[Mb-civic] The Lynne Stewart Trial

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Just had to send at least one more article on the Lynne Stewart 
Trial.  Justice is not served, but it is important for Americans to 
understand what is happening....

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050307&s=cole
The Lynne Stewart Trial

by DAVID COLE

[from the March 7, 2005 issue]

On February 10, a jury in New York City convicted longtime activist 
attorney Lynne Stewart and two others on all counts in one of the 
Bush Administration's most heralded terrorism trials since 9/11. 
Stewart, a 65-year-old who has never committed a violent act, now 
faces twenty to thirty years in prison. Do you feel safer?

Perhaps more than any other, this case illustrates how out of hand 
things have gotten in the "war on terrorism." To inflate its successes 
in ferreting out terrorism, the Justice Department turned an 
administrative infraction into a terrorism conviction that, unless 
reversed, will likely send Stewart to prison for the rest of her life. To 
make sure the charges would stick, the prosecution tried the case in 
the most inflammatory and prejudicial way possible, introducing as 
"background" reams of evidence of terrorism that had nothing to do 
with Stewart's actions.

The case against Stewart was fairly straightforward. She 
represented Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, now serving multiple life 
sentences for conspiring to blow up several Manhattan bridges and 
tunnels. Rahman is barred from any contact with the outside world 
beyond his immediate family and attorneys. As his lawyer, Stewart 
signed an agreement not to transmit messages from him to 
unauthorized people. In June 2000 she violated that agreement. 
After meeting with the sheik, Stewart called Reuters to say that he 
had withdrawn his personal support for a cease-fire then in place in 
Egypt. Two days later she issued a clarification explaining that the 
sheik "did not cancel the cease-fire," but "left the matter to my 
brothers to examine it and study it because they are the ones who 
live there and they know the circumstances better than I."

Stewart should not have issued the release. Doing so violated the 
administrative agreement. But it is not a crime to violate such an 
agreement. In an ordinary case, the lawyer might receive a warning. 
In an unusual case, the lawyer might be barred from continuing to 
visit her client (as indeed Stewart was at the time, until she agreed 
to a new set of conditions). In an extraordinary case, the lawyer 
might be brought up on disciplinary charges before the bar.

But after September 11, the Justice Department was not content 
with any of those measures; it charged Stewart with terrorism. Since 
violating the agreement was not itself a crime, the indictment 
charged her with fraudulently entering into the agreement in the first 
place. And it alleged that by passing on the sheik's message, she'd 
offered "material support" in aid of terrorist activity.

Both charges were a stretch. Showing that Stewart violated the 
agreement would be easy, but proving that she intended to violate it 
when she initially signed it was much more challenging. And the 
terrorism charge would require showing that Stewart's statement to 
the press was intended to support a particular terrorist act, when in 
fact the release did not call for or prompt any such act.

So how did the prosecution meet its burden? With classic 
McCarthy-era tactics: fearmongering and guilt by association. First, 
it tried Stewart together with Ahmed Sattar, an Egyptian-born US 
citizen against whom it had thousands of hours of wiretaps of 
communications with a terrorist group. Among other things, Sattar 
had issued a fake fatwa urging followers to "kill [Jews] wherever 
they are." By trying Stewart and Sattar together, the government 
could taint Stewart with Sattar's sins, even though, as was the case 
with the fatwa, she had nothing to do with them and no knowledge 
of them. In his closing, the prosecutor repeated Sattar's "kill the 
Jews" fatwa more than seventy times.

Second, the prosecution sought to inflame the jury by introducing 
evidence that had nothing to do with Stewart's actions. Shortly 
before the anniversary of 9/11, it played a tape of Osama bin Laden 
expressing support for the sheik. It introduced evidence of Al 
Qaeda's bombing of the USS Cole, even though there was no claim 
that Stewart or her co-defendants had anything to do with Al Qaeda, 
and of a massacre in Egypt in which fifty-eight tourists were killed, 
even though the massacre long pre-dated the actions of Stewart 
and her co-defendants. The prosecution offered this evidence as 
"background," not proof of Stewart's culpability, but it is hard to 
believe that such a distinction could be maintained by a jury sitting 
less than a mile from Ground Zero.

Let me be clear: I think Stewart crossed the line from zealous 
advocacy to wrongful conduct. But she is no terrorist. At most she 
deserves a disciplinary proceeding before the bar. Sending her to 
prison will provide another statistic in the Justice Department's 
desperate effort to show results in the "war on terrorism," but it will 
not make us any safer. One of the defining evils of terrorism is that 
it uses human beings' lives to send a political message. Has the 
Justice Department done any differently here?

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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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