Christopher Black
An extraordinary human-rights attorney and author
This is another “lives of the great” post. My last email from Ed Herman also introduced me to Christopher Black. Chris’s response to my chapter on Rwanda in Ed’s bio was my first indication that I was doing justice to Ed’s life and work. There was not a higher authority on that chapter than Chris.
Chris was born in England but moved to Canada as a child. He became an attorney to avoid blue-collar jobs. Chris became a criminal-defense attorney, working murder trials, among others, and he was always a lefty. But he got radicalized by NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia and joined the Communist Party, which was about the only organization that opposed NATO’s bombing campaign.
I first became aware of Chris when he coauthored an article with Ed in 2000 on the kangaroo-court tribunal that the USA set up in Yugoslavia. I have written about my dismay when Amnesty International asked me to join their campaign to have Slobodan Milošević arrested and delivered to that tribunal. I asked Ed about it, who agreed that it was scandalous. Chris provided that statement from Milošević, in which he observed that Osama bin Laden was protected by the sitting president, Bill Clinton, who refused to remove bin Laden from Kosovo, as bin Laden had been a CIA asset for a generation by then. Milošević was highly skeptical of the idea that a man who was protected by the sitting American president led the 9/11 terror attacks two years later, as any thinking person would be. There was far more than met the eye happening on 9/11. That tribunal blocked Chris from defending Milošević in the courtroom, for one of its many judicial irregularities, but Chris still led Milošević’s defense effort. Here is a recent interview of Chris on the issue.
Milošević died in that tribunal’s custody (a typical fate of the defendants), either through criminal negligence (Ed’s opinion) or murder (Chris has obtained evidence of that), but imperial victors never face the grinding wheels of justice, at least in this life. Both Ed and Chris wrote at length (1) about the “genocide” at Srebrenica, which was another Western propaganda victory, as what were likely vengeance killings of several hundred men (in retribution for civilian slaughters, and the West may have willingly sacrificed those soldiers) were inflated into a “genocide” of 8,000 people.
As fate would have it, a few months before the Srebrenica massacre, there was a real slaughter of at least 8,000 people as part of a genuine series of genocides, but it was committed by the forces of American asset Paul Kagame, who is arguably the greatest living mass murderer. That slaughter was swept under the carpet and few Westerners have even heard of it, while there is an annual drumbeat on Srebrenica and Kagame is feted in the English-speaking West as a heroic figure who has been compared to Abe Lincoln.
Chris informed Ed and Ed’s coauthor David Peterson about what was happening in Rwanda, and Ed made it the last great writing project in his lifetime. The USA’s tribunal in Rwanda even used the same personnel as the one in Yugoslavia did. Chris defended a Rwandan general at that tribunal and amazingly won an acquittal, while his life was wrecked (malaria, divorce, scant income, death threats from the CIA, he was on Kagame’s assassination list, etc.).
When I mortgaged my life to save my partner’s life, which resulted in hiring the USA’s leading Constitutionalist attorney, that guy was in it for the money and lives in a $5 million mansion in his retirement years. And he was the best of the numerous attorneys that I encountered in the USA over the years. None of them could hold a candle to Chris. After my adventures in the American legal system, it seemed that the term “heroic attorney” was an oxymoron, but Chris really is one, and one of the few that I ever heard of. He has been in my pantheon for a while. Chris remains one of Ed’s staunchest friends and supporters.
Marko Attila Hoare’s claim to fame is helping write that tribunal’s indictment of Milošević, so I consider Hoare an accessory to murder. Ed wrote about Hoare’s role as an imperial tool, and to this day, Hoare’s lie about Ed and the Srebrenica massacre – that Ed denied that it even happened – has a place of prominence in Ed’s libelous Wikipedia bio. Meanwhile, Wikipedia deleted Chris’s Wikipedia bio, on the “notability” issue. I saved it here. Wikipedia libels Ed, erased Chris, and Hoare is a lying voice of authority on Ed, with a hagiographic Wikipedia bio. This is how our world works, but I do what I can for saints such as Ed and Chris, to help tilt the table back towards the truth a little.