Lynne Stewart Convicted

Yesterday, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted of conspiracy and providing and concealing material support of terrorism for her actions in smuggling messages from her jailed client Omar Abdel-Rahman to his followers in the terrorist group Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group).

For anybody interested in some background on Lynne Stewart and this case, the best article I've read on the matter is George Packer's "Left Behind," which was published in the New York Times Magazine on September 22, 2002.  The article is definitely not a hit piece -- in fact, the author appears sympathetic to Stewart as a person ("In person it isn't possible to dislike her . . . .").  But despite the author's sympathy, he paints an honest picture of Lynne Stewart, warts and all.  And those warts are substantial.  Some highlights:

• It should come as no surprise that Stewart was convicted.  In her taped prison conversations, Stewart relayed how much she enjoyed tricking the prison guards into believing that she and Abdel-Rahman were having a lawyer-client conversation while the sheikh was in fact dictating a statement to translator Mohammed Yousry in violation of the Special Administrative Measures that governed the case.  "At one point she joked that she should get an acting award."  The statement that Abdel-Rahman dictated ended the ceasefire between the Gama'a al-Islamiyya and the Egyptian government.
• Stewart didn't just enable Abdel-Rahman to dictate a statement ending the ceasefire; when the sheikh's followers doubted the statement's authenticity, she in fact "held a press conference a few weeks later to confirm that Abdel Rahman advocated withdrawal from the cease-fire."
• Note that when terrorist groups end their cease-fires (which is what Stewart assisted Abdel-Rahman in doing), innocent people generally die.  This is a concept that many of Stewart's misguided supporters don't seem to grasp.
• Former attorney general and moral cretin Ramsey Clark persuaded Lynne Stewart to take Omar Abdel-Rahman's case:  "Clark wanted Stewart to take on a new client -- Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric and the spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad movement . . . .  Friends warned [Stewart] that the sheik wasn't her kind of client.  He was a religious fascist who opposed everything that the feminist, atheist and vaguely revolutionary Marxist Stewart stood for. . . .  All morning in Ramsey Clark's office, Stewart wavered.  Finally Clark told her that if she refused, the Arab world would feel betrayed by their friends on the American left.  So she agreed to take the case."  (Ramsey Clark, incidentally, is currently part of Saddam Hussein's defense team.)
• Despite her initial apprehensions, Lynne Stewart came to view Abdel-Rahman's vile terrorist group as a liberation movement:  "As Stewart got to know her new client, she came to see him as a fighter for national liberation on behalf of a people oppressed by dictatorship and American imperialism."
• Apparently mired in leftist fantasies, it seems that Lynne Stewart also came to see al-Qaeda as a liberation movement of sorts, and the 9/11 attacks as a strike back at the United States on behalf of the rest of the world:  "[T]his warmhearted woman took the slaughter of innocents with a certain coldbloodedness.  The U.S. is constantly at war around the world and shouldn't expect its acts to go unanswered, she says.  The Pentagon was 'a better target'; the people in the towers 'never knew what hit them.  They had no idea that they could ever be a target for somebody's wrath, just by virtue of being American.  They took it personally.  And actually, it wasn't a personal thing.'  . . .  She mentions Hiroshima and Dresden.  'So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are sort of placed in a position of having no other way."  Placed in a position of having no other way?  It seems like Lynne Stewart has been placed in a position of having no clue.  (For a discussion of what al-Qaeda's true goals are, see my article "Osama's Big Lie.")
• Stewart describes the reason that she's consistently embraced radical causes:  "My true goal was always to be on the right side of history."  Has she succeeded in this goal?  We report, you decide:  "She backs [Abdel-Rahman's] Islamism for the same reason that she backed Mao and Ho's Communism:  because it resists imperialism."  Mao and Ho Chi Minh:  on the right side of history since 1949.
• One added bonus not from the New York Times article.  My IP colleague Brian Hecht further elaborates on Lynne Stewart's view of the "right side of history" in a recent article at Front Page Magazine, in which he notes her statement:  "I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous, because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution."  Ah, yes.  Dissent for me, but not for thee.  Beautiful, Lynne, really beautiful.