Ram­sey Clark from Attor­ney Gen­eral to the IAC

by Kevin Coogan

On Sep­tem­ber 29th, 2001, just a few weeks fol­low­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11th ter­ror­ist attack on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon, a large peace rally was held in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to oppose an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary response to the attack.

The main orga­nizer of the D.C. rally, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), was offi­cially estab­lished shortly after the 9/11 attack. The lead­ing force behind ANSWER’s cre­ation is the Inter­na­tional Action Cen­ter (IAC), which rep­re­sents itself as a pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tion devoted to peace, jus­tice, and human rights issues.

The IAC’s orga­ni­za­tional clout is con­sid­er­able: for the past decade it has played a lead­ing role in orga­niz­ing protest demon­stra­tions against U.S. mil­i­tary actions against both Iraq and Ser­bia. After the Sep­tem­ber 11th attack, the IAC decided to turn its long-organized planned protest against the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund and World Bank gath­er­ing, sched­uled for the 29th, into an action oppos­ing any use of U.S. mil­i­tary power in response to terrorism.

The IAC owes its cur­rent suc­cess to Ram­sey Clark, a for­mer Attor­ney Gen­eral dur­ing the John­son Admin­is­tra­tion, who is listed on the IAC’s web­site as its founder. Clark’s estab­lish­ment cre­den­tials have caused many in the mass media to accept the IAC’s self-portrayal as a group of dis­in­ter­ested human­i­tar­i­ans appalled by war and poverty who are work­ing to turn Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy towards a more humane course. On its web­site the IAC says it was “Founded by Ram­sey Clark” and then describes its pur­pose: “Infor­ma­tion, Activism, and Resis­tance to U.S. Mil­i­tarism, War, and Cor­po­rate Greed, Link­ing with Strug­gles Against Racism and Oppres­sion within the United States.”

Yet since its incep­tion in 1992, the IAC’s actions have given rise to seri­ous doubts about its bona fides as an orga­ni­za­tion truly com­mit­ted to peace and human rights issues.

Behind the blue door entrance to the IAC’s head­quar­ters on 14th Street in Man­hat­tan can be found deeper shades of red. When one looks closely at the IAC, it becomes impos­si­ble to ignore the over­whelm­ing pres­ence of mem­bers of an avowedly Marxist-Leninist sect called the Work­ers World Party (WWP), whose cadre staff vir­tu­ally all of the IAC’s top posi­tions. Whether or not the IAC is sim­ply a WWP front group remains dif­fi­cult to say.

Nor is there any evi­dence that Ram­sey Clark him­self is a WWP mem­ber. What does seem unde­ni­able is that with­out the pres­ence of scores of WWP cadre work­ing inside the IAC, the orga­ni­za­tion would for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses cease to exist. There­fore, even if Clark is not a WWP mem­ber, he is fol­low­ing a polit­i­cal course that meets with the com­plete approval of one of the most pro-Stalinist sects ever to emerge from the Amer­i­can far left.

Part One: Ram­sey Clark from Attor­ney Gen­eral to the IAC
Before ana­lyz­ing the role of the WWP in both the cre­ation and con­trol of the IAC, it is first nec­es­sary to explain just how the IAC man­aged to link up with Clark, a 74-year old Texas-born lawyer and the IAC’s one big name media star.

The son of Supreme Court Jus­tice Tom Clark (him­self a Attor­ney Gen­eral in the John­son admin­is­tra­tion), Ram­sey Clark radi­ates “mid­dle Amer­ica” with his puppy dog eyes, short hair, jug ears, Texas twang, plain talk, and “aw, shucks” demeanor. Clark backs up his folksy pub­lic per­sona with some daz­zling cre­den­tials that include serv­ing as the National Chair­man of the National Advi­sory Com­mit­tee of the ACLU, as well as serv­ing as past pres­i­dent of the Fed­eral Bar Association.

Despite his promi­nence within the estab­lish­ment, Clark also main­tains close ties to the Left. After he ceased being LBJ’s Attor­ney Gen­eral in 1969 when Nixon became Pres­i­dent, Clark vis­ited North Viet­nam and con­demned U.S. bomb­ing pol­icy over the “Voice of Viet­nam” radio sta­tion. He also served as a lawyer for peace activist Father Phillip Berri­gan, and led a com­mit­tee that inves­ti­gated the killing of Chicago Black Pan­ther leader Fred Hamp­ton by local police in col­lu­sion with the FBI.

At the same time, Clark remained polit­i­cally active inside the more mod­er­ate ranks of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party. In 1976, how­ever, his defeat in the New York Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary cam­paign for Sen­ate ended his polit­i­cal ambi­tions. From the mid-1970s until today, the Green­wich Village-based Clark has pur­sued a career as a high-powered defense attor­ney who spe­cial­izes in polit­i­cal cases.

Some of Clark’s cur­rent clients, includ­ing Shaykh Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, the “blind Sheik” who was con­victed and sen­tenced to a lengthy prison term for his involve­ment in help­ing to orga­nize follow-up ter­ror­ist attacks in New York City after the first World Trade Cen­ter attack in 1993, are a far cry from Father Berri­gan. Shaykh ‘Abd al-Rahman, of course, deserves legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion. What makes Clark’s approach note­wor­thy is that in the case of ‘Abd al-Rahman (as well as those of Clark’s other polit­i­cal clients), his approach is based more on putting the gov­ern­ment on trial for its alleged mis­deeds than actu­ally prov­ing the inno­cence of his clients.

While com­pletely ignor­ing Shaykh ‘Abd al-Rahman’s piv­otal role in the Egyptian-based Islamist ter­ror group al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyyah, as well as the cen­tral role that the Shaykh’s Jer­sey City-based mosque played in the first World Trade Cen­ter attack, Clark tried to por­tray the blind Shaykh as a bril­liant Islamic scholar and reli­gious thinker who was being per­se­cuted sim­ply as a result of anti-Muslim prej­u­dice on the part of the Amer­i­can government.

Clark appears to be dri­ven by intense rage at what he per­ceives to be the fail­ures of Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy; a rage so strong that it may well be irrel­e­vant to him whether his clients are actu­ally inno­cent or guilty as long as he can use them to strike back at the Amer­i­can estab­lish­ment which once wel­comed him with open arms. After los­ing his 1976 Sen­ate bid, Clark deep­ened his oppo­si­tion to Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy. In June 1980, at a time when Amer­i­can hostages were in their eighth month of cap­tiv­ity in Iran, Clark sojourned to Tehran to take part in a con­fer­ence on the “Crimes of Amer­ica” spon­sored by Aya­tol­lah Khomeini’s theo­cratic Islamic regime.

Accord­ing to a story on Clark by John Judis that appeared in the April 22nd, 1991 New Repub­lic, while in Iran Clark pub­licly char­ac­ter­ized the Carter Administration?s failed mil­i­tary attempt to res­cue the hostages as a vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law. By the time Clark was sip­ping tea in Tehran, Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy was in sham­bles. In both Nicaragua and Iran, U.S.-backed dic­ta­tors had fallen from power. In Europe, the incom­ing Rea­gan Admin­is­tra­tion would soon be faced with a grow­ing neu­tral­ist move­ment that was par­tic­u­larly strong in Ger­many. Inside the U.S., the anti-nuclear “freeze” move­ment was then in full swing. Mean­while, in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had deployed mas­sive amounts of troops into a for­merly neu­tral nation for the first time since the end of World War II.

By the mid-1980s, how­ever, the com­bi­na­tion of Rea­gan in Amer­ica and Mar­garet Thatcher in Eng­land had brought the Left to a screech­ing halt. Huge sums of covert CIA aid allowed the mujahidin to turn Afghanistan into a ceme­tery for Russ­ian sol­diers, while in Cen­tral Amer­ica the U.S. man­aged first to desta­bi­lize and then to bring down Cuban-allied states like Nicaragua and Grenada. In the Mid­dle East, the U.S. (with help from Israel) suc­cess­fully encour­aged both Iraq and Iran to fight a long bloody war against each other, a war trig­gered by Sad­dam Husayn’s attempted inva­sion of Iran. In 1986 Amer­i­can planes even bombed Libya to pun­ish Colonel Qad­hd­hafi for back­ing ter­ror­ist groups in the West.

As U.S. power began to reassert itself glob­ally, Clark became even more extreme in his oppo­si­tion to Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy. He first aston­ished many on the Left when he agreed to defend f
ormer Grenada Defense Min­is­ter Bernard Coard, leader of the ultra-leftist clique respon­si­ble for the assas­si­na­tion of Mau­rice Bishop. (It was Bishop’s 1983 mur­der that had sup­plied the pre­text for the U.S. inva­sion of Grenada.)

After the U.S. attack on Libya, Clark jour­neyed to Tripoli to offer his con­do­lences to Colonel Qad­hd­hafi. That same year he defended Pales­tine Lib­er­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion (PLO) lead­ers from a legal suit brought by the fam­ily of Leon Kling­hof­fer, an elderly retired man in a wheel chair who was mur­dered by Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists on the Ital­ian cruise ship “Achille Lauro” sim­ply because he was Jew­ish. Clark even became the lawyer for Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tor Karl Lin­nas, who was unsuc­cess­fully fight­ing depor­ta­tion to his native Esto­nia to face war crimes charges.

Clark’s next legal client was equally sur­pris­ing. In 1989 he became Lyn­don Larouche?s lead attor­ney in Larouche?s attempt to appeal his con­vic­tion on fed­eral mail fraud charges. Larouche, who began his polit­i­cal career in the late 1940s as a mem­ber of the Trot­sky­ist Social­ist Work­ers Party (SWP), had by the late 1970s embraced the far right, anti-Semitism, and Holo­caust denial.

Clark claimed that the gov­ern­ment was per­se­cut­ing Larouche solely to sup­press his polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, and even went so far as to express “amaze­ment” at the per­sonal “vil­i­fi­ca­tion” directed at his client! A report from the left-wing watch­dog group Polit­i­cal Research Asso­ciates sug­gests that Clark’s fond­ness for Larouche may have been rooted in Larouche’s aggres­sive sup­port for Pana­man­ian dic­ta­tor Gen­eral Manuel Nor­iega, who had been forcibly removed from power by the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion. Both Larouche and Clark par­tic­i­pated in the move­ment opposed to Amer­i­can mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in Panama. Clark even vis­ited Panama in Jan­u­ary 1990 as part of an “Inde­pen­dent Com­mis­sion of Inquiry” to exam­ine Amer­i­can “war crimes.” (Not sur­pris­ingly, the Com­mis­sion found Amer­ica “guilty.”)

Clark’s will­ing­ness to defend polit­i­cal clients so long as he felt he could use their cases to put the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment on trial meant that he was less inter­ested in prov­ing that his clients were saints than in prov­ing that mem­bers of his own gov­ern­ment were sin­ners. Clark’s logic now began to extend beyond his choice of legal clients to encom­pass groups that he was will­ing to col­lab­o­rate with who he felt might help advance his polit­i­cal agenda. By 1990, Clark decided he was even will­ing to ally him­self closely with an ultra-left Marxist-Leninist sect called the Work­ers World Party (WWP).

Clark’s ties to the WWP first became appar­ent dur­ing the 1990–1991 for­eign pol­icy cri­sis in the Mid­dle East that began unfold­ing after Iraqi dic­ta­tor Sad­dam Husayn invaded Kuwait in an attempt to dom­i­nate the Mid­dle East?s oil sup­plies. Dur­ing the Win­ter 1990–91 Mideast cri­sis, two sep­a­rate “anti-war” coali­tions arose to protest the first Bush Administration’s policies.

Before the mil­i­tary attack on Iraq took place in Jan­u­ary 1991, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion (with sup­port both from Con­gress and many other nations) imposed an eco­nomic embargo on Husayn in an attempt to pres­sure him to vol­un­tar­ily with­draw his forces from Iraq and avoid a full-scale war. The embargo pol­icy was strongly endorsed by Democ­rats in Wash­ing­ton. Although the Rus­sians had long main­tained strong ties to Iraq, even Soviet leader Mikhail Gor­bachev tried to per­suade Husayn to with­draw his forces or face mil­i­tary defeat.

The Bush Admin­is­tra­tion made it clear to Husayn that he was on a tight dead­line, and that any fail­ure to meet that dead­line and with­draw his forces would result in war. The first anti-war coali­tion, the National Cam­paign for Peace in the Mid­dle East, strongly opposed the idea of a dead­line and advo­cated the exten­sion of the sanc­tions pol­icy against Iraq as an alter­na­tive to mil­i­tary action.

The National Cam­paign also made it clear that no mat­ter how much it was opposed to a war against Iraq, it also con­sid­ered Husayn?s inva­sion of Kuwait to be an unde­ni­able act of aggres­sion. The National Campaign’s stance on the Gulf War was chal­lenged by a rival orga­ni­za­tion, the National Coali­tion to Stop U.S. Inter­ven­tion in the Mid­dle East. The National Coali­tion bit­terly opposed the National Campaign’s sup­port for the exten­sion of sanctions.

The Coali­tion argued that Iraq itself was the vic­tim of “U.S. Oil Impe­ri­al­ism,” which was work­ing in cahoots with reac­tionary states like Israel, Saudi Ara­bia, and the rul­ing class of Kuwait itself. The Coali­tion demanded, instead, that the Left uncrit­i­cally defend “the Iraqi peo­ple” against both con­tin­ued eco­nomic sanc­tions and direct Amer­i­can mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion. The divi­sions inside the Left over this issue became so deep that both groups were forced to hold rival ral­lies in Wash­ing­ton in Jan­u­ary 1991.

The hard Left National Coali­tion came out of a long-standing Work­ers World Party front orga­ni­za­tion known as the People’s Anti-War Mobi­liza­tion (PAM), which quickly reor­ga­nized itself into the National Coali­tion. The WWP’s promi­nent role in the National Coali­tion was made evi­dent by the group’s choice of a leader, a WWP mem­ber named Mon­ica Moor­head (the WWP’s can­di­date for Pres­i­dent in the 2000 elections).

The Coalition’s office was adja­cent to Clark’s Man­hat­tan law office, where another WWP cadre mem­ber named Gavriella Gemma (Coali­tion Coor­di­na­tor) worked as a legal sec­re­tary. The National Coali­tion (most likely through Gemma) extended an invi­ta­tion to Clark to serve as its offi­cial spokesman. To the aston­ish­ment of many, he accepted.

Yet Clark and the WWP, at least pub­licly, had so lit­tle in com­mon that as late as 1989 the WWP?s offi­cial mouth­piece, Work­ers World (WW), never even men­tioned Clark in a favor­able light.
Clark’s deci­sion paved the way for his sub­se­quent involve­ment in the WWP-allied Inter­na­tional Action Center.

After the Gulf War ended, Clark estab­lished an “Inter­na­tional War Crimes Tri­bunal” to denounce U.S. actions against Iraq. When the Tri­bunal held its first hear­ings in New York on May 11th, 1991, the speak­ers included WWP mem­bers Teresa Gutier­rez (“co-coordinator” of yet another WWP front, the Inter­na­tional Peace for Cuba Appeal), Moor­head, and WWP stal­wart Sarah Floun­ders. One year later, on July 6th, 1992, Work­ers World announced the cre­ation of a “cen­ter for inter­na­tional sol­i­dar­ity” (the IAC) with Clark as its spokesman.

Clark told WW that “the inter­na­tional cen­ter can become a people’s United Nations based on grass-roots activism and the prin­ci­ples of peace, equal­ity and jus­tice.” With Clark as spokesman and Sarah Floun­ders as a coor­di­na­tor, the IAC shel­tered a myr­iad of WWP front groups and allied orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the National Coali­tion to Stop U.S. Inter­ven­tion in the Mid­dle East, the Haiti Com­mis­sion, the Cam­paign to Stop Set­tle­ments in Occu­pied Pales­tine, the Com­mis­sion of Inquiry on the US Inva­sion of Panama, the Move­ment for a Peo­ples Assem­bly, and the Inter­na­tional War Crimes Tribunal.

From 1991 until today, the IAC/WWP has led repeated del­e­ga­tions to Iraq with Clark at their head to meet with Sad­dam Husayn and other top Iraqi offi­cials. The close ties between the IAC and Husayn have led other crit­ics of U.S. for­eign pol­icy toward Iraq, such as for­mer UN inspec­tor Scott Rit­ter (who, like the IAC, opposes the con­tin­u­a­tion of sanc­tions as being far more harm­ful to the Iraqi peo­ple than to Husayn), to dis­tance him­self from any asso­ci­a­tion with the IAC. Iron­i­cally enough, a few years before the Gulf War broke out, the WWP had no qualms about label­ing Sad­dam Husayn as a geno­ci­dal war criminal.

In a Sep­tem­ber 22nd, 1988 WW arti­cle enti­tled “Iraq launches geno­ci­dal attack on Kur­dish peo­ple,” WWP cadre (and cur­rent IAC hon­cho) Brian Becker denounced Iraq’s “hor­rific chem­i­cal weapons attacks on Kur­dish vil­lages,” cit­ing “ample evi­dence” from Kur­dish sources and “inde­pen­dent observers” that “mus­tard gas, cyanide and other out­lawed chem­i­cal weapons have been used in a mas­sive fash­ion” not just against the Kurds but al
so against “thou­sands of rebelling Iraqi forces who deserted from the army in 1984 dur­ing the Iran-Iraq war, and took refuge in the marsh­land areas in south­ern Iraq.”

Becker then noted that the Iraqi attempt to crush the Kurds “by a com­bi­na­tion of ter­ror and sys­tem­atic depop­u­la­tion” has been “the hall­mark of the government’s pol­icy for the last sev­eral years.”

More recently both Clark and the IAC have played a lead­ing role in uncrit­i­cally defend­ing for­mer Ser­bian leader Slo­bodon Milosevic’s bru­tal attempts to dom­i­nate both Bosnia and Kosovo. (Clark even defended Radovan Karadzic, the noto­ri­ous Bosn­ian Serb war­lord allied with Milo­se­vic, against a civil suit brought against him for the atroc­i­ties car­ried out by his forces.)

While accus­ing NATO of com­mit­ting war crimes against Ser­bia, nei­ther the IAC nor the WWP crit­i­cized Serbia’s noto­ri­ous record of ter­ror against civil­ians, one which includes both the infa­mous mas­sacre at Sre­brenica and the dis­place­ment of a mil­lion Mus­lim refuges from Kosovo. The Clark/IAC War Crimes Tribunal’s hatred of Amer­i­can pol­icy, which comes coated in legal jar­gon, bor­ders on the comic as well as the megalomaniacal.

One IAC “legal brief,” for exam­ple, accuses Pres­i­dent Clin­ton, the U.S. Sec­re­taries of State and Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and “U.S. per­son­nel directly involved in des­ig­nat­ing tar­gets, flight crews and deck crews of the U.S. mil­i­tary bombers and assault air­craft, U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel directly involved in tar­get­ing, prepar­ing and launch­ing mis­siles at Yugoslavia” with war crimes. Nor does the IAC indict­ment ignore the polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary lead­er­ship of Eng­land, Ger­many, and “every NATO coun­try,” not to men­tion the gov­ern­ments of Turkey and Hungary.

It then charges NATO with “inflict­ing, incit­ing and enhanc­ing vio­lence between Mus­lims and Slavs,” using the media “to demo­nize Yugoslavia, Slavs, Serbs and Mus­lims as geno­ci­dal mur­der­ers,” and “attempt­ing to destroy the Sov­er­eignty, right to self deter­mi­na­tion, democ­racy and cul­ture of the Slavic, Mus­lim, Chris­t­ian and other peo­ple of Yugoslavia.” The Alice in Won­der­land qual­ity of the “war crimes indict­ment” is fur­ther high­lighted by its demand for “the abo­li­tion of NATO”!

No mat­ter how sur­real the IAC’s actions sound, there can be lit­tle doubt that they are well-funded, since IAC/WWP cadres reg­u­larly fly to Europe and the Mid­dle East to attend con­fer­ences and polit­i­cal meet­ings. Through a 501© 3 orga­ni­za­tion called the People’s Rights Fund, a wealthy Serbian-American who may even have busi­ness con­nec­tions to Bel­grade can freely donate to both the IAC and its related media pro­pa­ganda arm, the Peo­ples Video Net­work. Nor are for­eign diplo­mats ter­ri­bly shy about being pub­licly asso­ci­ated with IAC events.

Iraq’s UN Ambas­sador, Dr. Sa‘id Hasan, for exam­ple, even spoke at the IAC’s “First Hear­ing of the Inde­pen­dent Com­mis­sion of Inquiry to Inves­ti­gate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the Peo­ple of Yugoslavia,” held in New York City on July 31st, 1999. One for­eign offi­cial who will not be attend­ing any IAC con­fer­ences in the near future, how­ever, is for­mer Yugoslav leader Slo­bodon Milo­se­vic, who is cur­rently on trial for war crimes in the Hague.