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Nevertheless many of these lawyers want to see the terrorists go free cause they hate the US. Even when they are not their own clients.

That is why quite of few of them answer the poll the way they do.

70,000 trained in AQ camps could the US justice system handle them ? That doesn't include Hizzbollah.

Less that 40 terrorists have been sent away and that wasn't easy either.

And then when they are cross examined they would force the government to reveal methods of intel gathering and sources.

Winning the war comes first. Americans also have the right to life liberty and happiness that means getting the terrorists.

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Lawyer of JIHAD: meet Lynne Stewart, the radical attorney who happens to be on trial herself

Rachel Zabarkes Friedman
REPORTS about Lynne Stewart will tell you how sweet and warm and cuddly she is. And it's true: She's sweet and warm and cuddly. Heavyset and endearingly disheveled, Stewart comes to court in a faded cotton housedress and likes to refer to people, even relative strangers, as "dear." You'd never think this charming, grandmotherly figure--someone who refuses to defend childabusers because she believes children are true innocents--would be accused of helping Islamist terrorists. But appearances can be deceiving.

On February 26, 1993, Muslim terrorists set off a powerful bomb in the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring a thousand. The man widely recognized as the terrorists' "spiritual leader," the Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, had previously claimed credit on behalf of his group for the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and was revered by Osama bin Laden. In July 1993 the "blind sheikh" was arrested on immigration charges. In January 1996 he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to wage a war of urban terror against the United States that included the World Trade Center attack and a foiled plan to simultaneously bomb the U.N. complex and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

Lynne Stewart is the radical leftist lawyer who defended Rahman in 1995 and continued to serve as one of his attorneys thereafter. During the trial she argued the sheikh was not a terrorist but a venerable Islamic scholar who was not responsible for the actions of his followers and shouldn't be punished "for his outspoken ideas." Clearly, those responsible for deciding his case didn't buy it. As Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution, documented in the Middle East Quarterly after the trial, Rahman had long incited violence against those he considered "enemies of Islam," America foremost among them. "Every conspiracy against Islam," he once said, "its source is America." He had even issued a warning to this country just a month before the attack: "We must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet." His organization, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group, which he had led for over two decades before his imprisonment, was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997.

The 64-year-old Stewart has now been indicted for helping relay messages between the imprisoned sheikh and members of the Islamic Group in violation of government-imposed security measures. The official charges against her are conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity, actually providing and concealing that support, and making false statements (two counts). In just a couple of months, a New York jury will decide whether she's guilty; if convicted, she could spend over 30 years in prison. Regardless of the verdict, her story is a powerful illustration of how easily radical leftist dissatisfaction with America becomes cheerful support for America's enemies--even the most destructive of them--and how a so-called defender of the public becomes a defender of the public's enemies.

A GIRL FROM QUEENS

Stewart's defense is that she was just doing her job as an attorney --"nothing more than what any lawyer would ever do under any circumstances." But she also admits that her notion of good lawyering goes beyond the traditional lawyer's role. She is a self-described "political" or "movement" lawyer, in the mold of William Kunstler and Ron Kuby. Stewart proudly acknowledges that she goes the "extra yard" for her clients--which means being an activist, sometimes breaking the rules, making a client's cause her own.

To anyone unaware of the alliance between the radical Left and fundamentalist Islam, it may be hard to believe that a '60s radical would go out of her way to help an Islamist sheikh. Stewart, a Protestant girl from Queens, turned political in the 1960s while working as a public-school librarian in Harlem. There she met her second and current husband, Ralph Poynter, a black militant and then schoolteacher who would later lose his job and serve six months on Rikers Island for assaulting a police officer. Stewart went to law school angry at America for its racial and economic injustices, and after graduating started a criminal practice defending underground groups such as the Ohio Seven and the Black Liberation Army. As those movements dwindled, she moved on to defending individual cop killers and drug dealers, all of whom, according to her worldview, had been in some way betrayed by "the system."

Having spent her life defending homegrown miscreants, Stewart didn't know much about the Egyptian sheikh in 1994. But famed radical Ramsey Clark persuaded her to take his case. As George Packer told it in the New York Times Magazine, Clark said that the Arab world would feel betrayed by the American Left if Stewart didn't step up. And for her, Rahman is a natural fit. Like many of her previous clients, he is a public enemy and a revolutionary: anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois, and most of all anti-American. Stewart has always seen violence as the unavoidable result of the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and though she might not say it explicitly these days, "Amerika" is Oppressor No. 1.

"I felt that [the sheikh] could be a tremendous political influence for change in Egypt," Stewart told me. And she said to the Washington Post, "My own political sense tells me the only hope for change in Egypt is the fundamentalist movement."

In May of 2000, Stewart agreed to abide by special administrative measures imposed by the government in 1997 on Rahman. These measures prohibited her from communicating the sheikh's messages to third parties, including the media. They allowed her to be accompanied by translators when speaking to him but limited their conversations to legal matters. Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo explains that such measures are "extremely rare," imposed only when a prisoner is deemed a significant danger even from inside prison walls.

And there was apparently good reason to consider the sheikh such a danger. After his arrest, according to the government's indictment of Stewart, Rahman called on his followers to wage jihad in order to secure his release: "It is a duty upon all Muslims around the world to come to free the sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail." Sure enough, his followers soon began pledging to do just that. A January 1996 statement by the Islamic Group said, "All American interests will be legitimate targets for our struggle until the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his brothers," and similar statements followed in 1997.

On November 17, 1997, six terrorists shot and stabbed a group of tourists at an archaeological site in Luxor, Egypt, killing 58 foreigners and four Egyptians. The killers scattered Islamic Group leaflets calling for the release of the sheikh, and even inserted one into the slit torso of one of their victims. Afew years later, in March 2000, members of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group kidnapped almost 30 people in the Philippines and threatened to behead them if the sheikh and two other convicted terrorists were not released. Authorities later found two beheaded bodies and were unable to account for four of the hostages.

In September 2000, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden's deputy in al-Qaeda), and an Islamic Group leader known as Abu Yasir went on al-Jazeera to declare their support for the sheikh and pledge to free him.

One would think Stewart would know better than to believe that the sheikh bears no responsibility for the terrorism carried out in his name. But if she does, it doesn't stop her from defending her decision in June 2000--just a few weeks after agreeing to the special administrative measures--to release to Reuters a statement from the sheikh calling on his group to reevaluate the ceasefire agreement they had made with Egyptian authorities a few years earlier. The statement came on the heels of a two-day prison visit in which--according to the government's indictment, based on wiretap recordings of the conversations--alleged co-conspirator and translator Mohammed Yousry read to the sheikh a statement and letter from Islamic Group members while Stewart attempted to fool prison guards into believing Yousry was merely translating her words. The sheikh also dictated letters to Yousry indicating that he no longer supported the cease-fire. Shortly thereafter, a third defendant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, related in telephone conversations to Islamic Group leaders the news that the sheikh did not oppose a return to terrorist operations ("work").

Around the same time, Stewart submitted to the U.S. attorney's office an affirmation that she had agreed to abide by the government's special administrative measures.

Stewart has little choice now but to acknowledge she did what the government alleges: "We're not saying, 'No, I was in Cleveland that day.'" She claims she issued the press release to publicize her client's case, and because the security measures violated his First Amendment rights. Moreover, she insists, the Islamic Group was no longer in the terrorism business: "It was clear that this group that has perhaps been dubbed a terrorist group had not done anything violent since 1997 and indeed it had turned to a peaceful course, which was endorsed by my client" (press release notwithstanding!). As for distracting the prison guards, she says, "I don't think there are many criminal-defense lawyers who visit in a prison who don't do the best they can to keep their conversations private and away from the ears of the guards."

Yet as Prosecutor McCarthy confirms, there was little Stewart could do, legally. Her client had been convicted, and that conviction upheld on appeal, and it was too late to file a writ of habeas corpus. His case was essentially a political one--for instance, Stewart was pushing a prisoner swap with Egypt. As for the administrative measures, she could have contested them in court. Instead she broke the law, and her word, to advance the opinion that convicted terrorists are entitled to communicate with their followers.

POSTER GIRL?

This may be why Stewart's cause isn't exactly popular among lawyers right now. Ron Kuby, one of the relative few who defend Stewart, does so because he thinks the statement she released from the sheikh was merely his "opinion about matters in his country" and not a directive: It was made openly in the press and didn't call for specific acts of violence. Kuby believes that if Stewart is convicted, "it'll show that when your view of your client and the government's view of your client collide, the government's view prevails." He laments that she "hasn't gotten the kind of support from lawyers I would expect. This is a time when many civil libertarians are running for cover."

More likely, lawyers recognize that Stewart abused her power as an attorney. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz says he thinks Stewart is "a disgrace to the legal profession." She "hides behind the Sixth Amendment, but what she cares about is radicalism. She hides behind her law degree and her bar admission to do the work of a lawless radical." Nevertheless, Dershowitz finds himself in the position of rooting for Stewart, because he worries the court's decision could be so broad as to prevent other lawyers from taking on clients accused of terrorism.

Defense lawyer Jarett Decker, writing in the June issue of Reason, is of similar mind. He criticizes the Justice Department for "pursuing a course that threatens the Sixth Amendment" and says the department's "history suggests that charges may be used, or threatened, against lawyers who represent the government's prime targets too often or too well."

But according to McCarthy, that concern doesn't remotely apply to Stewart's case. "Lynne was not in any way acting as the counsel contemplated by the Sixth Amendment," which protects the accused, not the convicted, he says. Moreover, he points out that in the eleven years since 1993, when the first World Trade Center bombing inaugurated a new wave of terrorism, not a single lawyer has been prosecuted for acts related to the defense of a terrorist client who has not yet been convicted and is preparing for trial. "If Lynne is their best shot at saying the government is impinging on the Sixth Amendment," McCarthy says, "I think everyone can calm down."

Still, Stewart's case may be a useful lesson in the ongoing struggle to balance liberty and security. It is a lesson in the need to preserve our liberty, but not in the way civil libertarians suggest--that is, not by merely asserting our freedoms against the government, but by making sure government has the means to protect those freedoms. Stewart has for years used the legal system to advance, in one way or another, her fundamentally lawless agenda. Perhaps when that meant defending individual Communists and cop killers the stakes were lower, and the damage to be done less severe. But now that Stewart or someone in her shoes has the power to help entire enemy networks by taking advantage of the very freedoms that make this country great, increased vigilance is prudent, and ultimately just.

Of course, Stewart and her ardent supporters--not to mention the far Left generally--have made an art of alleging that government measures to protect us from terrorists and terrorist supporters are unnecessary, unconstitutional, evil, or all of the above. Attorney general John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act have restricted freedom of speech, destroyed the attorney-client privilege, and made lawyering a crime. But wait, none of these criticisms applies to Stewart's case: The special administrative measures were imposed on the sheikh in 1997; her conversations with him were recorded under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not the Patriot Act; and the anti-terror statute under which she is being tried dates from the Clinton era.

And wait again: Hasn't Stewart said she favors repression when Communist (and perhaps now Islamist) regimes are the ones doing it? "I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous," she has said. In other words--as David Horowitz points out in his forthcoming book about the "unholy alliance" between the American Left and radical Islam--it's okay for states Stewart likes to squash the freedom of their citizens, but criminalizing acts that help terrorists undermine and attack America is not.

Meanwhile, the country she hates so much has been remarkably good to her. Stewart has carried on relatively undisturbed for years, and now that she's taken her political lawyering too far she has hardly been treated cruelly. In fact, the judge in this trial threw out an earlier indictment on the grounds that the statute was too vague, and now the government is forced to prove that she knowingly aided terrorist violence, not just that she provided material support to a terrorist group. And there's more: All of Stewart's legal fees are being paid for by the government, at taxpayer expense. Doesn't she have it pretty good? Don't we all?

In a 2003 speech before the notorious National Lawyers Guild, Stewart exhorted her followers to defend her so that she could continue defending "the people" against our "poisonous government." She paid homage to those "modern heroes" such as "Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara, who reminds us, 'At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.'" Make that hate--hatred of America, in Lynne Stewart's case. Fortunately, in this country of laws, her revolution is unlikely to come to pass.

COPYRIGHT 2004 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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