The devils’ advocate

For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the Kennedy administration in 1961. Promoted to the post of US attorney general by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Clark’s left-liberal political trajectory has taken him so far from the political mainstream that he is now campaigning for the rights of the two most hated men in the world.

Is he mad? These men’s very names resound with the thud of the scud and the sear of the flame-thrower’s torch. The shock is all the greater because, in office, Clark pursued a host of politically correct causes such as African-American emancipation and the abolition of the death penalty.