LEFTIST ATTY. LYNNE STEWART TAKES THE STAND IN NEW YORK!

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Almost 17 weeks after some dozen federal government prosecutors had begun their marathon presentation charging progressive New York attorney Lynne Stewart with aiding and abetting terrorism, Stewart finally took the witness stand in her own defense.

On Oct. 25, before a packed courtroom of her supporters and a myriad of attorneys who were similarly outraged at Stewart’s persecution – ordered by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft – her defense counsel, Michael Tigar, methodically queried Stewart to expose the fraud of the “evidence” against her. In four days, shortened by technical and procedural delays, Stewart effectively tore apart and reduced to ridicule every aspect of the government’s frame-up.

The multi-racial jury panel of eight women and four men seemed transfixed, paying close attention as Stewart’s responses to each key government exhibit demonstrated the innocence of her actions.

There is no doubt this was to be a show trial designed to buttress the government’s contention that Americans face real terrorist threats, not the least of which come from life-long radicals like Stewart, who has been a partisan in the struggle for social justice since her youth.

Stewart is being tried in the very room in the Manhattan Federal District Court House where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were railroaded to the electric chair in 1953 during the witch-hunt era of Joseph McCarthy and his governmental and judicial associates. Much as the McCarthyites made a mockery of the U.S. Constitution by executing the Rosenbergs, so their modern-day incarnations seek Stewart’s life. If convicted of the “aiding and abetting terrorism” charges against her, Stewart, 65, faces 45 years in prison.

Prosecutors spent more than four months presenting thousands of pages of Middle Eastern and U.S. press clippings, wiretapped phone calls, intercepted e-mails, and secret government video/audio recordings of Stewart’s confidential jailhouse meetings with her 1995 client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman. Rahman was convicted on frame-up charges of conspiracy to blow up historic landmarks in New York City.

The government’s aim in the present trial is to postulate an intricate scenario in which Stewart and her co-defendants – professional Arabic translator, Mohamed Yousry and post office employee/paralegal, Ahmed Abdel Sattar – had been involved in a vast terrorist conspiracy.

Press clippings refuted as evidence

A central part of the prosecution’s case consisted in presenting a seemingly never-ending series of Arabic and English-language press clippings on terrorist activities in several countries. The clippings had been confiscated from Stewart’s office as well as from the home of Yousry.

This was designed to demonstrate that Yousry’s home and Stewart’s law office were repositories of vast tombs of material that could only be of interest to terrorists.

The procedural rules of law exclude the use of such press clippings. They are legally considered hearsay since the views expressed or the facts presented in them represent only those of the author and cannot be taken by the jury as fact.

Early in the trial, however, at the government’s request, presiding Judge John Koeltl approved an exception to the hearsay rule allowing introduction of the clippings, accompanied with instructions to the jury that the material was to be considered not in regard to factual accuracy but only to demonstrate “the state of mind” of the defendants. And what could be the “state of mind,” the government implied, of persons who collect press clippings on terrorism, other than committing terrorist acts?

With this ruling, the jury was subjected to prosecution attorneys’ reading, line by line, countless press articles on terrorist activities into the official record. The fact that none of these connected any of the defendants to any of these activities, or any other terrorist acts, was deemed irrelevant.

The government’s verbal presentation of each article was accompanied by its simultaneous visual presentation on a huge courtroom movie-size screen and further elucidated with the aid of individual monitors placed in the jury box itself.

In 16 weeks, with the exception of the testimony of a government bureaucrat who attested to his drafting government documents mailed to Stewart, not a single witness was produced to prove the government’s charges.

When defense attorney Tigar opened his questioning, holding up one of the government’s press clippings, he blithely asked Stewart if this clipping actually came from her office. “Yes,” Stewart responded.

“And where did you get this press clipping?” Tigar continued. “From the U.S. government,” Steward answered. Stewart explained that many of the press clippings in her alleged terrorist file box had been sent to her office by government prosecutors.

This was a routine procedure employed as part of the 1995 trial proceedings, in which Stewart served as the chief counsel for Sheik Rahman, whom the U.S. government tried and convicted as a terrorist conspirator. Stewart explained that press clippings that the government intended to introduce as evidence were, in effect, required to be sent to her office.

Additionally, Stewart and her staff made it a practice, in the course of the defense of their client, to collect such press clippings, as was her longstanding practice when handling such cases. Thus, in the course of a minute’s testimony, the government’s case began to unravel.

What about the collection of press clippings and other material directly related to the Egyptian “Islamic Group” (which the U.S. government had designated a terrorist organization) that were found in the home of co-defendant Yousry?

Yousry told this writer and will testify in early November that in addition to his professional work as a translator, he was a Ph.D candidate at a New York City university preparing his doctoral dissertation on the very same Islamic Group. At the suggestion of his doctoral adviser, who is also expected to testify on Yousry’s behalf along with a dozen other defense witnesses, Yousry had long ago begun work on this subject. But his innocent collection of material for his thesis was turned by the government into “proof” of his engagement in criminal acts.


[see a smiling Lynne Stewart and read the rest of the article here: http://nyc.indymedia.org/feature/display/132220/index.php ]

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