James Mann: We are pleased and honored to have with us today, the former Attorney General of the United States Ramsey Clark.

Ramsey Clark:: Thank you very much. It's a good feeling to be here with you again this year. I wish I could say it's been a good year for freedom and justice under law, but I can't say that. But at least, in this company, you know that the struggle goes on, and that we shall overcome.

I'll start and end with the case of Lyndon LaRouche and his co-defendants, not because it's the Alpha and Omega, although it's about as close as a case gets to the potential perfidy of justice, but because it shows how bad it can be, and yet, it has, as so very, very few of these cases ever do, a positive side that we have to consider.

I came into the case after the trial. As a person who lives in the country and pays attention to these things, I followed it carefully. I knew something about the ways of the judicial district in which the case was filed and the meaning of filing a case there. To call it the “rocket docket” is a disservice, unless you identify the rocket, because if there's a rocket in present use that would be similar, it would be the so-called depleted uranium-tipped missile, the silver bullet used in Iraq.

In other words, it's a lethal rocket. It's not a rocket that sought truth or intended justice. I had watched this court crush a beautiful young Vietnamese man, David Trong, whose father had been vice president of his native land, in the '50s. Because this tormented young man, seeing his country being destroyed, as a student dared to participate in campus demonstrations, against the war in Vietnam. And they actually put brought him to this court, claiming that he had engaged in espionage, pretty serious business. Now tell me how a young student from Vietnam, who's Vietnamese, can engage in espionage in the United States with members of the U.S. government, necessarily, and you'll explain a near-miracle to me.

I was prepared, therefore, for what might happened. I had followed the earlier case in Boston, which, by any measure, was an extremely peculiar case, both in its charges and its prosecution, and in its history. I knew the judge there as a fellow Texan, his brother, Page Keeton, had been dean of the law school where I started out, down at the University of Texas. The Boston judge is one of the old school, that doesn't like tricks, falsity, or injustice. He became outraged with the prosecution, and did a lot. I can't tell you he did all that a judge could have done. I believe Odin would agree, though, he did a lot. And not many judges, who come through a political conditioning process, have the courage to stand up to the power of the Executive Branch, to the FBI and others, and say the things that he did. And, that was almost an early end to a malicious prosecution.

But, in what was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. There are some, where the government itself may have done more and more wrongfully over a period of time; but the very networking and combination of federal, state, and local agencies, of executive and even some legislative and judicial branches, of major media and minor local media, and of influential lobbyist types, the ADL preeminently; this case takes the prize.

The purpose can only be seen as destroying--it's more than a political movement, it's more than a political figure; it is those two. But it's a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.

Being personally immersed in two other cases right now, which I'm going to mention briefly. One is Waco. Just the deadly firepower of the government on a church. That was a church. You won't find lawyers in this country, that spend as much time reading law books, as those folks in that church spent every day reading the Bible. You hear a lot of bad things about 'em, but I'll tell you, if you want to get someone who can quote the Bible, and quote the Bible, and q uote the Bible, they could do it. The other is the case of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rakhman, whose trial concluded yesterday, and whose jury charge was set today (196 pages). Closing arguments will begin Monday. Sheikh Rakhman, who is blind, memorized the Holy Koran at age 11.

And I don't mean just memorizing it like a child does. When he was 11 years old, and he could withstand tough interrogation by octogenarian Imams who had done nothing in their lives, really, but study, study, study. And these people in Waco were like that, with the Bible. Even the FBI concedes it: “Be careful, because all of a sudden, they'll recite whole books. You won't be able to get away.”

And yet, all this law enforcement was coming down on them. We didn't have that kind of violence, that physical violence, in the LaRouche case. But the potential from the government's side was entirely there. The day they went out to seize 2 million documents. These people produce a lot of paper, and it's not trash; it's not bureaucratic paper-keeping; you may not agree with it, but it's all saying things. They had several times more agents, armed, than the ATF force that initially attacked the Mt. Carmel Church outside Waco on Feb. 28, 1993. They just didn't have people on the other side, who were shooters.

But the potential was high; and I'd have to say, if I know law enforcement, that was the mindset on the day of the Leesburg raid.

I guess I'm really still caught with the idea, the old idea of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, that is ingrained in a lot of Americans, in particular, young lawyers, who are kind of idealistic and believe in the idea of freedom and the power of the word and the truth. I believe the truth can set us free. I think that's the struggle.

The real struggle, is whether we can see the truth in time. If we can see the truth, that we have killed 570,000 Iraqis, the overwhelming majority infants, children, elderly, chronically, and emergency medical cases, by the sanctions. We know it. We've been told time and time again. UNICEF says 500,000 under age 5. It's very hard to count. But there's bad water, and there's no medication for rehydration. There's no medication for common childhood diseases. There's severe malnutrition. They've never known marasmus and kwashikor until now.

If we knew the truth, we have to hope and believe that we wouldn't let it happen. It's a crime against humanity. I just wrote a letter to the United Nations about it yesterday, because on Sept. 8, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, we'll vote again, as to whether to continue those sanctions, which are killing people, because we want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. So we're going to kill all these babies?

You'll never justify to me the life of one child, to get rid of a political leader. You don't do it that way; because you corrupt yourself. You are worthless, if you'll take the life of that child, to change that political system. You are worthless, you are dangerous. This is a weapon of mass destruction, these sanctions.

The rich: it doesn't hurt them very much. They can buy what they need, even with the sanctions. But, the poor haven't got a chance. The mothers have no milk, there's no powdered milk. The infants are drinking water and sugar, and they're getting marasmus and kwashikor and other things, and malnutrition. They're dying. The truth could set us free.

In the LaRouche case, they're book people. (I have to confess to an intellectual weakness, I find reading easier than thinking, so I read constantly, nearly blinded myself from too much reading. I've got 15,000 books at home, read most them, unfortunately. As you can tell, I haven't learned much, but I haven't stopped yet.) These are book people. They had publishing houses going on. Important publications. Non-profit stuff. This is what they were about: ideas, information, social change. Meeting the needs of human people all over the world, humanity all over the world.

We're going to have a billion more people before the end of this millennium, and the vast majority, eighty percent are going to have beautiful, darker skin. And they're going to live short lives, short lives of sickness, hunger, pain, ignorance, and violence, unless we act radically. And these books have ideas. Some will work, some won't work, but they're ideas. They can be “tested in the marketplace,” as we used to say.

And the government came in with a false bankruptcy claim, against a non-profit publishing houses, and shut 'em down! What's the First Amendment worth? “We'll silence you, you'll have no books out there.”

And not only that: then they took people who were contributing and supposed to be paid back their loans to the publisher, and try to prosecute, falsely, on it. They put on witnesses, to give false testimony. From the tens and tens of thousands of contributors, and thousands of people who gave loans, the government came up with a baker's dozen, who got their feelings hurt, perhaps, and some who were mean-spirited enough to lie about it, and who didn't get their money back, although they were being paid back. Because anybody can have financial crunch, where you can't pay back immediately.

Imagine what would happen to political campaigns in this country, if you enforced law strictly against those who are raising money like this, by inquiring about all the people who gave money; whether they got what they wanted, what they expected and whether they were misled about it. Nobody could run for office.

We need some ideas, we need the good words out there. And that's why it had to be stopped, and that's why they came after LaRouche.

I read the record of the case. Absolutely no evidence to support a conviction there. If you take it all, if you exclude the parts that were false or venomous, there's not even a shell. But they had to say that this noble enterprise, agree or not with it, was corrupt. Corrupt; have nothing to do with it! It's corrupt! Nobody respects financial or other corruption. Destroy 'em that way.

They were put to trial, without any chance to prepare their case, and they made a valiant effort. But, they were convicted and got consecutive sentences. Unbelievable!

When the government will use that much force, that much energy, that much of its resources, to destroy an idea or movement of people--

Now let me go down to Waco for a few minutes. Those people that lived there, they built a church. They preached, and prayed and read the Bible together.

They had a fire. It burned the church down. Like any church, they had some problems, they had the son of one of the founders who has been in a state mental institution for many years now, who threatened somebody. Killed one person with an axe, threatened to come back.

They live in Texas, and they're not immune to the cultural values of the whole society, so some of 'em like guns. But, the fact is, that the number of guns in the church, per capita, were less than average Texas household. That's a statistical fact. It is too many guns, but it's not as many as other folks have, just plain old folks, all over the state of Texas. Most of their guns, in fact, 70 percent, were in two categories: collector's guns, old Texas Rangers six-shooters, and crated M-15s, M-16s, that were being sold at gun fairs. Gun fairs, it turns out, are big business. And, they're going on all over the country. People drive 250 miles in Texas, for the next gun fair.

Four or five of the folks in the church, at least one of whom had a license, started going to those gun fairs, and they were making money for the church.

They hadn't hurt anybody. The evidence of child abuse was non-existent. We all have seen demonization. We know how it can destroy people. You have to be extremely careful in scrutinizing it, or we'll be taken in, time and time again. The ATF had no evidence. I've reviewed this case ad nauseam with all the evidence that we have. If you look at the affidavit for the search warrant, they had no evidence. They had no knowledge, within five months, of any illegal weapons in the place.

To serve a search warrant, or to arrest David Koresh, would have been the easiest thing in the world. I have a good friend from Waco, Bernie Rapoport, who is the president of a big insurance company down there. He called me when he heard I was in the case and said, “you know, there's a good friend of mine who has a hardware store, two blocks from where I'm sitting. And he said David Koresh came in there on that Friday, and he's got the receipt. He'll give it to us. He got $139.00 worth of hardware.” There he is, walking the streets of Waco, buying hardware, the Friday before the Sunday raid, Sunday because that's when everybody's in the church. This is a church. And these ATF guys come in, they've got masks, they've got hoods, they've got firearms, and they get ambushed, surrounding the church, and on the roof of the church, with helicopters. That's an ambush.

ATF had an agent inside the church. (So much for the sanctity of the church.) They had an agent inside, and he couldn't find out, he'd been in there for months, whether there were guns in there. They had nothing from him about there being guns in there. He has said he didn't know of any guns in there, that were illegal. And yet, they come in with this huge force. We don't know exactly how many, but they have conceded at least 75 heavily armed agents, in what they conceded was a “surprise attack”; no knock. And then a 51-day siege, in which their psychologists dreamed up everything they could, to torment these people. One hundred and fifty-decibel music in the middle of the night. Sounds of rabbits screaming when they're being killed; Buddhist chants. Bright lights that make you board up the windows, because you can't sleep in the night. They turned the electricity off, cut the water off, tormented them about milk: “You want a little milk? Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, we'll see.” They called the night before the big, final day, saying, “We're going to have some milk for you at 11 in the morning.” That's to make 'em not be alerted.

And then, at 6 a.m., they come in with 11 armored vehicles, an Abrams tank, nine Bradleys, and one other tank, and three CEVs, Combat Engineering Vehicles. And they started gassing that entire church at 5:58 am. At 6:15 am, logs show that they have gassed the entire church even the new tornado shelter.

They gassed every room in the church, they've gassed it seven times. They start punching at the church with these vehicles, whamming it in, whamming it in, the whole back end had fallen in, the whole gym area had fallen in. Fires had started back there. As even the chief arson investigator for the joint task force said, any time you start running a 60-ton vehicle into a frame building, you've got a risk of starting a fire. That makes sense, particularly when there's no electricity, and you've been using kerosene for fires, and all the rest.

Determined to say the Davidians shot first, determined to say they killed themselves. Anybody who thinks they killed themselves, after enduring for six hours the battering and the gassing that they went through? And to say they killed themselves, they're all separated all over the place, it makes no sense. Nine got out. Of the nine that got out, not a single one says there was never any intention on anybody's part in there, to start a fire. They thought they were going to get out. One talked about having his suitcase packed, ready to go. He thought it was going to be resolved.

Janet Reno, after it's all over, said, “I don't know what else I could have done.” Which means, you might have to do it again. It couldn't have come out worse.

Of the 80 people that died, on the 19th of April, 1993, 21 were men. Twenty-seven were children under 18. The rest were women. They were incinerated by a government that didn't have to do anything.

The right to be let alone, the right to be let alone, is still one of the most comprehensive and treasured rights of a civilized people, and we were going to destroy this church, because we found it “threatening.”

I already mentioned, that on Tuesday, Sheikh Abdel Rakhman's final arguments will begin. That case is absolutely unbelievable. Here's a man who's in his late 50s, been blind since he was 10 months old, done nothing his whole life but pursue his religion. A fundamentalist who believes in the Koran, as do, in varying degrees, a billion and a half other people that call themselves Muslims on the planet. Overwhelmingly living in the poorest parts of the world, from Mauritania; well, even a huge country like Nigeria is close to 40 percent Muslim now, across North Africa and through the Middle East and Pakistan. India's still got more Muslims than any country in the world, except three. The old Soviet Union's got tens of millions of Muslims. Bangladesh. All through the Malaysian peninsula, Indonesia. One hundred and fifty-million. The Philippines, with a huge population, most living in poverty, many devout.

By far, the most rapidly growing religion in the world; in the United States, in the American prisons. There is nothing happening with Muslims in American prisons today, which are one of the worst places in the world, with a huge population growth. Our prison archipelago, has quintupled since 1980. It's unbelievable. We've got 5 million people, including Lyndon LaRouche, in some form of custody right now, because it includes parole supervision. We've got a million and a half incarcerated.

We have better than 27 percent of the African-American male population, between ages 16 and 25, in prison. In prison. I'm not talking about on parole.

Can you believe it? More than one in four. And, at the rate we're going, by 2010, we'll have half. If that doesn't make you know we've got to do something, then God help us. What do we think we're doing? Executions constantly. A man last night, severely retarded, severely retarded, executed in Arkansas, without a real hearing on whether he could have possibly understood what happened. Nobody cares. More than 3,000 on death row.

We're the world's Lord High Executioner. And here we take this Muslim cleric, we charge him with the World Trade Center [bombing], when the United States government knows as well as it knows anything in the world, that he had nothing to do with it, and knew nothing about it. And they're constantly getting new information, that shows he was never involved in it, in any way. They prosecuted people, and he was never mentioned in the trial.

He's charged with conspiring to murder Meir Kahane, a rabbi in Brooklyn. There were prosecutions for the murder of Meir Kahane. His name was never mentioned. They had absolutely no evidence that he had any knowledge, that he'd even heard of Meir Kahane, or even heard of the World Trade Center.

They can see he never committed an act. It would be almost impossible for him to commit a physical, criminal act, because he's blind, he's elderly, he's diabetic, he's not well. They claim he was the leader; but he didn't know most of the co-defendants. There were sixteen, it's now down to ten, nine plus him.

But what they want to say, is that some of the most famous Islamic scholars in the world are nothing but common terrorists, even if they're blind! “These Islamic people are dangerous.”

When he was asked about blowing up the U.N., he said, “it's not prohibited in Islam. Because jihad recognizes your right to attack a government. But you cannot attack the UN, because it is seen as a center for peace, and it will be bad for Muslims, and we cannot establish the case that it's a government opposed to Islam. And,” he says, “don't do it.”

The government informant, was paid one million dollars; one million dollars and an additional sixty-seven hundred dollars each month, for spending money.

So, here they've got this guy coming in, and trying to set up this blind cleric, who has a religious duty to hear everyone who comes in. He sits there all night, and hears everyone.

And these people come in, and this guy's asking him: “Is it all right for Muslims to attack --” “Is the UN the devil?” he asks. This is the translation. “Is it all right to attack the UN?” and he concedes, on cross-examination, that the Sheikh said, “No, don't do it.”

I've been through a lot of cases of persecution, more than I like to think about. And I've often said, even when you win, you lose. The Kent State students who were indicted after the Kent State massacre. I represented the president of the student body. We struggled with that case for four or five years. It set the family back. They've never gotten back on their feet.

I represented the Attica prison people. We got acquitted. And we try to win a civil case, which we've never won, it's still pending, going to be retried this winter. But the inmates: you can imagine the misery of their lives. Half of 'em are back in. Never gotten their lives together, never really had a chance.

Even in a case of religious commitment, like the Harrisburg Seven case. I represented Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth Mcalister. You had seven people called Catholic radicals, who were opposed to the war in Vietnam. They'd take their blood and go into drafts boards. They were indicted and accused of trying to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up the computers in the Pentagon, and stuff like that.

And we won the case. But it took five years. It took all their energy and attention. It created divisions. And the movement was never really reorganized.

So this is one reason to look at what's happening here. I just see it from afar, I'm just a lawyer. But talk about getting heavy bodyblows! This Lyndon LaRouche and his supporters and people who work with him: heavy bodyblows. Five, mean years in prison. Constantly worried about health, and all the rest. Continuing prosecutions, with unbelievable sentences: 77 years, 44 years. You can't say Draconian. They're essentially psychological death sentences, if not physical death sentences. Constantly coming at you. And there they are. And here we are.

And they're not only carrying on, they are prevailing. We have to examine that. We have to protect and support that. I want to see the Mount Carmel Church rebuilt. I want it to be a memorial to faith, and the indomitable spirit of humanity. I want to live with respect and love for the Muslim people. I want to help the Muslim people in their poverty and misery, as they are helping us in our prisons and elsewhere. We have to find out how you overcome, and how you prevail, and I think, in hearings like this, if we can simply devise the means to insist upon integrity and honor and principle, in government and in private life, and find the way to nourish ideas quickly, it can save us from the misery that faces us, unless we act with courage and compassion, now.

Thank you.

J.L. Chestnut: Many Americans believe, as I do, that there is a concerted effort by the Justice Department, and certain United States Attorneys, to target black officials. Among the people believing that are black mayors, black legislators, black officials, and even the Congressional Black Caucus, not one of the most aggressive and stand-up type groups. Evidence supporting this belief mounts almost by the hour. There's also developed what appears to be a pattern, of U.S. Attorneys picking high-profile black off icials, and using their prosecution as a stepping-stone to Congress, to the governor's mansion, or wherever.

I would be interested to hear what you have to say about that, as a former Attorney General of the United States?

Ramsey Clark: One of the--I started to say, burdens, I don't know exactly what it is--one of the things that happens when you are around a long time, and exposed to things like this, you realize the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, that there's no new thing under the sun. We lynched more than 3000 blacks in the first 30 years of this century, and the murder rates in parts of the country were vastly underreported because assassinations, or summary executions, of uppity young black males.

I watched Adam Clayton Powell. Lyndon Johnson was a funny man. He loved Adam Clayton Powell and the real reason was he'd been a school teacher. And he once told me, he said, “Ramsey, you won't understand this but that man has done more for education in the United States that anybody in our history.” And I thought, Lyndon Johnson can sure exaggerate. What's this supposed to mean? What about Horace Mann and all those other people. And I watched it and I testified a few times up there before him. Now we're trying to privatize public education. It's unbelievable.

 Adam Clayton Powell chaired the Education Committee of the House of Representatives. And, I read everything that comes out about him. Nobody has caught the dimension of this individual. Tell me an individual can't make a difference. His impact on public education in the United States was absolutely enormous. Heroic. They tried to prosecute him when I was Attorney General. I looked at that stuff; they'd come up with their files and they'd point to all these things.

He was a preacher of, course. He could out-preach any preacher. He was an incredible man. He had style. He had class. He meant a lot to the people around him, and to his whole constituency, because he said, “You can be somebody.” He said it long before Jesse Jackson was born. They had to put him down. Well, they never did convict him, of course. But finally, it was the Congress. One of my old buddies had to go in there and represent Adam at the end because he didn't care about money. He wasn't into that. He liked nice things, but he didn't ever save money. We had to get some lawyers to represent him in the congressional hearings, but they finally forced him out. Then, there was Congressman Diggs, from Detroit.

At one time, back in the old days, when we only had a handful of blacks in the Congress, virtually every member was under investigation. They were picking off leadership.

Of course it's going on. We would be absolutely blind to think it's not going on. And we really have to stand up to it. It's destroying leadership. It's destroying the ability to organize and be effective. It's to put a cap on things that they can't control. And I don't care if it's your worst political enemy. If they come after him on one of these bogus charges that we see constantly, stand up for them! Stand up with them! I'll tell you this. I have seen unbelievable talent, I don't want to go through the rolls it's kind of demeaning, but when I think of the beautiful congress people from Ohio and California and Texas--I mean people that could do anything--neutralized, destroyed, harassed.

 You know, at one time, a long time ago, I'd say in the early 70s or late 60s, perhaps, even, I helped organize a group of black elected officials. It had as its purpose, at a public information level, not a legal defense level, addressing just what you're talking about. And I think that is probably more important today even than it was then. I don't say we haven't made progress. We have. I've said earlier, that just seeing y'all here shows that we've made progress.

I remember what it was like before the Voting Rights Act. I spent the winter of '64-'65 in Selma. But, all that struggle and those deaths and we only increased voting registration in Dallas County, Alabama, from one percent to two percent. All they wanted to do was vote here in the world's greatest democracy. Those petitions that we carried to Montgomery were just for the right to vote. It seems unbelievable, doesn't it? That was all they were asking for. You'd think they were trying t o rob the National Treasury or something. All they wanted to do was vote. And they were getting shot, killed, beaten. And fear, fear, fear, you know it, cause you've been around a long time, too. Not as long as I have, but, the fear throughout the community: in Mississippi in '64 in November in the presidential election, less than seven percent of the voting age population of the state that was black, was registered. It was dangerous. But in '68, four years later, we had it up to 70%, but I've often observe d that white registration went up to 107%, at the same time.

J.L. Chestnut: Let me raise another matter with you. Thirty years since we struggled in Selma and places like that. As I sit here speaking to you now there is not a single entity, not a single institution in America that treats black folk with equal parity and equity. Not the church. Not the government. Not the universities. Not even the Red Cross. There was a time when we ran to the federal courts for justice. Now, we run from the federal courts. Do you really believe that a black person, bringing a civil righ ts action, in a federal court staffed mainly by appointees of Reagan and Bush, sitting in Mississippi and Alabama, can get justice?

 Ramsey Clark: The probability is very low. I think a few observations need to be made. There's a very good book called Unlikely Heroes. It is about folks on the Fifth Circuit. There are heroes in life. What is there to believe, if we don't believe in heroes. And, there were people on the Fifth Circuit who saved the constitutional integrity of the United States by defending the 14th Amendment. If the Fifth Circuit had capsized the Supreme Court couldn't possibly have handled the caseload. And the states wouldn't have accepted it. And we saw what happened.

 There was a time when, within this limited vision, there were judicial officers and even a Supreme Court, (remember Brown was 9-0), that believed that equality was desirable and possible and constitutionally mandated. And they wanted to do something about it. I don't believe in men on horseback, and I don't believe in salvation through individuals, but I knew Earl Warren well, and I do believe that his heart was pure and that within the limit of his vision he passionately desired to move our people on cons titutional principles of equality. And I think the courts were working that way, hard.

But, at the same time, you could go into a case before Judge Cox in Mississippi. He hauled our U.S. Attorney in once because I had ordered the U.S. Attorney to not prosecute a young man; a young African-American who was heading up a poverty program and doing a good job. And they didn't like that. You do a good job and that's dangerous, because it implied that black people had skills and talents and that poverty programs could work. So, they wanted to say he was corrupt and indict him. I looked at the evidence and said, “There's no evidence of corruption here. We're not going to indict that man, and we're going to see if we can get a little more funding for that program.” And Judge Cox held our U.S. Attorney in contempt--ordered an indictment, which he doesn't have the power to do. It went to the Supreme Court of the United States and we won, but that was the kind of struggle we had.

 You know, racism is deeply ingrained in the character of the American people. You don't go through the tortured history that we've had of, of, of slavery and economic servitude and suddenly have a generation that just doesn't have any racism anymore. It doesn't work that way. I believe that it can be overcome. I will always believe that. I can't accept anything else. But, if I know anything about what's happened the last thirty years, there was a deliberate, carefully planned, highly financed effort to change all that. To turn it around. To roll it back. To eliminate from the court anybody who would stand for racial justice.

 I took a lot of abuse in the government. That's why Nixon said the first thing he was going to do was get a new Attorney General. But I took more abuse for resisting pressure on judicial appointments than probably anything else, including opposition to the death penalty and opposition to wiretapping and all the rest. These Senators had classmates, or whoever it was, and they were determined to make him a judge and he's a terrible racist. And you put a racist on a federal court and you have do ne a terrible thing to a whole population for half a generation or longer! A terrible thing. It is a criminal thing to do. And I fought, and fought. And President Johnson would get very upset and say, “You know, Senator so-and-so just demands we do that. We've got to do that. He's voted for us on this. He's holding this up. He won't do this.” And I would say, “You'll have to get a new Attorney General. I won't do that. I'm not going to send that name over here. You can do it without me if you want to; you're the President. I'm just the Attorney General. I'm not going to do it.” And actually, I think he appreciated that.

 You can talk about Roosevelt's court packing, but the court packing that's gone on since.... I don't know how you feel about the Clarence Thomas thing. But I loved Thurgood Marshall as I loved my own father and mother and children and grandchildren. I knew him most of my adult life. He took my father's seat on the court. I remember the night of the riots in Washington; he came back over and sat in the chair in my office and I said, “Thurgood, what are you doing here?” He was on the court then. He said, “I know I'm not supposed to be here, but it's the only place to be.” He just came in and he said, “I want to bear witness.” He just came and sat there. But to replace him with Clarence Thomas, is calculated. There has been a deliberate, nationwide effort to pack the courts with people who won't enforce the 14th Amendment or the statutes enacted under it that guarantee equality. Nothing hurts any human being worse than to be treated in a demeaning way compared to others. So we've got work to do with the federal judiciary.

But, over-reliance on the judiciary is a terrible weakness. The real power of the judiciary is extremely limited. We'll get the kind of courts we demand and deserve.

It's extremely difficult today. It was never easy, even in the best of times, but there was a time when we put some judges on the bench who were real heroes. And they had crosses burned in their yards and they were reviled. We've got to work for a day in which we know the people who go on the courts of the federal government and the state governments and the local governments are personally committed to equal justice, equal justice under law.

Ulysses Jones: As a former attorney general, you were acknowledging that the problems that exist with the investigation of African-American elected officials; that it is almost commonplace in the Department of Justice and departments within the Department of Justice. How does an Attorney General, who knows what's going on, that these charges are at best vague, continues to stand by and let the department falsely accuse and go after elected officials in the manner that they're doing? And, it's been going on for decades.

 Ramsey Clark: Well, I don't think an Attorney General can. But, you may not have the power to correct it. I never claimed the power to fire J. Edgar Hoover. He was director of the FBI before I was born. And, if the President had to choose between me and Hoover; and I don't care whether it was Kennedy or Johnson; and I was the assistant to Robert Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy had as much use for Mr. Hoover as I did. I can't say that I really know what President Kennedy thought, but I can guess. But he wouldn't dare touch him. But, you either enforce the law fairly as to important matters, or you resign. That's your choice.

In the years that I was Attorney General, there was not a single prosecution by the Department of Justice, as far as I can recall, of a black elected official.

On the Janet Reno issue today: you know, I've been very anxious for her. I really think she's got good qualities in her. But, she knows that Waco was wrong. She has to know that Waco was wrong. There's no way you can have eighty people die like that. All you had to do was leave them alone. And, to say she doesn't know what else she could have done? With all those dead people and all those children. You have to have people who will face up, and if they won't, you've got to make them face up. The congressional hearings were a real instruction. We have to be very careful. What I saw in the congressional hearings on Waco was that there was not a member, none of them, with the courage, not a single one, in the obvious face of misconduct by the FBI. They're willing to attack the ATF a little bit, because it's not big. It's not powerful. It's endangered anyway, for a variety of other reasons, so they'll attack the ATF a little bit. But you don't have, in the Congress, a political figure with the will to stand up to law enforcement. And the reason is, we've let the fear of crime so overwhelm us, no one will risk being attacked, not just by the FBI, but the law enforcement constituency as a whole. “You're soft on crime; you're weak on crime. You've got criminal associations.” You're going to be prosecuting yourself! None of them had the will to do it.

So, they let people get up there and say anything. They testified to things that were different than what they testified to in the San Antonio trial. We'll see how that comes out, because that's perjury.

Senator Fielding: I wanted to address a question to Mr. Clark, if I might.

I was particularly interested, Mr. Clark, in some of the things that I had heard here, right here, in the last couple of days. I've been impressed with your knowledge, and certainly impressed with your political outlook and your philosophical outlook, and your compassion.

But I've heard some things here, in the past two days, that really bother me tremendously, about the United States Justice Department. We have heard tales of what I think is actually criminal and deliberate suppression of evidence by certain sections of the OSI, in the Justice Department; and also what you call prosecutorial abuse, by that particular section in the Justice Department, and by the Justice Department as a whole. It really bothers me. And, I'd like to know, just what we can do specifically, to ensure that this doesn't happen in the future?

Ramsey Clark: Well, I think your interpretation of what you heard is right.

I think OSI is such a special office. It arose from hatred. It is a generation after World War II, you've got septuagenarians and octogenarians. Isn't there any chance, or hope in life, for reconciliation; for redemption? The moral of OSI is: if you can find a Nazi, who's 95 years old and on his death bed and death rattle, and you can get to him, and strangle him before he dies, do it! Really!

I've watched them strike fear in whole communities, in Toronto, Canada, and southern California, among Lithuanians and people from all over east Europe; because the elders are about to be grabbed, to appease hatred.

Statutes of limitations are special things, but there comes a time, when you ought to believe, that reconciliation is possible. You never forget. Because the long struggle for freedom, is between memory and forgetting. You don't forget; but you do reconcile. You do recognize our common humanity, and you try to pull people back together.

So this office is special; and, because it was born in hatred, it does the thing that hatred does. The OSI ought to be abolished. It should never have been created. It's an instrument of hatred, when there ought to be an end to it.

It's not, however, the office that caused Waco or so many other things. We have a new and dangerous mentality. We have developed a police mentality, that loves the SWAT team. The image of the SWAT team. They absolutely love it! They don't believe they're real policemen, unless they can came in with a Rambo fire capacity and shoot up the place.

We worked hard at the idea that a police officer is a public servant. He is a civil servant; with an obligation to serve the community, to reconcile, to prevent violence, not to cause violence. To solve problems, not to create problems.

I believe community service training for police, is absolutely essential. But now, we have a mentality of police at war with the public. It's an extension of Green Beret warfare, to the domestic scene. We have to stop it.

The prosecutors fall in with it. They identify people that they want to eliminate, and they go after them. And it's a pretty awful experience, when they come. You need lots of friends and support if we hope to protect the country from it.

Marino Elseviff: My name is Marino Elseviff. I'm a lawyer from the Dominican Republic. The case of Mr. LaRouche: we have been aware of it from the beginning. We have been close to his movement since 1974. We are convinced that there is political persecution against him, and I believe that the hegemonic centers of power in the United States are the ones who pressured for his persecution, as well as certain economic power centers, such as the IMF.

At this stage of the game, how do you see the possibility of asking the Congress of the American people, for a hearing? As someone said here yesterday, we are 20 minutes away from Washington.

Ramsey Clark: We've been trying in every way we can, others much more than I, to make the LaRouche case known. I personally have appeared at meetings in Europe and North America. There have been books and pamphlets and there's a constant flow of literature and verbal communication.

We've tried, for I can't tell you how many years right now, but several years, to explore the possibility of fair hearings in the Congress.

Hearings are risky in a highly political environment like this. We saw how the Waco hearing went.

But there's a continuing effort. I think it will bear fruit. We've asked the Department of Justice for a comprehensive review. Lyndon LaRouche has always asked for a review, not only of his case, but of all cases where there are allegations of serious misconduct. And so, we've always done that. That's his vision. It happens to be my vision, too, of how you correct things.

But the capacity of the Department of Justice for self-criticism, is of a very low order. It has two offices that are charged with the responsibility. One's called the Office of Professional Responsibility, and one's called the Office of the Inspector General, and neither have ever done anything very serious that I'm aware of.

So our efforts to secure a review of injustice; we've tried in the courts; and we got short shrift. We had to go back to the same judge who ran the railroad the first time.

So, we have to find solid means. The media's a great problem. The media's controlled by wealth and power that prefers the status quo, and it's very sophisticated in how it manages these matters. I can take a cause that they're interested in, that's virtually meaningless, and be on prime time evening news. And I can take on a cause of what I consider to be international importance of the highest magnitude, that they oppose, and shout from the rooftops, and you'd never know I existed. That's the way it works. That's one reason that LaRouche's publications are so important; the books and magazines and newspapers that spread the word, even though they're minor compared with the huge international media conglomerates that we're confronted with. But they reach thinking people, and they spread the word.

I think we'll get our hearing in time, and I think it'll be a reasonably short time, but to be meaningful, it's going to take a regeneration of moral force in the American people.

I'm both an optimist and an idealist. I believe that the civil rights movement was the noblest expression in my time. I think it was real and vital, and passionate. And I think it consumed the energies and faith of several millions of people. We really believed in it. We were marching and singing and doing.

We have to have a moral regeneration and energy and commitment and faith and belief, that we can overcome; that equality is desirable; that justice is essential; that a life of principle is only worth living; then we'll get our hearings. Then we won't need our hearings.

Dr. Miklosko: The State Department publishes an annual report about human rights violations all over the world. I'm vice chairman of the Helsinki Commission. A week ago, I was asked for information about human rights problems in Slovakia. And, I asked them about human rights violations in the United States. We've arranged a meeting for the end of September. After this hearing, I have many interesting arguments for them.

My question is: they tell us that human rights compliance is very important for the attitude of the United States to Slovakia, as far as financial assistance through Congress is concerned.

And my question is: By what philosophy and motivation, can America make such a report every year, and absolutely ignore its own situation at home? And, who should write such a report about human rights violations in America; because there are too many.

Ramsey Clark: Yes. This is a very important observation for, particularly, the Americans here. I worked for years to get those so-called state reports authorized. The Congressional Black Caucus worked hard for it. They're highly political.

The State Department criticizes our political enemies, and ignores our political friends. As President Roosevelt said of Somoza: he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch, so we don't criticize him.

And we have this myth: there are no political prisoners in the United States; there're no injustices in the United States. Oh, there may be mistakes from time to time, but we're the world's greatest democracy.

But, money dominates our political process. That has to be understood, to realize where we are. It absolutely dominates the political process, the political figures, and the acts of the government.

So we need introspection. We need to know ourselves; but we desperately need the help of our friends around the world.

I've always opposed the death penalty. In 1965, I brought the DOJ out against the death penalty for the first time in our history. But now.... I always use South Africa as the illustration. South Africa was the Lord High Executioner. They were executing several hundred a year. And most years, they were all black.

Today, the Supreme Court of South Africa, has abolished the death penalty. South Africa does not have a death penalty. They are not executing. There is moral leadership, that says we don't do that, because we know who gets executed. It's the poor, and those who can make a difference, like Stephen Biko. We don't do it. But now, we've got three thousand people on death row in America!

If you examine our criminal justice system; now, I know this sounds awful, and I don't mean to detract from the horror of the political prosecutions, like Lyndon LaRouche; but if you examine our criminal justice system, you'll see that it is little more than a means of controlling young male minority members, who are given very little chance in this society, to do anything. We're roundin' 'em up and sendin' 'em to prison, that's what we're doing.

We're not sending them to college. We're not supporting their families, so they can have a chance. We're not doing the things you have to do, if we want all that talent to be liberated, for everybody's joy and good. And if that's not a political crime, I don't know what is. That doesn't mean that they didn't mug somebody. It simply means, that we won't pay attention to what causes it.

We need to be indicted for our prison system. We have built more prison housing in the last ten years, than public housing. Can you believe it? For the whole population! And there's not a city in the United States, that doesn't have thousands and thousands of homeless people, and tens of thousands of families struggling to survive, in inadequate housing, dangerous housing, unhealthy housing. And we're spending more on prisons, than public housing? Madness!

Representative Percy Watson: Mr. Clark, would you share with us some of your experiences and ideas, about the Internal Revenue Service involvement in some of the oppressive actions that we have been talking about here today?

Ramsey Clark: It's serious, and it's major. Historically, it arose from the fact, that a large segment of the African-American population, didn't file income tax returns. The reason was, they didn't have income. Or, they were making little income. Or it just didn't seem to be a part of their lives: “It's not a part of my life. They exclude me from everything else. I'm not a part of any other segment of the society. What's the IRS to me? I don't know anything about it.”

So, in the early years, the IRS was the most convenient, the easiest, enforcement agency for addressing black leadership, black elected officials, preachers, and all the rest, because there was a common high-frequency of non-filing. And they had the goods. I mean, even though it was true that they didn't usually prosecute others for that.

Anyway, we have to watch IRS and we have to stop it. I think it is a priority, but it's a lower priority than some of the other prosecutorial abuses right now.

Thanks very much for your patience. I know I answered long, but I'm from Texas, what else can I say?

James Mann: Well, you've been on the stand for two hours, and we thank you very much.

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