Looks like Saddam Hussein's found himself an American mouthpiece:

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said Friday that he would be willing to provide legal counsel to Saddam Hussein if the ousted Iraqi leader requested Clark's assistance.

"I would seek to help him protect his rights if he needed my help and I felt that there was no one who's willing who could do it better,'' Clark said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I would have no hesitation. That's my work. That's my chosen pursuit - to protect rights. His rights need protecting.''

His rights need protecting, and of course Ramsey Clark needs the publicity. Clark, who has made a career out of associating with such organizations as International ANSWER -- a Stalinist group that organized rabidly anti-American protests over the past year -- manages to get himself interviewed on a regular basis despite his connections to lunatic-fringe groups. This is no exception. I understand the need under the Consititution for everyone to have legal counsel, and of course I believe that Saddam, if he is tried, should be represented by such, although I'd love to see him represent himself instead. But for Ramsey Clark, it goes way beyond his "calling" as an attorney, as the interview explains:

Clark also lashed out at the Bush administration for the military's handling of the ex-Iraqi president since he was discovered last weekend hiding underground near his hometown of Tikrit.

'My two main concerns would be about the way he's being treated from the standpoint of human rights, and my belief that the humiliation that he has suffered causes hatred and will be harmful to the interests of the United States,'' Clark said.

Clark is most concerned about Saddam's civil rights, not his guilt or innocence? Is that how defense attorneys approach cases? What he wants is an international platform with which to bash the Bush administration for going to war in the first place, not for giving Saddam a physical in front of a video camera. Fortunately, Clark goes completely off the rails later on:

The 76-year-old Clark, who was attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, is a staunch anti-war advocate who has met with Saddam on several occasions in the past decade. He most recently sat down with the former Iraqi leader in February, in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion.

Clark described Saddam as dignified, reasonable and an interesting person. ``He is a human being,'' Clark said.

Clark has assisted other despised leaders before. He has consulted several times with one-time Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who is on trial in The Hague for alleged war crimes committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Saddam Hussein: "dignified, reasonable, and an interesting person." Perhaps. But so were many of the 400,000 people or so he had murdered and buried in mass graves, quite a few of the women and children he had gassed to death at Halabja, and the hundreds of thousands he had tortured in his prisons. It is not terribly surprising that Clark finds him interesting, as Clark seems to take an interest in plenty of genocidal tyrants like Hussein and Milosevic.

I, on the other hand, do not find Ramsey Clark interesting; I find him pathetic. I wonder why the media keeps finding him interesting.

UPDATE: Power Line is all over this as well, and Big Trunk notes that Clark's heart belongs to Saddam.

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