Christopher Hitchens sharpens his talons on the vile Ramsey Clark. It is fine that Clark, a former attorney general, as is constantly pointed out, wants to uphold the principle that anyone, even a mass murderer, deserves a lawyer. But Clark goes so much further than that.

Yet before he had even had his credentials accepted by the court, Clark announced that his client was a) guilty of disgusting atrocities and b) justified in having committed them.

To be exact, in an interview with the BBC last week and another in the New York Times on Tuesday, Mr. Clark addressed the charge that in 1982, after an apparent attempt on his life in the Iraqi town of Dujail, Hussein had ordered the torture and murder of about 150 men and boys from the area.

Far from denying that any such horror had occurred — and it is one of the smaller elements in the bill of indictment — Clark asserted that it was justifiable. He has now twice said in public that, given the war with the Shiite republic of Iran, Hussein was entitled to take stern measures. "He had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt," he told the BBC.

To this he calmly added that he himself had more than once been shoved aside by Secret Service agents eager to defend the president of the United States (and of course one remembers the mass arrests, beatings and executions that followed the assassination attempts on presidents Ford and Reagan). It is as if Hussein had not started, by his illegal, blood-soaked invasion of Iran, the "huge war" that Clark cites as the excuse for Hussein then turning his guns on Iraqis.

As Hitchens points out, the anti-Bush crowd is so much more exercised about all the crimes they allege against Bush than the fact that Saddam Hussein will not be able to continue his crimes against human nature.

And, by the way, have you noticed that Saddam's shenanigans in court, disrupting proceedings and turning all the focus onto him rather than his crimes seemed to have coincided with the arrival of Ramsay Clark there to defend him? Doesn't it seem that Clark is there to handle the PR for Saddam rather than his defense. As Hitchens points out, Clark is all over the place agreeing that Hussein is guilty. He's just trying to "spin" the murder of more than a hundred people in response to an assassination plot.