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Upon
reading your “open letter” to Vlada Krsljanin a few days ago I see that
Emperor’s-Clothes and its chump collaborators continue their breathless descent
into gutter journalism. It’s hard
to know where to start dissecting this latest stinker lobbed the way of Ramsey
Clark and IAC, except to perhaps borrow the observation of a friend who pointed
out that if Clark *had* to be a
U.S. gov’t agent in the anti-war movement owing to his past functions as
Attorney General, then by an identical logic William Blum (former State Dept)
and Philip Agee (former CIA) must be agents too.
Oh, but
I guess I shouldn’t overlook that other - and the *only* other - exhibit of “proof” you offer
up that Clark’s change of political stance couldn’t be real, viz, because he
hasn’t been bumped off yet! You
meant this seriously, did you? (and does this mean that Blum and Agee are just
living on borrowed time?) I guess I
shouldn’t be surprised by such reasoning, coming from a collaborator on a
website which loftily claims to have proven that 9-11 was an inside job by Bush
and Co. cuz the suicide planes weren’t shot down. For folks who profess such opposition to
the kangaroo justice being dealt Milosevic at the Hague tribunal and the
latter’s flimsy evidentiary standards, you operate a pretty cavalier and
self-serving judge-jury-executioner service
yourselves. Perhaps
since you’re writing “open” letters you might care to enlighten us in the broad
public as to the “process” - voting, discussion, whatever - which led to the
supposedly “official” website of the ICDSM running the first of Emperor’s
Clothes’ smear attacks on Clark/IAC on May 17th of this year, at a
time when Clark was not only a member of the ICDSM, but, from all available
evidence, its co-chairman.
Since
it strained credulity that an article attacking Clark and casting him as an
instrument of the Hague Tribunal and U.S. gov’t would have appeared at the
website of a committee claiming Mr. Clark among its membership, I tried to
confirm the committee membership list by clicking on the link at the ICDSM
website entitled “Committee members.”
Unfortunately, and curiously, the link didn’t work. This was on May 18th. The link didn’t get restored until quite
a bit later, many days later, as memory serves, and it then showed Clark as a
committee member still - I guess that bespeaks the committee’s tolerance, that
it would knowingly allow an “agent” in its ranks after publishing on its site an
article calling him one - but that he’d been “demoted” from the
co-chairmanship. The diss on Clark
was yanked shortly after it appeared, though it stayed up at the Emperor’s
Clothes site. Then we read on June
3rd (E-C) that a Mr. Nico Varkevisser - co-author of the smear series
on Clark - had a 4-hr meeting with Milosevic on May 31st. *Then* we read on June 13th (E-C)
- nearly a month after the first attack on Clark was ephemerally run on the
website of a committee he chaired! - that “For
two years he [Clark] was entrusted with the position of honorary co-President
[sic - his title was co-chairman, not co-President, and there had never been any
mention of “honorary” before - this qualification was added by E-C post
facto. See this link:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/resistancepoliticalfront/message/19887
–
jy] of the ICDSM, the group organized to counter media lies about the Serbs and
President Milosevic. Clark no
longer holds that position. He was removed following a decision reached with the
agreement of President Milosevic.”
This
is interesting wording, which suggests the initiative to remove Clark from the
chairmanship didn’t originate with Mr. Milosevic, but rather elsewhere, and that
somebody had “run the idea by” Mr. Milosevic for approval. It wasn’t perchance Mr. Varkevisser
during their mtg of May 31st, was it? Oh, please, enlighten us Andy, since you
favour *open* discussion of this
matter. If it was on May
31st that Milosevic gave his agreement to this decision which had
been “reached,” then who “reached” it, and when? And who authorized the sleazy baiting of
Clark/IAC on the ICDSM website on May 17th, two weeks before
Varkevisser’s mtg with Milosevic?
Who? The full committee,
which includes Clark himself and other IAC’ers among its membership, as well as
Vlada? Its chairmen? That doesn’t seem very likely, does
it? Please answer this Andy, and
answer it fully, cuz you throw charges around about coup attempts, but the
actions outlined above and their timeline suggest a coup attempt from another
quarter. Since
you’re credited for “research” on the May 17th smear job on Clark
which appeared and then disappeared from the ICDSM website, I gather we can
trace back to you the responsibility for brewing up that apocryphal tempest in a
teapot about Clark “posing” as Milosevic’s lawyer, yes? I’ve listened to/watched the entire
..ram clip of Clark’s talk and the Q&A which followed at the National Press
Club more than once, and at *no*
time does Clark “pose” as Milosevic’s lawyer. He was indeed asked why he represented
Milosevic, and then, in an attempt to confirm he heard the question properly, he
asked his interlocutor, using the conditional, “Why *would* I?” [represent
Milosevic, i.e., why *would* I, if asked, if called upon to, etc], to which she
replied “mhmm” [=yes] and he then went on to answer the question based on the
hypothetical situation his phrasing implied. This is frankly obvious to any native
speaker of English, who will automatically understand the conditional (“would” +
verb) to be evoking a hypothetical situation, and it’s obvious not just from
viewing and listening to the full clip, but even from the transcribed snippet
which you used in your hatchet job.
So what’s your excuse for this Andy, and what’s Jared’s? You’re both native speakers of English,
right? (let’s leave Varkevisser out
of this for the time being). The
only poseurs here are the characters at E-C posing as internet muckrakers.
If
Ramsey Clark is indeed a U.S. gov’t agent, he’s left a byzantine and laborious
serious of feints over many years to throw us off the track, hasn’t he? He/IAC were vocal and principled
defenders of Yugoslavia before, during, and after Nato’s bombing. And thinking back, let’s see, there were
his tireless efforts to bring to public attention the scope of U.S. criminal
aggression against the people of Panama, establishing a truth commission which
documented casualties in the 1000’s, rather than the risible claims put out by
the Pentagon of a death toll in the dozens, and which were swallowed hook line
and sinker by America’s pushover press.
Funny that an “agent” would want to expose such lies, when virtually
nobody in America’s media was even probing the official line. Then there were his tireless efforts to
denounce and oppose U.S. aggression and genocide against Iraq. He was among the very first to denounce
economic sanctions against that country, at a time when most of America’s
designer left and social democracy raised the odious slogan “sanctions, not war”
which implicitly recognized the racist concept of the West acting as
“disciplinarian” over Iraq. His
book “The Fire this Time” is a searing indictment of U.S. policy in the Gulf and
in the Middle East generally, and makes for interesting comparison with the
disgraceful apologetics for Israeli brutality and aggression in the Occupied
Territories which have become a regular offering of your pals at
“Emperor’s-Clothes.” I don’t know
how seriously I should take pronouncements about who’s really a “socialist” and
who isn’t when they come from a collaborator on a website whose latest
hobbyhorse is to prettify a genocidal colonial apartheid project in Palestine,
and who goes toe to toe with America’s Christian Right and Israel’s far right in
whitewashing the history of Zionism, in baiting Palestinians and Muslims,
etc. I
have no idea how seriously Mr. Milosevic regards your efforts but for his sake
and for the sake of the very worthy anti-imperialist cause that he represents
and has fought for, I hope he cuts you loose, as well as your pals at E-C who
pimp off his name for their own unseemly ends. Sincerely, Jim
Yarker Québec |
