Neighborhood Bully
Ramsey Clark on American Militarism


Interview by Derrick Jensen
The Sun magazine, August 2001
 http://www.thesunmagazine.org/bully.html

When I picture a high-ranking government official, I think of someone who is corrupt. I think of a corporate shill. I think of someone who is not
a friend to the people of this country. I think of Lord Acton’s famous line about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely. I
think of the disdain with which so many Americans have viewed so many of their leaders for so many years.

Former attorney general Ramsey Clark is different. Despite having once been the chief law-enforcement officer of this country, he consistently
takes the side of the oppressed.

Born to power — Clark’s father was attorney general in the 1940s and later a Supreme Court justice — the University of Chicago Law School
graduate was appointed assistant attorney general by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and went on to head that department as attorney general under
Lyndon Johnson from 1967 to 1969. During his years in the Justice Department, Clark was a staunch supporter of the civil-rights movement.
While in charge of government efforts to protect the protesters in Alabama, he witnessed firsthand “the enormous violence that was latent in our
society toward unpopular people.” He had a similar experience when he was sent to Los Angeles after the rioting in Watts and discovered abuses
by the police and the National Guard.

Although back then, Clark didn’t take the strong antiwar stance he advocates today, his Justice Department record boasts some major
accomplishments: He supervised the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He denounced
police shootings and authorized prosecution of police on charges of brutality and wrongful death. He opposed electronic surveillance and refused
to authorize an FBI wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr. He fought hard against the death penalty and won, putting a stay on federal executions that
lasted until this year [2001], when Timothy McVeigh’s death sentence was carried out.

After a failed bid for the Senate in 1976, Clark abandoned government service and set out to provide legal defense to victims of oppression. As an
attorney in private practice, he has represented many controversial clients over the years, among them antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan;
Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier; the Branch Davidians, whose compound in Waco, Texas, was destroyed by government
agents; Sheik Omar Abd El-Rahman, who was accused of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing; and Lori Berenson, an American
held in a Peruvian prison for allegedly supporting the revolutionary Tupac Amaru movement there. Clark’s dedication to defending unpopular,
and even hated, figures has also led him to represent such clients as Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and far-right extremist Lyndon
LaRouche.

Clark is founder and chairperson of the International Action Center, the largest antiwar movement in the United States. A vocal critic of U.S.
military actions around the globe, he calls government officials “international outlaws,” accusing them of “killing innocent people because we
don’t like their leader.” He has traveled to Iraq, North Vietnam, Serbia, and other embattled regions of the world to investigate the effects of
American bombing and economic sanctions there. The sanctions, he says, are particularly inhumane:

“They’re like the neutron bomb, which is the most ‘inspired’ of all weapons, because it kills the people and preserves the property,
the wealth. So you get the wealth and you don’t have the baggage of the hungry, clamoring poor.”

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, 1992; International
Action Center, 2002), 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, as citizens, need to announce our principles and “force
our government to adhere to them. When you see your government violating those principles, you have the highest obligation to correct what
your government does, not point the finger at someone else.”

The interview took place on a dreary day last November [2000], when the presidential election was still undecided. We have a new [illegitimate]
president now, but Clark’s criticisms of U.S. foreign policy are, if anything, more relevant with George W. Bush in the Oval Office. I met with
Clark in the offices of the International Action Center (39 West 14th St., #206, New York, NY 10011, www.iacenter.org). Books lined every wall,
except for a fairly large area devoted to photographs of Clark’s two children, his numerous grandchildren, and his wife of more than fifty years.

 http://www.americanstateterrorism.com/iraqgenocide/TheFireThisTime.html