Reply #55: This is worth posting again. [View All]

How anyone can defend this is beyond me:

When he flew to Belgrade to support Slobodan Milosevic during NATO's campaign, there was no word about the siege of Sarajevo, the massacre at Srebrenica or the million homeless refugees from Kosovo -- and even less of those olfactorily eloquent mass graves that NATO is now uncovering. But then, urging Belgrade to resist NATO, while he was there picking up an honorary degree, he told his hosts, "It will be a great struggle, but a glorious victory. You can be victorious."

In Grenada he went to advise Bernard Coard, the murderer of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Other clients include Radovan Karadzic, the indicted Bosnian Serbian war criminal whom he defended in a New York civil suit brought by Bosnian rape victims, and the Rwandan pastor who is accused of telling Tutsis to hide in his church and then summoning Hutus to massacre them, and then leading killing squads.

His willingness to accept dubious clients is defended by some attorneys. After all, everyone needs a defense. Others say he has crossed a moral line by defending Karadzic and overlooking events in Kosovo. But looking at his legal arguments, one must question the wisdom of his legal counsel, not just his morals. A prominent international lawyer explains, "He's not really very well up on international law -- I remember he was asking for help in some of his early cases."

In his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, for instance, he played to U.S. isolationist sentiment, and -- somewhat ironically for a case originating in Texas, the capital of capital punishment -- said his client faced execution if extradited. A moment's research would have established that the international tribunals set up by the United Nations do not have the death penalty, because most countries, unlike the United States, regard executions as barbaric. But even then it seems odd that someone who regards this country so balefully would seek to exempt it from the clear international law expressed by the tribunal. With a foretaste of his blas頡ttitude over Kosovo's ethnic cleansing, he said that it was "unconstitutional" to extradite someone to the "illegal" international tribunal. "The international tribunal for Rwanda is an extension of colonial power in Africa, which can threaten every African leader. The tribunal is foreign power intervention taking sides to maintain its control over the majority Hutu through Tutsi surrogates."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/21/clark/print.html

This isn't exactly a secret. And it certainly isn't something I'm about to excuse. I want nothing, repeat nothing, to do with Clark.

The reasons should be obvious.