from Nightlife 09/19/02

Ramsey Clark on Iraq and Romas:
An Exclusive Nightlife Interview

introduction by Michael G. Roach
interview by Sue Basko

"A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you."-- Ramsey Clark

Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General in the Cabinet of President Lyndon Johnson, will be in Carbondale on September 22 and 23. Clark will be a keynote speaker at a symposium sponsored by the SIU Public Policy Institute regarding the problems facing the Romani (or Gypsy) people. The symposium begins Sunday, September 22, at 4:30 p.m. in Student Center Ballroom B with opening remarks by former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon. A panel discussion follows. Ramsey Clark will deliver his keynote address at 7:30 p.m.

Clark is the rarest of the rare-- a former high-ranking member of the political establishment who left government service and embarked on an almost quixotic quest to challenge the political status quo.

Born in Dallas in 1927, Clark enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school. Following his honorable discharge, Clark graduated from the University of Texas and received his law degree and a master degree in American history from the University of Chicago.

Clark followed his father, Tom C. Clark, to Washington after President Harry Truman appointed the elder Clark as Attorney General and later as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In 1962, Ramsey Clark was appointed by President John F. Kennedy as Assistant Attorney General in charge of Lands, an appointment that gave him supervision over all litigation concerning federal lands, natural resources, water and airspace; the federal government’s acquisition of new property; and the protection of certain Indian rights, properties, and claims. Along with his responsibilities in the Lands section of the Justice Department, Clark assumed other responsibilities, notably in the area of civil rights.

Clark became the federal government’s point man at the scene of some of the most storied confrontations during the civil-rights battles of the 1960s. Following riots on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1962, aimed at preventing the admission of black students, Clark led federal civilian forces at Ol’ Miss as he did later in 1963 during the campaign against racial injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. Clark led the federal government’s legal team during Martin Luther King’s march for voting rights from Selma to Birmingham in 1965, and later that year Clark performed the same role during the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

In early 1967, President Johnson nominated Ramsey Clark as Attorney General. Two hours after the announcement of the nomination of his son to lead the Justice Department, Justice Tom C. Clark announced his retirement from the bench. Although neither law nor precedent required the senior Clark to resign, he did so, he later stated, to avoid the imputation of a conflict of interest. (Thurgood Marshall succeeded him.) Justice Clark administered the oath of office to his son on March 10, 1967.

Shortly after taking office, Ramsey Clark initiated the first suit to force a school district to comply with its own desegregation promises. Clark led one of the first efforts to regulate firearms and championed a Johnson Administration bill to control the importation, interstate shipment, and sale of guns. In July 1967, Clark initiated sweeping new regulations forbidding the use of wiretapping and of virtually all electronic surveillance by federal agents except in the area of national security. In contrast to his more conservative father, Ramsey Clark supported the landmark Supreme Court holding in Miranda v. Arizona, which required criminal suspects to be informed of their constitutional rights to remain silent and to their right to an attorney even if indigent.

Attorney General Clark supervised the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

During his two-year tenure as Attorney General, Clark advocated an overhaul of the juvenile-justice system. He identified the need for more psychologists, psychiatrists, probation officers, caseworkers, and other professionals to assist the young within the court system. He opposed "blue ribbon" juries by disputing the view that only "superior" segments of society were capable of sitting on juries. Clark insisted that the Constitution demanded that juries reflect a cross-section of the community and he recommended the inclusion of "all of our people in the judicial process." An examination of the "average" jury shows that Clark’s view has prevailed.

After leaving the government after the election of Richard M. Nixon, Clark taught law and became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Clark visited North Vietnam in 1971 as part of a peace delegation. "Mr. Insider" was evolving into "Mr. Outsider." In 1974, he was defeated in his only bid for elective office, losing a Senate race in New York to Jacob Javits.

Clark abandoned government service after his Senate defeat and began to provide legal defense to those he believed were victims of oppression. As an attorney, he has represented a litany of controversial clients. He has defended clients across the political spectrum, often for free. His clients include the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (accused of genocide, torture, and other crimes against humanity), as well as far-right politician Lyndon LaRouche.

(l-r): Former U.S. Sen. Paul
Simon greets former U.S.
Attorney General
Ramsey Clark after the
latter's lecture at SIU.

Clark defended antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan in the Jesuit priest’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience against war and nuclear arms. Clark has defended Native American activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of the murder of an FBI agent in 1975 at Oglala District of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Clark assisted the Branch Davidians, whose compound in Waco, Texas, was destroyed by government agents. He assisted in the representation of Sheik Omar Abd El-Rahman, who was accused of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He has helped bring international attention to the case of Lori Berenson, an American held in a Peruvian prison for allegedly supporting the revolutionary Tupac Amaru movement.

Following the end of the Gulf War in 1991, Clark convened an international tribunal that tried and convicted President George H.W. Bush and General Norman Schwartzkopf of war crimes for their alleged misconduct during that war.

Clark has recently traveled to Iraq and is a leading opponent of the current Bush Administration’s goal of building a coalition of war against that nation. A national war protest will take place in Washington, D.C., in October.

Ramsey Clark is the founder of the International Action Coalition, an organization embracing myriad causes championing societal underdogs. SIU’s symposium will deal with one such group, the Romanis, or Gypsies. Also known as Romas, Rromas, Tziganes, and Cyganes, they descend from people in Punjab in northern India. They are noted in our culture for being wanderers, with a colorful culture noted for melancholy violin music, dance, Flamenco dance, and fortune-telling with Tarot cards. More disparagingly, Gypsies are identified with organized theft and scam rings, and for living outside the law by using aliases, constantly moving, and not sending children to school. These perceptions will be addressed by symposium speakers, including Clark.

This excerpted phone interview with Ramsey Clark took place Friday, September 13:

Should the U.S. remove Saddam Hussein from power?

No, because it not only conflicts with all of our principles, which include self-determination of nations and the choice of peoples of their own leadership, but because if you look at the results of U.S. regime change over the past fifty years, you see a trail of tragedy. We replaced the democratic Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. William Colby of the CIA said that twenty-five years of surrogate power over Iran was the greatest achievement of the CIA. It wasn’t good for the people of Iran. They not only suffered enormously for twenty-five years, they suffer to this day as a result of it. We replaced the democratic-elected Patrice Lumumba, killed with the assistance of the CIA, whose body was found in the trunk of a car of the CIA, with Mobutu, in what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but Mobutu chose to call it Zaire. He was by far the most violent and unscrupulous leader of any African nation in the post-colonial period. What he did to that country is unbelievable. Pinochet in Chile was a product of U.S. intervention. We fought the election of Salvador Allende, a medical doctor who made remarkable progress in delivery of healthcare to the people, rural and urban. Pinochet, though now recognized as an international criminal, ruled by not only our leave, but with our support. We called it an economic miracle, while people were disappearing and fear reigned.

But Saddam Hussein is backed only by the Baath Party, said to be a minority. He was elected by a bogus election, with the names and addresses of voters being made known with their votes. It’s not a free election.

Suppose there were no elections? How many governments do we support that have never had an election, that are contemptuous of elections? Scores, and we reap great profits from them. Suppose there were bad elections or an absolute dictatorship-- does the United States have the power and the right to determine the future of those people, halfway around the world?

In the area of Iraq today, I think people are very dubious about a war, and in bringing in an American regime.

I talk and visit the region constantly. I did interviews with Iran and Syria this week, and I can tell you they want no part of the U.S. coming in there. The U.S. has meant nothing but misery for them, and they are terrified of the prospect. That can be a Pandora’s box. We don’t know what will happen in Kurdish areas, in Turkey and Iraq and Iran and Syria. We don’t know what the [Shi'ite] Muslim people will do. We don’t how severely Israel will increase its attack on the Palestinian people. We don’t know whether Pakistan and India will decide to have a nuclear war because of it, which they almost did after Bush’s proclamation that you have a right to pursue terrorists wherever they are. So there is no neighbor, if you go around the clock, starting with Turkey, which is a NATO ally, which we support against the will of the people, opposes intervention. Iran, which fought a bloody, senseless eight-year war with Iraq that cost a million lives, including about 750,000 Iranian lives, very young men-- they don’t want the U.S. to intervene. Kuwait, which was wrongfully invaded in 1990, does not want the U.S. to intervene. Saudi Arabia, which we control basically, and profit from enormously through our oil companies-- they don’t want it. And certainly Jordan, who has supported Iraq through the best of its small ability, doesn’t want it. So there is no one in the region who wants it.

Saddam Hussein aerially gassed the Kurds with chemical weapons. The Kurds are poor, unpopular, disliked in the region. This could be compared to Hitler’s attacks on the Jews, the Gypsies, and homosexuals. Do we have a moral obligation to do something to help those people?

The comparisons are not helpful. The Holocaust [executed] six-million people. The numbers killed in 1978, and the United States never protested, never complained in any way about what happened, were in the hundreds, or at the very most, a few thousand, and in a time of extremity. Do you act all these years later because of it? It is astonishing to hear Bush, and before that Cheney, talk about that Iraq has invaded two countries in the last twenty-two years. We’ve invaded two-hundred countries in the last 220 years, and we haven’t stopped.

Do you agree with the UN declaration that war should only be engaged in as self-defense?

I think the most urgent concern of the peoples of the world has to be ending war. The scourge of war is created by people. The twentieth century [was] the most violent, war-infested century in history. We spend more money on war than on saving babies who are dying of hunger, where it wouldn’t take much to feed them.

We bombed Iraq mercilessly during the Gulf War. Iraq had no defense-- they put up no defense. Then we imposed sanctions, which kills babies each day. We have crippled that country, and now we want to invade them. There is no evidence of Iraq having any nuclear weapons.... The United States holds the vast majority of weapons of mass destruction in the world, and the capacity to deliver them. There is no place we can’t hit in one hour.

Why is President Bush intent on having a war with Iraq?

A whole bunch of reasons. There will be billions of dollars made from Iraqi oil if we install our own government. There are also some who just believe in a New World Order, who believe that the United States must dominate the world or it will be overrun with ignorant, sick, impoverished people, and so we have to dominate and control it. Some people think it is a war on Arabs, or a war on Muslims. Some think it is to protect Israel.... President Bush may need to do something to take attention off the economy and people’s other troubles, and you have a sense of patriotism, no matter how artificial or scoundrelly it may be. The way they’ve used [September 11] and the war on terrorism, and suddenly it’s all Iraq, lying prostrate over there. I think Congress will hold back, because why do anything before the election? Iraq is not going to do anything before the election.

What do you think the role of the news media has been in creating war sentiment?

The media has to be one of the great concerns, not only in connection with issues of war and peace, but moral values and the human condition in its totality. I am a romantic-- the First Amendment is my flag. I still think we can manage these things for the hated and despised, the weak and the poor, all of us, as well as the rich and the powerful. You see these media empires of billions of dollars in sales and income, hundreds of thousands of employees. Their economy is bigger than all but a dozen countries in the world, and their political influence is dominant.

You can’t run for political office against those corporations. When I was a kid in Texas, running against the banks was the best way to get elected. Running against Wall Street was the best way to get elected. We were populist down there. There was a lot of demagoguery in it, but there was also something for the people. Now you can’t find that. Now it’s all greed. And we’ve consolidated the stock market where everyone thinks they’re part of the nation because they have ten shares of General Motors. And their happiness depends on whether the stock market goes up and down.

So we’re locked in. The corporations own the media. If they don’t own it directly, they own it through the advertising revenue, which is the lifeblood of commercial media. The public media is so intimidated. John Albert went to Iraq with me during the bombing. He has something like seven Emmys for war documentaries. He had a tremendous amount of raw footage-- the only raw footage possessed by any Western cameraman, because we rented a car in Amman, Jordan, and we drove two-thousand miles and took pictures of any damage we could find all the way from Basrah to Samarra.

Nobody [in the media] would touch [the footage] with a ten-foot pole.

John went back to Afghanistan and took a young woman with him who was [Afghan-American]. They went up to see her family just north of Kandashar, and found that nineteen members of her family had been killed by U.S. bombing. So he brought that film back and couldn’t get it on anyplace. Finally, Bill Moyers showed it on one of his shows, but it took him a couple of months. [By then the] film was stale.

One moment that should never be forgotten was January 15 at the cashier’s desk at the El Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. There was a line of the most famous journalists in the United States. It was a moment when one of the biggest stories of that year or any other year was about to occur-- and they were all checking out, leaving. The only one who stayed was a CNN guy who was an Aussie. Even the ones who stayed, like Peter Arnett, had to stay in the El Rashid. They didn’t get to tour around. We were able to tour around and we had all this footage. John put together this little film called Nowhere to Hide. It was shown around at churches, and it is still a valuable documentary.

In 1967, you initiated new regulations to forbid wiretapping and most electronic surveillance by federal agents, except for national security. How do you think this squares with what John Ashcroft is doing now with these new regulations that have been promulgated in the name of war on terrorism?

It’s the opposite. I was in the [Justice] Department for eight years. I started the first day of the Kennedy administration. Bob Kennedy operated the department on kind of a team basis. I always opposed all wiretapping. I opposed national security wiretapping because I learned that it creates an aura of secrecy and unreliability, and you never know what the truth is anymore. My experience tells me that public sources are much more reliable than secret, clandestine sources. People think that just because you don’t believe you are being overheard that you are telling the truth, but people lie all the time, without ever thinking about whether they are being overheard, just because they are trying to fool the person on the other end of the line, not the wiretappers.

I initially opposed the national-security wiretaps. I found all kinds of bad consequences, including allies tapping each other, which creates enmity and conflict, including falsification of reports. We cut it way down. Finally a general in the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board came over and the Vice President called and said, "You are destroying our foreign intelligence base." And Clark Clifford came over and said, "You’ve got to slow down on it." So we cut the number down to two-thirds.

They wanted to break and enter. They’d been breaking and entering. There’s the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, you know, you can’t break and enter. They’d scream, "It’s dangerous!" But it’s dangerous to break and enter, too. I refused that.

It’s an entirely different attitude now. In the sixties, we thought we could change things. We thought we could end poverty, and really believed it and worked pretty hard at it. We thought we could improve health and education and multiplied expenditures in those areas. We thought we could end racism and made some progress, not a whole lot. The Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1968 and the Civil Right Act made an enormous difference in terms of rights. Then, slowly, under those rights, progress was made. We even thought we could end war. We thought we could end the death penalty and secret conduct by the government against its own people, like wiretapping. And we believed we’d be a better people, a better country, if we did.

And now we’re going on just the opposite track. And that’s the great tragedy. We could be seeking peace. We have unprecedented power to seek peace, but what do we do? We wage war. And we spend more money on war and on research for killing. It’s a tragic failure of vision and of leadership and it is a tragic loss of perhaps one of the last opportunities that we will have before it gets really bad.

One question about the Romas, or Gypsies. What are the major obstacles that stand in the way of Romas being able to be assimilated into society in the United States and become fully contributing members?

Let me say first that I am not an assimilationist. I have no complaints about homogenized milk. But I think among the most precious things we have, after human dignity, is culture. It takes a lot of people, a lot of struggle, a lot of joy, and a lot of suffering, a long time, to create a culture. A culture reflects all the wisdom and all the ignorance and all the goodness and all the meanness of a lot of people. It’s rich and real and humanizing. More than species, cultures are endangered. The Romani culture is remarkable. It’s been more battered, persecuted, tormented, than any culture, except the Kurdish people. I don’t want the Romani to lose their culture and be assimilated and just be like the rest of us, We’d be bored to death. I don’t want a bunch of couch potatoes eating the same junk food and watching the same trash on TV and complaining that the world should devote itself to making us happy. I want to preserve that culture.

I want the Romani themselves to know more about who they are and where they came from and where they are. There’s at least fifteen-million of them worldwide. Their history is incredible. Their fortitude, their music, their joy, is incredible. What we need is to give them a chance for their own choice. Hopefully they’ll preserve their own language. What we want is for them to have equality and opportunities for health and education and participation in the society without discrimination, to choose what they want to do, to assimilate if they want to, and retain their independent culture and way if they want to. To me, life is choice. Needless to say, I love the Romani and are anxious to see them get a better shake.