Former attorney general Ramsey Clarke, who cofounded the radical Stalinist group International ANSWER, is back in his element, bashing America and standing up for the worst human monsters: Former US Attorney General joins Saddam’s defence team.

One of America’s most renowned human rights lawyers has astonished even close friends and supporters by taking on Saddam Hussein as a client and describing the former Iraqi dictator as “reserved, quiet, thoughtful and dignified”.

While most of the world regards Saddam as a brutal dictator who gassed entire villages, launched wars that cost millions of lives and murdered thousands of political opponents, Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney General, said he had been unfairly “demonised” by his captors.

Mr Clark spoke about his client, who faces trial in an Iraqi court for war crimes, after returning to the US from Jordan, where he met other members of his legal team for the first time. He provoked a furore by declaring that Saddam had been subjected to “savage” treatment by his American captors and comparing it with the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. “Demonisation is the most dangerous form of prejudice,” he said. “Once you call anything evil, it’s easy to justify anything you might do to harm that evil. Evil has no rights, it has no human dignity, it has to be destroyed. That’s how you get your Fallujahs, your Abu Ghraibs, your shock-and-awes.” …

He said he was shocked by the “savage presentation” of Saddam after US forces found him hiding in a hole in the ground. The former Iraqi leader was “dishevelled, with his mouth open, people probing his mouth,” Mr Clark told the New York Observer. “This is hardly the road to peace if you want respect for human dignity.”

He said the court that would try Saddam was “a creation of the US military occupation” and did not meet the standards of international law.