Last night, a “War Crimes Tribunal” convened at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on Amsterdam Avenue. On trial for not only war crimes but also crimes against humanity were President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks, Attorney General Ashcroft, and “others to be named.”

Having grown up in America, I had never witnessed an actual show trial, so I decided to have a look. When I arrived there at about 4 p.m. yesterday afternoon, hundreds of mostly normal looking people were spread out among the school’s classrooms listening to “testimony.”

I dropped in on a session called “Planning and Preparing for Wars in the Middle East” at which the main speaker was one Samia Haliby. “The accused are the U.S. government and its corporate handlers – the so-called captains of industry, the colonizing British government and its bourgeoisie now turned clients of the U.S., the United Nations, the International Zionist Movement, the Israeli government, the Jewish terrorist gangs…They are accused of criminal conspiracy, of criminal deception, and of executing a crime against the international working class and humanity.”

The references to the “bourgeoisie” and the “international working class” were a signal that the organization convening this trial was of an ideological persuasion that most of us thought went out of style with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The sponsor of the tribunal was the International Action Center, which has offices off Union Square in Manhattan and is the force behind International Answer. Behind both is the Workers World Party.

A radical journalist and author, L.A. Kauffman, has written, “The IAC was founded after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. It’s a front group for the Workers World Party, a four decade-old socialist organization with some super-creepy politics. Workers World applauded the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, supported the murderous regime of Romania dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and caused a major and ridiculous split in the antiwar movement during the Gulf War by refusing to criticize the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.”

One might dismiss this as the loony left, and on some level, it clearly is. But International Answer has managed to worm its way into the wider movement against the Iraq war. But as the evening wore on and more people crowded into the school auditorium, it became clear that at least some ordinary Americans are susceptible to their message. There were hundreds of people, right here in Manhattan, who believe President Bush is a war criminal and America is a rogue nation. They weren’t all obviously radical in appearance. Some of them were wearing khakis and button-downed shirts.

At about 6:30 p.m., the plenary session began and the text of the indictment was read, charging the American leaders of “waging a war or aggression against the sovereignty of Iraq.”

Then there were reports from around the world. An Iraqi-French documentary filmmaker who had coordinated a similar tribunal in Brussels, Hana Al-Bayaty, said “I think we really need to support the Iraqi resistance,” which she called “a fight that is opposed to the rule of the market.” This won thunderous applause from the crowd. “The Iraqis are fighting with weapons when we have the opportunity to fight with words,” she said.

Ms. Al-Bayaty praised a “coalition of nationalists, leftists, and Islamists” who are “fighting for democracy” and Iraq’s national sovereignty. She praised them for maintaining an egalitarian resistance movement that shuns “hierarchy” in its leadership.

Still, she said, “Whatever shape the Iraqi resistance is taking is legitimate because they are occupied by a foreign power.” She had special plaudits for “the popular uprising of Moktada Al-Sadr,” which represents “the people, the poor, who are defending their right to a sovereign state.” This, again, won applause.

Koichi Inamori, a “prosecutor” for the “International Criminal Tribunal for Iraq in Japan,” said, “The United States is trying hard to push its imperialism in the name of globalization out to control the world.”

During this section, the witnesses in the trial made clear that they opposed the American war in Afghanistan as well as the invasion of Iraq.

These people aren’t all backers of the Kerry-Edwards campaign. “John Kerry exploits his experience and his status as a veteran to further his political career,” another “organizer,” Dustin Langley said. He encouraged the crowd to “scare the warmongers in Washington and Wall Street… so much that John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge will have to come up with new colors for their alerts.”

The group then watched a video of Brandon Hughey, who was introduced as an American GI who had fled to Canada to avoid serving in Iraq. A Vietnam-era deserter, Gerry Condon, also spoke to the group.

A visitor from Spain, Maria Rosa Penarroya Miranda, said that the American attacks on Baghdad “were premeditated, designed to cause the greatest possible number of civilian victims.”

A professor from South Africa, Dennis Brutus, said, “This tribunal is part of a global movement all over the world against the United States and its agenda,” which he identified “imperialism which seeks to dominate the world.”

“The U.S. has become the principal agent of terrorism,” he said.

A Haitian, Ben Dupuy, urged the crowd to draw on the experience of opposing the war in Vietnam.

There was a solicitation of donations, and people put cash into red buckets. Red and white square cards were handed out.

Then Ramsey Clark himself got up and pronounced himself in an “unending struggle to save the poor of the planet, mostly people with beautiful, darker skin” from “a rapacious United States government and economy.”

Susan Flounders of the International Action Center asked for a vote. Everybody stood up and waved the red cards. She started saying “guilty, guilty.” And everybody joined in, chanting, “guilty, guilty.”

Mr. Bush never had a chance to make his case. Saddam would be proud.