wow - that is some damning stuff

Now wait here come the Clark defenders to smear Corn!!! What a wierd fucked up world we live in.

[fujiyama]

106. It's not so simple

as defending those who are accused of such gastly crimes no one else will defend. Now, that itself would be morally questionable, but would have some reasoning behind it (as you said everyone even those accused of the most disgusting crimes are entitled to a competant defense). Here's about the least biased info on him I could find (it wasn't from most of the RW sites like CNS News and Freerepublic links I found on google). It's too bad he descended into such lunacy. He did some good work back in the day.

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2003/feature_saunders_novdec03.html

Yet Clark has also said that he won’t defend someone if he doesn’t “believe in the morality of what the person has done or is accused of having done.” “Take antitrust,” he said recently. “If a corporation came to me and I thought they were abusing smaller competitors, I wouldn’t take the case.” Clark admits, however, that there is an important exception to his rule against representing people he believes are morally reprehensible, one that allows him to say no to a Microsoft and yes to a Karadzic or a Rahman: “The exception,” he said, “is if the person is being persecuted.” "

Looks like Clark basically believes that anyone prosecuted by the US government (or any other international body like the ICC) is being "persecuted". I'm no fan of corporations and monopoly power, but I see Microsoft as less of a threat than the war criminals and terrorists he's defended.

[American Tragedy]

93. So, why exactly is Ramsey Clark going to defend Saddam Hussein?

I fully recognize that Hussein is entitled to legal counsel, but I seriously question the wisdom of a public figure like Ramsey Clark serving in that role.

I'm afraid that he will make a spectacle of himself and the case in front of a sensationalist media, or deliberately divert the focus of the trial, like Jacques Vergès did when he defended Klaus Barbie.

Furthermore, Ramsey Clark doesn't speak Arabic, and Saddam Hussein doesn't speak English. It seems like an unnecessary complication for a defendant and attorney to be mutually unintelligible. Would it be so hard to locate an arabophone lawyer?

[bobwhite]

102. exactly, Ramsey has a bigger agenda than just a defense lawyer

I'm all for defense attorneys providing defendants a good legal defense. But Clark is in this to try and morally vindicate Saddam in the eyes of the world. That's my impression anyway.

[jdots]

115. OY is it soup yet ?

[American Tragedy]

120. I don't think it's really about Saddam Hussein. This is a publicity stunt.

He knows that the world media is going to devour the impending trial. I'm sure he's already envisioning himself on television, stalking through the courtroom and ranting about Western imperialism.

[Tinoire]

116. IMO it's less Saddaam and more the international legal case

against illegally invading a sovereign nation on trumped up charges and causing so much death and misery for corporate greed. It will be interesting to watch this develop.

I'll see if I can find more on this tomorrow...

[KoKo]

134. Excellent points Tinoire...thanks...n/t

[JohnOneillsMemory]

143. US imperialism is much older than W's wars. Ramsey was ahead of us.

Check this out folks, because it isn't a defense of Milosevic or Saddam!

>>IT IS AN INDICTMENT OF NATO FOR DOING TO YUGOSLAVIA WHAT BUSH IS DOING TO SADDAM!!<<

Get it? We know the scam of supporting Saddam, weakening him, and then knocking him off by playing White Hat Rescue Jesus, RIGHT?? RIGHT??!!

And we are NOT Saddam supporters, for gawds sake!!

Read this and you will also get a different view of Wesley Clark for his role. Understand that the Geneva Conventions outlaw destroying civilians and civilian infrastructure, especially with depleted uranium weapons, something we all want to see Bush* in the Hague for, right?.

>snip<

""With this trial," said International Action Center (IAC) representative Bill Doares from Amsterdam, "Washington and its NATO allies hopes to pin the guilt for the 10 years of civil war in the Balkans on the Yugoslav leader. The goal of these big powers is to shift the blame for the war they fomented onto the victims, the Serbian people and all the other peoples of Yugoslavia."

>snip<


"Confused about why the U.S. bombed Yugoslavia? That's because you never heard about the hidden agenda behind the dismemberment of this multiethnic country.

Washington and NATO strategists invoked humanitarian principles to justify their war. But they practiced the divide-and-conquer tactics used by empires since the days of imperial Rome.

Behind the façade of concern for self-determination, they sliced away most of the republics of Yugoslavia, one by one, through economic pressure, political threats and, finally, outright warfare.

This book presents evidence gathered by dozens of nongovernmental hearings in 1999 and 2000 that the NATO countries engaged in a decade-long conspiracy to foment war in Yugoslavia in order to split it up.

Now NATO has military bases all over the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. They are the Roman legions for Western transnational corporations and Big Oil.

In the 40+ essays presented here, leading anti-war activists and analysts from many countries take up The Hague Tribunal, the occupation of Kosovo, media lies, war crimes and the blatant illegality of NATO aggression. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark writes on "Blaming the victim."

>snip<

Wars are almost ALWAYS, ALWAYS for economic reasons and Tinoire's citing of the unacceptable treaty NATO offered that demanded 'free-market' economic rape that the IMF, WTO, and White House use to conquer regions seems to be in play here and Ramsey Clark was way ahead of us after seeing it from the inside during the 1960s.

I think Ramsey shows us just what a Trojan Horse Wesley is in the 'Battle of the Clarks.' It took us until recently to realize how much Republican corporateer policy Clinton and other DLC candidates have gotten over on us while we think in terms of Dem or Repub.

We're being played by a good cop/bad cop routine on each side.
Chomsky is right about how long the American power structure has been consistently pschopathic.

It is about power, not ideology. Power protects itself like any other organism in nature. That's why the American government has been genocidal for 200 years, not just all of a sudden!

Read Chomsky's 'Understanding Power' and learn why Ramsey Clark and so many others see the poverty and blood behind the flag every time.

That's a truth even some liberals can't handle.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

122. I Am Shocked...

I have a simple question...



Was Slobodan Milosevic engaged in genocide against the indigenous Muslim population in Kosovo and Bosnia?


If the answer is yes then America and it's allies had a moral obligation to stop him....

Everything else is commentary....

[DemocratSinceBirth]

123. I Must Answer My Own Post...

It was the right led by misanthropes like Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh who criticized our intervention in Kosovo...


I'd rather get in a bed with a pig than those two...

[JohnOneillsMemory]

144. Wrong. Delay and Rush didn't want Clinton to take 'credit' for the PR job

of seeming to do a rescue, the way Bush** is doing a 'rescue' in Iraq.

They hoped that the public would be instead be horrified by the 'interventionist' act and rail over any US dead, just for partisan points.

But Clinton and NATO got away with pretending to be a White Hat Sheriff while they took apart another region to colonize.

[Tinoire]

145. Incorrect The Left was out there in force- u just didn't see it in the MSM

This was both domestically and internationally. The Moderates and Centrists however lapped up the media blitz which is why some have such a problem with understanding Ramsey Clark & ANSWER right now.

This is a prime example of the problem I have with Centrists. From asleep, to no facts, to foolish, faulty conclusions. How hard can it possibly be to tell Left from Right when you're standing in the middle of the road?

Yugoslavia was step 1 of the PNAC wars and the Left all over the world was on top of it. The Left in the US was on top of it too and spoke out very strongly which is why certain posters here have a huge problem with Left-leaning sources calling certain candidates collaborators and/or war criminals.

If you need more links and/or pictures, let me know... I'd be HAPPY to oblige.

===============================================


Above photo doesn't show even half of the column of marchers which CNN said accounted for only 5,000. Organizers said there were between 30,000 and 40,000 protesters - the largest anti-war rally since the Vietnam War.


From CNN's Inside Politics, 4/23/99:

-----(Transcript begins)-----

SESNO: And the NATO mission in Yugoslavia has sparked a number of anti-war demonstrations. During the president's visit to San Francisco last week, protesters made it clear they did not support U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia -- similar protests occur with some frequency outside of the White House, here in Washington -- but the numbers are relatively small, despite what the pictures may show you.

Joining us now from New York to talk more about the opposition to the war, Laura Flanders of Pacifica Radio.

(snip)

SESNO: There are those within the pacifist movement who say that the anti-war sentiment has been ignored, swept under the rug, minimized. Do you buy that, or are the numbers relatively small compared to other conflicts?

FLANDERS: Well, I think that's been the, sort of, media drumbeat, that the left has been silent on this war; and I would say it's true, the left, if you look at the mainstream media, has been silent, but it's not been silent, so much as silenced.

I don't know about you, but I've been seeing demonstrations in the thousands from the very first night of the bombing. Today in New York, there's a demonstration called by the War Resistance League, that I'm going to after this. There's another similar demonstration called by, among others, Peace Action, outside of the NATO shindig you mentioned in Washington, tonight. And there's a national demonstration called June 5th. Now I bet that's the first time you're hearing that mentioned on these airwaves.

SESNO: Now, what is it that anti-war protesters are saying, that this war is immoral, that any war is immoral, unjust, unjustified?

FLANDERS: Well, the media tends to -- I think they can have a kind of theme tune of sort of looking for the left in all the wrong places. I mean, if you want to understand what the left position has been on this war, you just need to look at the line that has been consistent since the Vietnam War, that militarism is not the solution to conflict. You have had every major organization that you would expect -- the War Resisters League, Peace Action, Fellowship of Reconciliation, AFSC, MADRE -- many, many other groups, who've all made statements calling for an end to the bombing, an end to the NATO involvement in Yugoslavia, and a negotiated settlement to the problem in Kosovo.

(snip)

FLANDERS: Well, there you go again, looking for the left in all the wrong places. I mean, progressives have never counted any of the people you've mentioned as their leaders. The leaders you could look to are people like the folks from the Catholic Workers -- Daniel Phillip Barrigan, Elizabeth McCallister, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Vivian Stromberg, Lou Walker. There's no shortage of leadership that has held absolutely firm.

But Clinton may be the king of inconsistency -- it's not exactly the left's fault. The left is not responsible for him.

(snip)

http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn2.html


AUSTRALIA





Washington march protests NATO bombing of Yugoslavia



Several thousand people marched to the Pentagon last Saturday to protest the continued US bombing of Yugoslavia. The demonstrators assembled near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC and marched across Memorial Bridge to the headquarters of the US Department of Defense.

(snip)

The march organizers had agreed to have two liberal black Democratic congresswomen, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Barbara Lee of California, and one of the most right-wing Republicans, Ron Paul of Texas, address the rally. None of them actually attended or spoke. But one religious pacifist speaker, Thomas Fleming, hailed the prospect of uniting left and right against the bombing of Yugoslavia, which he described as “NATO killing Christians.”

(snip)

Only one speaker actually examined the historical issues underlying the war in the Balkans, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. He said that Yugoslavia had been founded on the idea that all people of southern Slav descent could live together in peace, and he said that in the period 1945-1989 the region had enjoyed the greatest peace and prosperity in its history.

He denounced US support for ethnic cleansing against the Serbs in the Krajina region of Croatia, citing the recent book by US diplomat Richard Holbrooke which boasts of the expulsion of the Krajina Serbs. He said that US and European support for the breakaway of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia, combined with the policies of the International Monetary Fund, had produced a disaster in the region.

Clark was particularly critical of the 1995 Dayton Accords in Bosnia, which he said imposed an ethnic segregation worse than Jim Crow or apartheid, dividing the country into Serb, Croat and Muslim enclaves that were completely separated. While the United States seemed to be determined that the peoples of the region should not live together, Clark said, there was no alternative but the establishment of a new type of federation in the Balkans.

(snip)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/wash-j09.shtml

ŸStop the Fascistic NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia


http://www.jrcl.org/english/yugo.htm

Overseas Appeal for the 37th International Anti-War Assembly in Japan

Oppose NATO States' Military Occupation of Kosovo!
Oppose Imperialist Powers' Military Domination of the World!
Advance International Anti-War Struggles!



http://www.jrcl.org/english/yugo.htm#apeal



Protests as NATO bombs Yugoslavia
Reaction in Scotland to the NATO bombing of Serbia was complicated by the reaction to the refugee situation which itself was accelerated massively by the bombing. Correctly and understandably the humanitarian crisis was to the forefront. Public attention was focused on the need for aid and the refugees arriving in Scotland. Early on Alex Salmond took a clear stand against the bombing campaign and was savaged in the media for doing so. There was reluctance on the part of whole sections of the natural political opposition to take this issue up, because it was a Labour Government doing it in a pre-election period. There was a real pulling back of opposition from the Labour movement, with notable exceptions such as Tam Dalyell, Tony Benn and George Galloway. Meanwhile Tony Blair was widely regarded as the most hawkish leader in Europe.

However in practically every significant centre meetings began to take place within several weeks, in almost all cases there was some CND involvement. Meetings took place in Aberdeen, Cumbernauld, Dumbarton, Dundee, East Kilbride, Paisley and Stirling. Regular vigils have been held at Faslane organised by the Peace Camp (the British submarine which was firing cruise missiles at Belgrade, HMS Splendid, is based at Faslane). In Edinburgh over 200 attended a conference called opposing the bombing. In Glasgow a "Committee against the Bombing of the Balkans" was set up with weekly meetings and several demonstrations. The broad range of participation was reflected in the fact that there were over 10 speakers at the rally on 5th June which was attended by more than 1000 people. The demonstration was addressed by Tam Dalyell MP, Nicola Sturgeon MSP, Tommy Sheridan MSP and Rikki Ross of Deacon Blue. Brian Quail spoke on behalf of Scottish CND and there were also speakers from Justice and Peace Scotland, the United Nations Association, the Iona Community and the Fire Brigades Union.

http://www.banthebomb.org/archives/magazine/nfs997e.htm

Tam Dalyell MP

There is every reason to stop bombing

Kosovo is littered with unexploded cluster bombs dropped by NATO as well as Serb mines and booby traps. The peace agreement stipulates that the Serbs clear away their own devices. This is easier said than done. By our action we have set a precedent for opening the bomb doors whenever required and are opening our cheque books as soon as bombing has stopped, we will come to regret the day that we ever embarked on such folly.
http://www.banthebomb.org/archives/magazine/nfs997e.htm

Alex Falconer

There is a sore need in this country to bring the full facts about this war to the attention of the public. The facts are that the IMF and World Bank loan conditions forced public sector cuts and massive privatisations. As a result, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia saw 1.9 million workers declared redundant (out of a public sector workforce of 2.7 million). GDP, already depressed, was halved.

Recognition of the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Boznia precipitated further economic crises for the Serbs. The sad thing is that Milosovic then decided to use ethnic cleansing as a scapegoat response to this Western enforced capitalism. We do not support Milosovic. But we also condemn the current NATO campaign.

I know of no debate in Westminister to change NATO's charter, and thus the campaign is illegal. The UN, which NATO has always tried to bypass and usurp, has been denied its legitimate rights to veto (or sanction) military action.

We should also be concerned over the way that a "Labour" Prime Minister has called this war using the Royal prerogative. Consultation only took place in the House of Commons after some good left comrades raised the issue. Democracy as we know it in this country must be protected, and issues such as this need the full attention of the House of Commons - as they did in 1939.

Lastly the so-called "fair" Rambouillet agreement is nothing but a charter for the military occupation of a sovereign state. If comparisons are to be drawn, then they should be drawn fairly. If Milosovic is like Hitler in his ethnic cleansing programme, then the Rambouillet agreement is equivalent to the terms many sovereign states in Europe had to suffer with Nazi occupation.




http://www.banthebomb.org/archives/magazine/nfs997e.htm

Antiwar protests in Prague



A major antiwar demonstration took place Saturday, 6 June, in Prague, Czech Republic. The original demonstration, the so-called "Street Party", was called by various anarchist and environmental groups as a protest against the impact of capitalist globalisation. About 6,000 to 8,000 young people participated. All four Czech radical left groups participated actively, selling their papers and trying to make the former fuzzy meeting more political.

After opening speeches and some music the meeting turned into a march through the city. While many anarchists were ready to just go from one McDonalds to another and throw bricks at their windows the more political part of protesters (influenced by above-mentioned radical left groups) were able to direct it to the American embassy and turn it into a full-scale antiwar protest. Police were taken by surprise and were not able to stop the march. Demonstrators started to chant slogans: "Stop war", "Stop NATO", "American murderers", etc. Seven windows of the embassy were broken. Nobody was injured. This action led to protest of the American ambassador about "lack of protection by police", humble apologies by our politicians and new plans to implement harsher measures against future protests on one hand, but also to a large wave of sympathy from people who think that broken windows are at least an open sign of the attitude of the Czech population to the war in Yugoslavia.


http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/read-j09.shtml


Apr. 01 - 14, 2000

COVER STORY

A wave of protests



A NUMBER of political parties and other democratic organisations reacted to the blitz and ballyhoo that surrounded the visit of President Bill Clinton in the language of protest. Going beyond the realm of rhetoric, they questioned the United States' fore ign policy, pegging their dissent on the U.S. role in a unipolar world.

At various forums, leaders of Left parties pointed out instances of military intervention by Washington (in Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam in the 1960s and the 1970s), its moves to destabilise governments that refused to follow its dictates, and its s upport to coups in Guatemala and Chile. The more recent cases of military aggression they cited included the Gulf war in 1991 and the subsequent military and economic bombardment of Iraq, the economic blockade against Cuba, and the U.S.-led North Atlanti c Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombings in Yugoslavia.

(snip)

PROTESTS were witnessed also in Pakistan and Bangladesh, two other countries Clinton visited. The Labour Party of Pakistan (LPP) held a demonstration on March 22 outside the U.S. Consulate in Lahore despite a ban announced by the Gen. Pervez Musharraf go vernment on political rallies and strikes. Members of the LPP carried placards which read "Clinton go back", "Killer Clinton", and "Killer of Iraqi children" and raised slogans against U.S. imperialism. They pointed out that the visit was a conspiracy ag ainst the working class. They appealed to the trade unions and the working class in the subcontinent to protest against Clinton's visit as it was aimed at pushing the imperialist economic agenda in order to exploit the region.

Although the scale of the protests in India was restricted owing to the Central Government's determination to exaggerate the importance of the visit, one thing emerged loud and clear: that the new world order under the leadership of the U.S. was not acceptable to the Left and democratic forces.

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1707/17070190.htm


DAILY PROTESTS AGAINST NATO BOMBING SWELL TO THOUSANDS IN BRITAIN

There have been daily protests in Britain against ... designs of NATO against Yugoslavia,
and whose ... Indian Workers Association and other left, peace, progressive ...

===

Madeleine Albright protest at University of Arizona

In Tucson’s largest anti-war demonstration since the 1991 Gulf War Against Iraq, nearly 300 people turned out Saturday afternoon May 15, to protest Madeleine Albright’s appearance at the University of Arizona. The Secretary of State had been invited to address the graduates. The award of an honorary law degree to the alleged war criminal and notorious international scofflaw was portrayed by speakers at the rally as an insult to the honest and reputable academic achievements of more than 4,000 other new degree holders. Demonstrators included University students and other Tucsonans called out by the Tucson Peace Action Coalition (Students Against Sweatshops, Pueblo por la Paz, Veterans for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, The Nuclear Resister, Raytheon Peacemakers, Jobs with Justice and others); several score of Serbian emigres and other peace activists from the metropolitan Phoenix area; and a large group of "spontaneous and self-organized" Chinese students and faculty demanding justice after the NATO bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy and the murder of journalists there.

Speakers at an open mike challenged Albright’s leadership in NATO’s war against Yugoslavia and the U.S. policy of bombing and starving Iraq through economic sanctions. The protest outside was seen, heard, and often supported by long lines of graduates, their families, and friends waiting to clear metal detectors and bag searches before entering McKale Center arena for the commencement exercises.

(snip)
http://www.iacenter.org/albrt_ua.htm

Here's a LLLLLLOOOOOOOONNNNNG list of the protest actions ANSWER alone led against that war with
http://www.iacenter.org/yugdemos.htm#ARIZONA
http://www.iacenter.org/yugdem3.htm
http://www.iacenter.org/yugdemo2.htm




The Nino Pasti Foundation reports that in Italy, some 20,000 people surrounded the U.S. air base at Aviano on June 6. Flying kites and children’s balloons around the periphery of the base, they stopped bombing runs for over two hours.

This was the biggest of all the demonstrations held at Aviano, which is the major base from which the Pentagon launches bombing raids against Yugoslavia. All sectors of the anti-war and pacifist movement in Italy participated, including the Communist Refoundation Party, Pax Christi, the autonomous unions known as Cobas and unionists from the General Confederation of Labor (CGIL).

http://www.iacenter.org/yug6999.htm

GREECE

Greek Communists pelt US troops
United Press International - March 19, 2000 08:22
By CARLA CAPUANO
ATHENS, Greece, March 19 (UPI) -- Hundreds of Greek communists on Sunday
hurled sticks and stones against U.S. Marines who docked at a northern
Greek port and moved to war-torn Kosovo for a NATO military exercise.
Holding red flags and chanting "American killers," some 600 protesters
lined a main highway near the port of Litohoro, in northern Greece,
where 300 Marines and 80 heavy vehicles bound for Kosovo arrived in two
U.S. helicopter carriers. An additional 800 U.S. Marines were due to
disembark at Salonika, the country's second-largest port, which NATO
forces used last June to move more than 50,000 peacekeepers to Kosovo.
Live television footage showed the communist protesters hurling sticks
and stones as the U.S. troops were making their way through the region.
A local prosecutor subsequently intervened, ordering protesters to clear
the passage. Security personnel guarded the Marines as Greek police
ensured their passage to the border.

http://www.fortunecity.com/business/bussix/1496/antinatodem.html

Greeks Demonstrate against NATO Presence in Balkans
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewGlobal.asp?Page=\Global\archive\GLO20000324c.html

By Louis Economopoulos
CNS Correspondent
24 March, 2000

Athens, Greece (CNSNews.com) - Thousands of Greeks
demonstrated outside the American Embassy in central
Athens Thursday night, demanding that NATO pull its
troops out of the Balkans.

Protestors, led by the Greek Communist Party and its
leader Aleka Papariga, burned U.S. flags during the
peaceful, mostly left-wing demonstration.

A large riot-trained police force kept the
demonstrators from approaching the embassy compound.

The demonstration marked the first anniversary of the
start of the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against
Yugoslavia, an event strongly opposed by a great
majority of Greeks and supported only minimally by the
socialist government.

Addressing the demonstrators, the leader of the "peace
movement" in Greece, Costas Macheras, called on Greece
not to support further NATO action in the Balkans and
to withdraw the more than 1,000 Greek troops from the
NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force, KFOR.

"We ask European leaders not to be dragged into
further military action by the United States and NATO
in Yugoslavia," the social democratic party DIKKI said
in a statement read out at the event. "We also call on
the Greek government not to allow NATO to use Greece
as a stepping stone for military action against our
neighbor."

http://www.fortunecity.com/business/bussix/1496/antinatodem.html

Greek Protesters Delay NATO Convoy
http://www.newsday.com/ap/topnews/ap463.htm

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) -- Left-wing demonstrators
stopped a convoy of NATO military trucks early Tuesday
as they tried to head to Kosovo, spray painting
slogans on the vehicles and smashing one window,
authorities said.

A group of about 80 protesters rushed the British,
French and Italian vehicles as they were leaving this
northern Greek city's main port and heading to Kosovo
to resupply the NATO-led peacekeeping force there.

The incident, which delayed the convoy for about 2{
hours, reflected deep opposition in Greece to the NATO
air campaign against Yugoslavia.

The demonstrators clambered over the 65-vehicle
convoy, which mainly carried supply containers, and
smashed the windshield of an Italian vehicle with a
rock. No injuries were reported.

(snip)

The vast majority of Greeks vehemently opposed NATO's
78-day airstrikes against fellow Christian Orthodox
Serbs last year, and held almost daily protest
rallies, some of which turned violent.

(snip)

http://www.fortunecity.com/business/bussix/1496/antinatodem.html
====

The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia
Michael Parenti
November 1999

In 1999, the U.S. national security state -- which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads -- launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases -- all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda -- not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching "humanitarian bombings" against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the Guatemalan military's systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators -- who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.

(snip)

http://michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html

====
The LEFT was out there. The SAME photos you see about Iraq were passed around in progressive circles. THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT TO THE LEFT, THE REAL LEFT, IT DID NOT MATTER WHETHER IT WAS DEMOCRATS OR REPUBLICANS WAR-MONGERING. EMBARRASSED DEMOCRATS CONTROLLED THE MEDIA BACK THEN JUST AS BUSH IS DOING IT NOW. The difference is that we did not have the internet or progressive forums in the same format as we do now.

[KittyWampus]

124. Ramsey Clark & ANSWER Are Why It's So Easy For The Right To Label

those of us on the left, who are fighting for Social Justice and Peace, as Communists and America Haters.

Both Clark & ANSWER are unbalanced and extreme.

And I also wonder why it is ANSWER always gets the permits.

It really makes me wonder.... ARE they a front group of those trying to discredit the Left?

[KoKo]

133. BECAUSE...they have the "exprience & the BALLS" to do it! You think

the smaller "anti-war" groups have the "in's" to do this?

While I well understand the many who are tired of "Screaming A.N.S.W.E.R. participants seeming to "take over" (which they aren't) the more reasoned voices of the rest of us "Anti-Iraq Invasion/Peace and Justice/Anti-American Corporatism Folks...you also need to know that we wouldn't be able to get these permits on our own.

Am I fond of having all large protests under the "A.N.S.W.E.R." banner...maybe not. BUT...I also understand that I have alot in common with what that group is fighting for...even if I have to swallow down the rest that's distasteful to me.

It's very hard to go against the Bush Regime to get permits through when they are working night and day to stop ANY PROTESTS. If we have to come under that "umbrella" til we find our "own wings" then we need to.

Dissing "A.N.S.W.E.R. is not productive until we are big enough and savy and sophisticated enough to go against the Bushies. So far...we aren't. We need ANSWER and we are going to have to tag along on it's coat tails until we have our own "BIG VOICE" and the lawyers who know the rules & regs who have the experience to organize Massive Marches...peacefully.

The "Key Word" is that "ANSWER" is peaceful. That's why they get their permits through. I don't know that "WE" have the strength and experience to be able to not get ourselves in trouble if we go it alone...being so fragmented as we here on DU are. How could we possibly organize something like "ANSWER & United for Peace" have done? They already have their organizations...they know how to "book the place" and they welcome folks to come. :shrug:

[Cookie wookie]

126. Watching the ANSWER speeches at the inauguration this week

(via CSPAN) made it clear to me again that ANSWER does have members and leaders who are communists or communist sympathizers. That is repugnant to me. I've seen this before at a anti war rally they did in Los Angeles before the war began.

One speaker extolled the virtues of Castro's Cuba. Another said debasing things about Jefferson and Truman. I want nothing to do with them and think it's unfortunate that they are the "face" of the US antiwar movement, but because they have the organization, they are the dominant voice of the movement. This is unfortunate. It did happen during Vietnam protests, with the extreme voices (aka Jane Fonda et al). I can remember being in a large antiwar march in Southern California in the early 70s with people chanting, "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!" But we also had a massive mainstream American antiwar contingent as well. Largely because of the draft, there was a broader base for the antiwar movement.

Because of ANSWER's broad brush, far-left, antiAmerican stance, I've not participated in some of the rallies that otherwise I would have. I want nothing to do with anti-Americanism. I am anti- imperialism, but it's leaders like * , the neocons, and their supporters who are the imperialists not our government as exemplified by the U.S. Constitution. When the two are linked by extreme leftists, it's unhealthy and destructive.

As far as Clarke defending Hussein, our Constitution gives everyone the right to a fair trial and defense in the criminal justice system. That must be protected. However, Hussein is not an American and is an avowed enemy of the U.S. We have to ask ourselves just why Clarke wants to take on his defense. Is it because he believes that the lies about the war will be exposed and he wants to take part in that? Is that the best way, the only way? Or does it undermine the antiwar movement and the movement to spearhead an impeachment of Bush? I think the latter.

Because of this, other mainstream organizations need to take center stage on both fronts, moving the spotlight away from Clark and ANSWER, and marginalizing them to the extreme left where they belong.

I was sorry to see again that they were the only antiwar activists who had a stage at the Inauguration.

[KoKo]

132. WOW! the old "Commie Pinko" Label from the McCarthy days LIVES!

UGH....

[Cookie wookie]

147. That is an interesting reply.

McCarthyism was a witch hunt that persecuted innocent people and also those who had, under the Constitution, the freedom in this country to espouse and follow their own political beliefs, even if they are communist.

I did not say those who represent communism on the podium of International ANSWER's rallies and forums shouldn't be allowed to do so. I said that the antiwar movement would be better served, IMO, if the far left voices was relegated to the wings, not stage front and center of the antiwar movement.

[Tinoire]

146. Why Ramsey Clark is defending Milosevic

Milosevic denied universal right of self-defense--
U.S.-Created Court Gags Yugoslav President

By Sara Flounders

In the most drastic maneuver yet to silence the truth of the U.S./NATO war on Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Sept. 2 denied former President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia the internationally recognized right to defend himself in court. This comes after the prosecution took two years presenting its side of the case. The ruling came on the very day Milosevic was finally to begin calling witnesses in his own defense.

President Milosevic vigorously presented his opening statement of his own defense in person for two days on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, immediately before the Trial Chamber decided he "is not fit enough to represent himself." He was apparently "fit enough" to perform that task.

(snip)


The former president's introductory remarks set the tone for a strong indictment of the U.S., Germany and other NATO powers for their 10-year war of aggression against Yugoslavia. His defense case was expected to continue in the same manner, exposing the crimes of the imperialist powers in the Balkans.

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general and co-chair of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM), stated in a letter to the court: "Under International Law, every person accused of a crime has the right to represent himself in person in the court.

(snip)

Over 100 legal experts, lawyers and jurists from 17 countries signed a letter entitled, "Imposition of Counsel on Slobodan Milosevic Threatens the Future of International Law and the Life of the Defendant." This letter urges the United Nations to allow Milosevic to continue defending himself against war crimes charges.

The internationally circulated letter warns that imposing a defense lawyer against Milosevic's wishes would violate international law. It is illegal even under the statute of the Yugoslav tribunal and also under the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights.

(snip)

A COURT TO JUSTIFY OCCUPATION

U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was behind this court's creation in 1993. Since then, it has been financed and organized by funds from the U.S. and Britain. Its 1,300 personnel are also overwhelmingly from Britain and the U.S.

From the very beginning the court has functioned to justify the U.S., British and NATO role in the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation.

The decision to charge President Milosevic with war crimes was made toward the end of the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. By charging the elected Yugoslav president, the U.S./NATO forces placed increased pressure on him to capitulate rather than participate in the cease-fire negotiations or oppose the long-term U.S./NATO occupation of Kosovo.

The entire 1999 U.S. war against defenseless Yugoslavia, the bombing of every major city, the destruction of 480 schools and 33 hospitals, along with bridges, roads and the entire industrial infrastructure, was all presented by the imperialist propaganda machine as necessary to stop an alleged genocide in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

NATO officials constantly referred to "mountains of corpses" and "killing fields." In April 1999, the U.S. State Department claimed that 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had been rounded up and killed by Serbs. Other reports used the number of 100,000 feared dead.

NO MASS GRAVES

Just as the weapons of mass destruction have never been found in Iraq, the charge of massacres, mass graves, ethnic cleansing and genocide proved to be an utter fabrication in Kosovo.

Immediately after the war, 20 forensic teams were sent to Kosovo by the International Criminal Court at The Hague from 15 NATO countries, including the U.S.. They dug all summer of 1999 at the very sites where supposed witnesses had reported mass graves.

By October 1999 they reported back to Chief Prosecutor for the Tribunal Carla Del Ponte that they had been unable to find any mass graves in Kosovo at all. They had found a total of 2,108 corpses in individual graves. How many of that number may have been killed by the NATO bombing they did not speculate.

(snip)

http://www.iacenter.org/milos_0904.htm

((no copyright. full permission/encouragement to reprint))

(snip)
http://www.iacenter.org/milos_0904.htm

Statement by Ramsey Clark: Pres. Milosevic Denied Right to Defend Himself


September 2, 2004--Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General and Co-Chairman of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) has made this afternoon the following statement:

Under International Law, every person accused of a crime has the right to represent himself in person in the court adjudicating his case. Slobodan Milosevic is no exception. The Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia has destroyed its last claim to legality by attempting to deprive the former President of Yugoslavia of this fundamental human right.

The appearance of President Milosevic representing himself alone during the prosecution case for over 2 years, nearly 300 trial days, cross examining nearly 300 prosecution witnesses, coping with 500,000 documents, and 30,000 pages of trial transcript then at the very beginning of his presentation of his own defense being silenced and lawyers he rejects placed in charge of his destiny, speaks of injustice.

(snip)

The very lawyers appointed by the Trial Chamber have a direct conflict of interest. They have served by appointment of the court as "friends of the Court". You cannot serve two masters. Having served as friend of the Court, that same counsel selected by the Court to represent President Milosevic cannot ethically serve as his counsel.

(snip)

The Trial Chamber must abandon this travesty and do its duty consistent with the health of the accused to faithfully, competently, independently and impartially hear the evidence, find the facts and apply the law.

Ramsey Clark
New York
September 2, 2004


http://www.iacenter.org/rc_milos0904.htm

Civil rights are for everyone. Even when the trial itself, just like the kangaroo one the US will give Iraq, is a travesty.