Vietnam War

Includes embedded YouTube broadcast War and Peace in the Asia-Pacific - Ramsey Clark at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan of speech given on 15 Aug 2013.

(From Wikipedia, 18 Aug 2013 : ) William Ramsey Clark (born December 18, 1927) is an American lawyer, activist and former public official. He worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, which included service as United States Attorney General from 1967 to 1969, under President Lyndon B. Johnson He supervised the drafting and played an important role in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968. Since leaving public office Clark has led many progressive activism campaigns, including opposition to the War on Terror, and he has offered legal defense to controversial figures such as Charles Taylor, Slobodan Miloševic, Saddam Hussein, and Lyndon LaRouche.₁

Footnotes

#RcFn1" id="RcFn1">1 #RcTxt1">↑ Whilst Ramsey Clark's record of effort and achievement is meteoric in comparison to that of his contemporaries, it is still of concern that:

1. There is no record, of which I am aware, of Ramsey Clark having given any support to Florida state attorney, Jim Garrison in his attempt to bring to justice the murderers of President Kennedy, as documented in Garrison's book On the Trail of the Assassins on Oliver Stone's file of 1991 based on that book, JFK. Even at this late date, Ramsey Clark should make the effort to speak up in support of the legacy of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Jim Garrison, and Oliver Stone as the mainstream and phony alternative media try to bury that legacy.

2. There is no record, of which I am aware, of how Ramsey Clark responded to President Johnson's cover-up of the deliberate attack on the US Navy surveillance ship the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967 by Israel, a supposed ally of the US during the Six-Day War. The Israeli war-planes even attempted to machine-gun the survivors in the water and were only stopped by the presence of a Soviet vessel in the vicinity. It can only be concluded, given the absence of other plausible explanations by the perpetrators, that the Israeli Government with the collusion of President Johnson intended to blame Egypt for the attack and for President Johnson to use that as a pretext to join Israel's premeditated war of aggression against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. This example of false flag terrorism predates the more recent and familiar example of 9/11 by 34 years and 3 months. The incident is described in Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb, the Voltairenet article of May 2013. The incident is somewhat in the mould of the staged incidents that were proposed in Operation Northwoods, put to President Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara on 13 March 1962. The incidents were to include staged military attacks on the US Guantanamo Bay military military base on the island of Cuba. Those were to be blamed on the Cuban government of Fidel Castro and used as a pretext to invade Cuba. President Kennedy rejected the proposal.

3. Ramsey Clark's attitude to President Johnson's criminal war against Vietnam is contradictory. Wikipedia writes:

As Attorney General during part of the Vietnam War, Clark oversaw the prosecution of the Boston Five for “conspiracy to aid and abet draft resistance.” Four of the five were convicted, including pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr.

However, in the next section, entitled International activism, Wikipedia writes:

Following his term as Attorney General Clark worked as a law professor and was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He visited North Vietnam in 1972 as a protest against the bombing of Hanoi.

I can only presume that Ramsey Clark formed the judgement that he could achieve more good from within government, using the resources of government than from outside. Had he spoken up earlier against the Vietnam War or demanded an explanation of the USS Liberty incident, he would have very likely found himself removed from the post of US Attorney General or, as did JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and Bobby Kennedy, have suffered an even worse fate.

Still, the achievements of Ramsey Clark as monum,ental as they are, need to be evaluated against the cost to the world and the US itself of the failure in the 1960's of JFK and RFK to dismantle the US war machine or of Jim Garrison to successfully prosecute their murderers.

That cost includes, apart from the wars in China and the Middle East mentioned above, the Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, genocidal counter-insurgency wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, bloody coups in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, the UK war against Argentina in 1983, the imposition of "Disaster Capitalism" as described by Naomi Klein in the The Shock Doctrine of (2007).