Ramsey Clark Doesn't Read Tom Clancy

Ramsey Clark must not have read Tom Clancy. Not the newest Tom Clancy tomes mind you, but the middle books in the Jack Ryan series - Debt of Honor and Executive Orders. At the end of Debt of Honor, Congress is vaporized, along with the President of the US and most high ranking officials when a Japanese pilot crashes his 747 into a joint session of Congress. Jack Ryan was being presented as the next Vice President of the US at the time, after the former VP [Kealty] was forced to step down due to a scandal.

In Executive Orders, Kealty believed that he should be the President of the US since it was unclear whether he was properly sworn in. When a new national crisis arises forcing a quarantine to be imposed because of a nasty virus spread by a terrorist outfit, Kealty, a former attorney, acts. He brings a lawsuit claiming that the acts are unconstitutional and that the orders should be lifted. It's a move that he hopes would install him as President instead of Ryan.

Problem for Kealty is that he drafted the papers for the lawsuit naming Jack Ryan as the President of the United States of America.

The court has settled another important constitutional issue here. In referring to President Ryan by both his name and the title of his office, the court has settled the succession question raised by former Vice President Kealty. Further, the court said that that order was vacated. Had Mr. Ryan not been the President, the order would have been invalid and never legally binding, and the court could have stated that as well. Instead, the Court acted improperly on point, I believe, but properly in a procedural sense. Thank you. [page 743 - Executive Orders]

It's bad form to try and get what you want when you admit the obvious.

Ramsey Clark has all but admitted for the world to see that Saddam Hussein was guilty as charged in the 1982 murders of 148 Shi'ite men and boys in the town of Dujail. As Hitchens puts it:

Ramsey Clark believes that A) the massacre and torture did occur and B) that it was ordered by his client and C) that he was justified in ordering it and carrying it out. That is quite sufficiently breathtaking. It is no less breathtaking when one recalls why Saddam "had this huge war going on." He had, after all, ordered a full-scale invasion of the oil-bearing Iranian region of Khuzestan and attempted to redraw the frontiers in Iraq's favor. Most experts accept a figure of about a million and a half as the number of young Iranians and Iraqis who lost their lives in consequence of this aggression (which incidentally enjoyed the approval of that Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter). And Ramsey Clark says that the aggression is an additional reason to justify the massacre at Dujail.

Not only does this mean that Saddam's defense counsel has been undermined by Clark's statements, but that Clark is monumentally inept in trying to defend his 'client.'