WASHINGTON – One can understand Saddam Hussein raging against the judge at his trial. But what is a former attorney general of the United States, Ramsey Clark, doing at the ousted Iraqi dictator’s side?

Mr. Clark, 77, is currently defending Saddam Hussein at the war crimes tribunal in Baghdad. The activist and lawyer, who served as President Johnson’s attorney general in the 1960s, became a leader of the movement against the war in Vietnam in 1969 and visited communist Hanoi in 1972.

Since then, Mr. Clark has provided counsel to a colorful cast of war criminals and despots. They include accused Yugoslavian war criminals charged with genocide, Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic.

They include members of the Palestine Liberation Organization who, in their hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1986, shot and threw overboard an elderly, wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

They include Karl Linnas, a Nazi who headed up the concentration camp at Tartu, Estonia, where Mr. Linnas was involved in the murders of thousands of prisoners. And they include a former Liberian dictator, Charles Taylor; a convicted leader of the Rwandan genocide, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, and the leader of the Branch Davidian cult, David Koresh. Mr. Clark also defended Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “blind sheikh” convicted in 1995 of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and plotting terrorist attacks against other New York City targets.

The attorney who prosecuted the American government’s case against Mr. Abdel Rahman, Andrew McCarthy, said that Mr. Clark chooses cases that “get him politically motivated, and what seems to get him politically motivated is anything that is distinctly anti-American.”

Mr. McCarthy criticized both Mr. Clark’s clientele and defense strategy, saying it amounted to arguing that, since Mr. Clark had been an attorney general of the United States, and since he was defending Mr. Abdel Rahman, Mr. Abdel Rahman must therefore not be a terrorist.

“He was ballistically angry when I made a motion before the trial to ask the judge to preclude him from mentioning to the jury that he had been attorney general of the United States,” Mr. McCarthy said.

The fact that Mr. Clark had risen to that position, Mr. McCarthy said, was partly the result of Mr. Clark’s lineage, and “says more about the frightening era in which he was made attorney general than about him.”

Mr. Clark, a native of Dallas, Texas, was appointed attorney general by President Johnson in 1967. His father, Thomas Clark, was then an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and stepped down three months after his son’s appointment, apparently to avoid conflicts of interest. Some reports indicate that Ramsey Clark’s appointment was motivated by President Johnson’s desire to create a Supreme Court vacancy in order to name Thurgood Marshall as the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice.

Mr. Clark’s bid for elective office – a 1974 run for the Senate from New York – resulted in a loss to Republican Jacob Javits. A chronicler of Mr. Clark’s career and the United Nations correspondent of the left-leaning magazine the Nation, Ian Williams, attributed Mr. Clark’s activism to an attitude among the American left that “assumed that if the U.S. wanted something, the opposite must be true.”

Mr. Clark, Mr. Williams added, had been “inveigled by this quasi-cult” of far-left activists, and “none of his former acquaintances invite him to cocktail parties anymore,” leaving Mr. Clark little exposed to mainstream political circles and thought.

A message left at Mr. Clark’s law offices in New York seeking comment went unreturned. Requests for comment to two organizations established by and affiliated with Mr. Clark – the International Action Center and International ANSWER – also went unreturned.