Motus Mentis

The CNN website today carried an interesting little item: an interview with Saddam Hussein’s defense attorney, Ramsey Clark. For those of you who aren’t up on Mr. Clark’s curriculum vitae, he was United States Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, and played an important role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s, but since then has wandered farther and farther into the fever swamps of the extreme Left, and from the Vietnam era forward has happily made common cause with an sordid assortment of America’s foes. He also seems, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, to have an “inordinate fondness” for brutal tyrants, including Serbian thug Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević, Liberian despot and mutilator of uncounted thousands Charles Taylor, and of course the Butcher of Baghdad himself. Clark attended MiloÅ¡ević’s funeral, for example, and announced that “history will prove MiloÅ¡ević was right.” Right to wage a ruthless campaign of genocide, I assume he means.

At any rate, Clark was interviewed for CNN by Wolf Blitzer, and after a brief consideration of whether Saddam might be considering a “political comeback”, Clark, speaking in obvious sympathy for his new friend, shares with us how Saddam is feeling these days. It turns out that he’s actually kind of sad, apparently:

…he’s torn apart by what he sees happening to his country, to the people of Iraq. And the thing he says above all is Iraqis should never kill Iraqis.

Now the last thing I’d want anyone to think is that I don’t have a “nuanced’ view of complex issues, but the idea that Ramsey Clark can have uttered this in apparent seriousness, and that both men seem subsequently to have been able to keep straight faces (I see nothing in the transcript about gales of laughter, elbow nudges, slapped thighs, or such like) was so absolutely mind-boggling that as I contemplated it just now I had momentarily to grip the table at which I write, lest I fall over sideways. Saddam is “torn apart”? Come to think of it, so were quite a few of his countrymen, in a much more literal sense: this is the psychopath who dropped his Iraqi political foes feet-first into industrial plastic-shredders, who gassed entire Iraqi villages, who has pocked the countryside with the anonymous graves of his fellow Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands, who tortured Iraqi children to death in view of their Iraqi parents.

I should have thought that the blogosphere would be all afroth over such lunacy, but nobody seemed to have noticed – or perhaps it’s just that Ramsey Clark is already so well known to be completely round the bend that this latest howler isn’t worth mentioning. Who knows? We report, you decide.