Ramsey Clark

William Ramsey Clark is an American lawyer, activist and former public official, the son of Tom C. Clark, the Fifty-Ninth Attorney General.

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to be Attorney General of the United States, he was confirmed by congress and took the oath of office on 2nd March. Later that day District Attorney Jim Garrison announced the arrest of businessman Clay Shaw on charges of conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The new Attorney General stated that the FBI had already investigated and cleared Shaw "in November and December of 1963" of "any part in the assassination".

As Jim Garrison pointed out: "However, the statement that Shaw, whose name appears nowhere in the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission, had been investigated by the federal government was intriguing. If Shaw had no connection to the assassination, I wondered, why had he been investigated?" Within a few days of this statement Clark had to admit that he had published inaccurate information and that no investigation of Shaw had taken place.

On 25th January, 1969, Ramsey Clark's final day as Attorney General, he ordered the Justice Department to withhold from Jim Garrison, the X-Rays and photographs from the autopsy of John F. Kennedy.

In the 1990s Clark defended the Islamic terrorists who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, characterizing their prosecution as the charade of a racist justice system.

Also in the nineties, Clark spoke out in support of the incarcerated Islamic Group leader Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who had masterminded numerous terror plots intended to strike targets in the U.S. during the 1990s. Describing Rahman as a “blind Islamic scholar,” Clark once asked: “How could a blind man be a terrorist, what could he do?” When Rahman was tried on terrorism charges, Clark urged his own protege, the self-proclaimed radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, to become the sheik's defense attorney. (Clark had previously asked William Kunstler and Ron Kuby to represent Rahman, but they both recused themselves.)

In a December 1997 interview with Impact International, Clark claimed that when the Cold War against the Communists had ended, America decided that “Islam would be the new enemy” and thus launched a “war against Islam.”

In April 1999 Clark addressed a letter to Bill Richardson, who he thought was America's ambassador to the United Nations. In the letter, Clark complained that “the U.S. assaults both Slavs and Muslims to stimulate them to attack each other and to control both.”

After Sept. 11, when Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz wrote a letter to express his condolences "to the families of the victims of those events," he mailed it to Ramsey Clark.

He has offered legal defense to controversial figures such as Charles Taylor, Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

In 2004 Clark joined a panel of about 20 prominent Arab and one other non-Arab lawyers to defend Saddam Hussein in his trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal.

On March 18, 2006, Clark attended the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. He declared: "History will prove Milošević was right. Charges are just that: charges. The trial did not have facts." He compared the trial of Slobodan Milošević with the one of Saddam Hussein by stating: "both trials are marred with injustice, both are flawed." He characterized Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein as "both commanders who were courageous enough to fight more powerful countries."

In October 2008, Clark joined several thousand college professors, students, and academic staff in signing a “Support Bill Ayers” statement to express solidarity with the former Weather Underground Organization terrorist who had recently come under considerable media scrutiny because of his relationship to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

For decades, Clark has consistently condemned American foreign policy and its related military campaigns, from the Vietnam War, to the Iraq War, to the broader War on Terror. Conversely, he has backed myriad groups, governments, and individuals with radically anti-American, and even terrorist, agendas. Whatever the nature of any conflict, Clark has invariably sided with America’s adversaries.