Now defending Saddam, Clark has long list of controversial clients

BAGHDAD, Iraq — He wore a headset pushed back from one ear and addressed the Iraqi judge in English, in a genial but stern Southwestern drawl.

"May it please the court," former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark insisted, his frustration evident even to those who didn't understand what he was saying Monday. "I just need two minutes. If I don't get two minutes, we're going to walk out of the courtroom."

And so he did, precipitating an abrupt exodus by Saddam Hussein's defense team in a tumultuous day in the trial of the former Iraqi dictator.

To those who've watched his legal evolution over the past half-century, Clark's latest choice of clients — and his brief protest at the outset of Monday's proceedings — came as no surprise.

The son of a former U.S. Supreme Court justice who began his practice in the family's establishment law firm in Dallas, Clark has spent much of the past 30 years well past the reaches of mainstream politics and the law.

Long before he signed on to Saddam's defense team, the 77-year-old Texan had assembled a client list that included former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, a Rwandan clergyman charged with genocide and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 truck-bomb explosion at New York's World Trade Center.

Clark's far-flung legal forays have earned him dubious nicknames such as "the war criminal's best friend." Jack Valenti, a former colleague from the Johnson administration, says Clark has drifted so far out on the fringe as to become "amusing."

Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia University who helped organize the first major Vietnam anti-war protest in 1965, said he listened with admiration to Clark's anti-war speeches years ago. "I thought he was admirable, but he's gone haywire politically," Gitlin said. "He seems to have aligned himself with every tyrant and every war criminal he can find."

In siding with dubious figures that most other lawyers would shun, Clark asserts, he's fulfilling a "moral obligation" to guarantee that everyone, no matter how heinous the alleged crime, has a chance at equal justice under the law.

"You do in life what you believe is right," Clark said Monday in a CNN interview.

Clark has known Saddam for nearly 15 years. He met him on a visit to Iraq before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and returned several times to condemn U.N. sanctions, saying they were imposing hardship on Iraqi citizens.

Although Clark signed on to Saddam's defense team last January, becoming one of more than 20 lawyers who are representing him, Monday's proceedings were the American lawyer's first substantial performance in the Arab-run courtroom.

Family members and longtime associates say Clark's intense — critics would say misguided — sense of fair play is deeply rooted in his own history.

One of his two children, Ronda, was born severely handicapped, and Clark and his wife, Georgia, have devoted much of their lives to her well-being.

"Ronda is a lesson in love that made him even more compassionate and perhaps an advocate for the underdog," his sister said.

Clark's father, Tom C. Clark, served as President Truman's attorney general before he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1949.

After serving in the Marines as a courier during World War II, the younger Clark earned a history degree at the University of Texas and a law degree at the University of Chicago, then returned to work in the family law firm.

For a while, he was the youngest assistant attorney general under President Kennedy, assigned to major civil-rights cases. President Johnson appointed Clark attorney general in 1966, prompting his father to step down from the Supreme Court.

After leaving government, Clark came out openly against the war by flying to Hanoi in 1971.

Three years later, he ran against Republican Sen. Jacob Javits of New York in an unorthodox campaign that included his refusal to take contributions of more than $100.

In subsequent years, Clark increasingly distanced himself from the political establishment.

His clients have included alleged former Nazi Karl Linnas, controversial political candidate Lyndon LaRouche and Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnia Serb general who was indicted on war-crimes charges.