A-Infos (en) US, exposing the Stalinists and questioning Ramsey Clark role]in the anti-war movement

[Matthew Williams <mw21@mindspring.com>]

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I found the following article on the International Action Center/Workers
World Party on Boston Indy Media
> <http://boston.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=3283&group=>. I've tried
working with them on the issues of Iraq sanctions and the Kosovo War. They
have a distinct tendency to try to take over both coalitions and protests
they had no hand in organizing. It also fairly quickly became obvious by
reading between the lines of their public statements that they support
Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic--although a lot of progressives
weren't willing to see this. Given the leading role they've assigned
themselves in the emerging anti-war movement, this seems very relevant.
-- Matt Williams

copied article starts here:

With very able organizational capabilities and large resources at their
disposal, the (Stalinist) Worker's World Party (aka International Action
Center; aka National Peoples' Campaign) have effectively dominated and
manipulated numerous anti-war coalitions in the past, often shifting the
overall message from opposition to U.S. military aggression to openly
supporting the likes of dictators such as Hussein and Milosevic.

Once again, they are one of the first organizations to mobilize against the
impending war. Before following the lead of this organization, please read
this interesting essay on both their history, and the background of the
elusive Ramsey Clark (WWP's public spokesperson and media darling)...

THE MYSTERIOUS RAMSEY CLARK: STALINIST DUPE OR DEEP-COVER SPOOK?
By Manny Goldstein

Take a close look and there is something downright suspicious
about former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now the darling of certain
sectors of the radical left. His journey has taken him from the heights of
federal power to outer orbits of the political fringe. In the process, he
has seemingly transformed from a shill for the most corrupt elements of the
US elites to a shill for any foreign despot who claims to oppose the US
elites. Who is Ramsey Clark really working for?

Dynasty of Mediocrity

Ramsey Clark was born to power. In 1945, the Clark family made its leap from
Dallas to DC when Ramsey's dad Tom Clark, a lobbyist for Texas oil
interests, was appointed attorney general by President Harry Truman. In his
Texas days, the politically ambitious Clark was cultivated as a useful
connection by New Orleans mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, and many feared
Clark's new job would afford organized crime access to higher levels of
power. AG Clark was repeatedly mired in corruption scandals. In 1945, he was
accused of taking a bribe to fix a war profiteering case. In 1947, after he
had four convicted Chicago mob bosses sprung from prison before their terms
were complete, Congress appointed a committee to investigate--and was
effectively roadblocked by Tom's refusal to hand over parole records. Truman
admitted to a biographer that "Tom Clark was my biggest mistake." But he
insisted: "It isn't so much that he's a bad man. It's just that he's such a
dumb son of a bitch." AG Tom Clark played along with the post-war
anti-communist hysteria, approving federal wiretaps on Alger Hiss, the State
Department official accused being a Soviet mole. In 1949, he moved over to
the Supreme Court. Carlos Marcello biographer John Davis asserts the kingpin
continued to funnel money to Clark when he sat on the high court. Tom
stepped down from the high court when young Ramsey was appointed attorney
general by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. Ramsey was likely appointed
precisely because he was Tom's son. And not because LBJ was impressed with
Tom, but just the opposite: Johnson knew that Ramsey's appointment would
maneuver Tom into stepping down. This cleared the way for the appointment of
Thurgood Marshall, a comparative moral and intellectual titan who was
strategic to the White House's effort to buy peace with the civil rights
movement. AG Ramsey got into a famous showdown with FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover when he attempted to block the Director's wiretaps of Martin Luther
King Jr.--apparently the first stirrings of Ramsey's conscience. Hoover,
considering Clark a spineless "jellyfish," went over his head and ordered
the wiretaps without the AG's approval. However, Clark later told Curt
Gentry, author of a critical biography of Hoover, that the FBI director had
"very strong human qualities" and "was not at all evil by any means. He
really believed deeply in integrity, as he defined it, as he saw it."
Despite his unwillingness to approve the snooping on King (who, after all,
had been a guest at the Kennedy White House), Clark was complicit with
Hoover's COINTELPRO. Following the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit, he
directed the FBI to investigate whether the unrest was the result of some
"scheme or conspiracy." He instructed Hoover to develop "sources or
informants in black nationalist organizations, SNCC and other less
publicized groups." The result was Hoover's extensive "ghetto informant
program." In 1968, Clark prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock for advocating draft
resistance. "As late as 1968, while campaigning for Lyndon Johnson in
Wisconsin, Clark was shouting at anti-war protesters to take their
grievances to Hanoi rather than Washington," wrote John B. Judis in a 1991
exposé on Clark in The New Republic.

Clark also dutifully backed the official findings that Lee Harvey Oswald and
Sirhan Sirhan each acted alone in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers.
But when LBJ lost in '68, Clark was iced from his farewell luncheon. The
humiliated White House isolated him as King's Resurrection City protesters
occupied the DC mall and Republican candidate Richard Nixon baited the AG
for undermining "law and order." He had become a convenient whipping boy for
both parties.

Leftward, Ho

An embittered casualty of the '60s, Clark assumed a leftist posture after
leaving the Justice Department. He became the lawyer for anti-war protestor
Philip Berrigan, headed a private probe into the FBI killings of Black
Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and travelled to Vietnam to condemn
the bombing. In a 1974 bid for Senate in New York, he played the centrist in
the Democratic primary, with Bella Abzug on the left and Daniel Moynihan on
the right. Moynihan won. Clark, now 46, appeared to burn his bridges with
the establishment at this point. In June 1980, with America mesmerized by
the Iran hostage crisis, he joined a forum on "Crimes of America" in
Tehran--the first of many such junkets. The '80s saw him globetrotting to
schmooze with any dictator who happened to be on the White House shit-list.
After the US bombing of Libya in 1986, he met with Col. Mommar Qadaffi in
Tripoli. He went to Grenada to advise Bernard and Phyllis Coard, leaders of
the clique accused of murdering Maurice Bishop, who were facing treason
charges. Things started to smell really fishy in 1989, when Clark
represented ultra-right cult-master Lyndon LaRouche and six cohorts on
conspiracy and mail fraud charges. The LaRouchies had been bilking their
naive followers of their savings by getting them to cough up their credit
card numbers. Clark (who had been silent when the real COINTELPRO was
conducted under his watch at the Justice Department) now charged that the
LaRouche case was an "outgrowth" of COINTELPRO. He said the case was
manufactured by LaRouche's "powerful enemies within the establishment" who
targetted the cult because of its crusade "to combat the traffic in
so-called 'recreational drugs'...and the practice of usury." Clark was
echoing the standard line of the LaRouche organization, which paradoxically
pleads government persecution while boasting of its connections to the
intelligence establishment (uniquely merging paranoia with delusions of
grandeur). In fact, the cult has exchanged information with the FBI, and
farmed out its "intelligence" services to Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega.
LaRouche's 1970s campaigns for a "War on Drugs" and space-based missile
defense eerily predicted Reagan-era programs. Clark couldn't keep his client
from a conviction and brief prison term. But Clark's relationship with
LaRouche went beyond legal representation to actual advocacy. Researcher
Chip Berlet, a watchdog on radical right groups, told Judis that Clark's
brief was a "political polemic." Clark's new coziness with LaRouche took
watchdogs by surprise. Just a few years earlier he had represented German
Green Party leader Petra Kelly in her libel suit against the LaRouche
organization, which had called her a "terrorist" and "whore" in its
propaganda. In June 1990, a LaRouche front organization, the Schiller
Institute, flew Clark to a cult-organized conference in Copenhagen. His
speech there claimed the US government had moved against LaRouche because he
was "a danger to the system," and decried that he was a victim of
"vilification." The speech was printed in full by the LaRouchie New
Federalist propaganda rag. Clark also represented PLO leaders in a suit
brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the elderly vacationer who was
shot and thrown overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise-ship by
renegade Palestinian terrorists in 1986. Another Clark client was Karl
Linnas, an ex-Nazi concentration camp guard in Estonia (where he had
overseen the murder of some 12,000 resistance fighters and Jews), who was
being deported from the US to the USSR to face war crimes charges. Clark
again lost the case, but again went to bat for his client in the public
arena, questioning the need to prosecute Nazis "forty years after some
god-awful crime they're alleged to have committed."

The Devil's Pact

In August 1990, two months after his return from the LaRouche conference in
Copenhagen, with US troops mobilizing to Saudi Arabia, Clark accepted an
invitation to lead the National Coalition to Stop US Intervention in the
Middle East. This invitation had been extended by members of an orthodox
Stalinist sect, the Workers World Party (WWP). Clark had finally found a new
home. The Clark-WWP alliance has lasted to this day. A brief look at the
doctrinaire sect's history: WWP is the brainchild of Sam Marcy, intellectual
guru at the party's helm until his death in 1998. In 1956, Marcy led the
faction in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that supported the Soviet
invasion of Hungary, attacking the popular uprising and general strike there
as "counter-revolutionary." In 1959, the Marcy clique broke from the
Trotskyist SWP to found the more Stalinist WWP. The new group wasted little
time in cheering on the brutal Chinese repression of the indigenous culture
in Tibet that year (which sent the Dalai Lama and 80,000 refugees fleeing
into exile). Vying with SWP and other parties for top dog position on the
radical left, WWP always maintained a front group to suck in neophytes.
During the Vietnam era this was Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF). In the
Reagan-Bush era it was People's Anti-War Mobilization (PAM)--which would be
the operative group in the National Coalition in 1990. With glasnost, WWP
supported the Kremlin hardliners who resisted Gorbachev's reforms and
disarmament moves. Insisting that China remained a "workers state," WWP
supported Deng Xiaoping in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, again
attacking the protesting students and workers as "counter-revolutionaries."
In 1991, WWP supported the KGB coup against Gorbachev. Yet WWP also wooed
the Democratic party, supporting Jesse Jackson's presidential bid in 1984.
In New York, WWP made alliances with the left wing of the Democrats to
establish a foothold in key trade unions. WWP cadre Gavriella Gemma became a
secretary in Clark's New York law office in 1977. In his New Republic piece,
Judis suggests that Clark fell under her spell and was won over to the WWP.
When David McReynolds of the War Resisters League (WRL) met with Clark in
1990 to warn him that WWP was "using him," Clark refused to listen,
constantly referring to what "Gavriella said." With Clark as the figurehead
and PAM/WWP at the helm, the National Coalition provoked a split in the
movement against Operation Desert Storm through its refusal to condemn
Saddam Hussein or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The other established anti-war
groups (War Resisters League, CISPES, SANE/Freeze, National Organization for
Women, etc.) formed the rival National Campaign for Peace in the Middle
East, which condemned both Bush and Saddam. Soft-peddling their pro-Saddam
line, WWP's National Coalition won endorsements from celebrities like Spike
Lee and Casey Kasem, sucking in numbers even after the split. The two groups
held separate marches on Washington in January 1991, allowing the media to
portray a divided movement. WWP went to extreme lengths to maintain control
of the National Coalition. At an April 1991 protest in New York City, WWP
thugs attacked a Lower East Side squatter contingent and ejected them from
the rally for refusing to take down their unapproved homemade banners.
WWPers then called in the police and had the squatters arrested (SHADOW
April/May 1991). In November 1990, Clark flew to Baghdad to meet with
Saddam, who allowed him to return with a few hostages. In February, with the
bombs falling, Clark was in Basra, Iraq's southern port, witnessing the
destruction. But his consistent failure to complain about Saddam's regime
made it clear he was there at its invitation. With Clark's name-recognition
and homespun, avuncular image, WWP had the opportunity to form a new front
group to win over naive liberals. This was the International Action Center
(IAC), which remains the top vehicle for Clark's ego and WWP's play for
hegemony over the fragmented remnants of the left. IAC/WWP's politics went
from bad to worse as Yugoslavia descended into chaos. It soon became obvious
that Clark's legal work now closely followed the WWP line. In 1992, Radovan
Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was served with federal subpoenas
when he touched down in New York for UN meetings. The National Organization
for Women and the Center for Constitutional Rights, acting on behalf of
Bosnian refugee women, were charging him with ordering mass rape and war
crimes. Clark, of course, immediately came forward to represent Karadzic.
Clark also made junkets to Serb-occupied Bosnia to schmooze with Karadzic
(as did various Russian neo-fascists, like Vladimir Zhirinovsky). Meanwhile,
International Action Center leaflets engaged in blatant historical
revisionism over Serb war crimes, portraying them as lies perpetrated by an
imperialist conspiracy. "What about all those reports of 'Serbian
atrocities'?" asked an IAC leaflet in 1993, and then answered its own
question: "Before the bombs can be dropped the lies must be told." It then
went on to cite fabricated atrocities which the Kuwaiti regime's paid PR
hacks had attributed to the Iraqi occupation forces in 1990--without
offering a shred of evidence that the reports of Serb rape camps and "ethnic
cleansing" were similarly fabricated. Note the subtly evil propaganda.
Opposing NATO bombing is one thing. Calling the reports of mass rape and
ethnic cleansing "lies" is quite another. This "anti-war" propaganda is on
the same repugnant level as right-wing Holocaust Revisionism. IAC/WWP
embraces what is now called in Europe the "Red-Brown Alliance"--the notion
of a left-fascist alliance against the West. This alliance is most advanced
in Russia where neo-Stalinists and neo-Czarists joined forces to oppose
Yeltsin (seen as a stooge of the West). In an echo of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin
Pact, former communists and anarchists in Russia now work with figures like
Zhirinovsky, who have themselves sought alliances with German neo-Nazis.
Like Clark and WWP, these Russian extremists have avidly rooted for the Serb
armies throughout the wars in former Yugoslavia. The "Red-Brown Alliance"
was seen on the streets of New York during the 1999 NATO air strikes against
Yugoslavia, when Clark led rallies which brought WWP communists together
with right-wing nationalists and Orthodox clergy from the Serb immigrant
community. Serbian flags were proudly waved at these New York rallies, while
meetings at IAC's 14th Street offices degenerated into mass chants of
"Serbia! Serbia! Serbia!" This at a time when Serbian police and
paramilitaries were forcing 800,000 Albanian refugees to flee their homes in
Kosovo at gunpoint. Again, WRL and other anti-war groups broke away to form
their own coalition that rejected both NATO's bombing and Serbian aggression
against the Kosovo Albanians. But this time it was only IAC/WWP which held a
national rally in DC. In October 1999, Clark met with Yugoslavia's President
Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, and said everything the dictator wanted to
hear. Milosevic, by then facing war crimes charges before the UN tribunal at
The Hague, called his guest "brave, objective, and moral." The case against
Radovan Karadzic has languished since the UN launched war crimes charges
against him, forcing him into hiding in Serbia. Clark, meanwhile,
represented Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,, a Rwandan Hutu fighting extradition
from the US to face charges of genocide collaboration before the UN
tribunal. The WWP line simultaneously (and predictably) tilted to the
genocidal Hutu militias as the UN wrote up war crime charges against their
leaders for ordering the slaughter of half a million Tutsi civilians in
1994. (Clark lost the case, and in March 2000, Ntakirutimana was deported to
Tanzania, where the UN tribunal on Rwanda was held). What is Ramsey Clark:
dupe, kook or spook? Has a well-intentioned but none-too-bright Clark been
duped by the WWP cadre? Or has his reasoning become unhinged for reasons of
personal psychology? Or, is he a deep-cover spook, whose real Devil's pact
is with sinister elements of the US intelligence community, his mission to
divide and discredit any resistance to Washington's war moves? You decide.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented
Analysis of the Movement Duke University 1991

Davis, John H.bth Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of
John F. Kennedy Signet 1989

Gentry, Curt J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Penguin 1992

Judis, John "The Strange Case of Ramsey Clark" The New Republic, April 22,
1991

King, Dennis Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism Doubleday 1989

Lee, Martin The Beast Reawakens: Resurgent Fascism & Right-Wing Extremism in
the US & Europe Routledge 1999

Margolick, David "The Long and Lonely Journey of Ramsey Clark" The New York
Times, June 14, 1999

Yalof, David Alistair Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the
Selection of Supreme Court Nominees University of Chicago 1999


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