PDC demands: "Fight the Frame-up of Lynne Stewart,

Partisan Defense Committee
PO Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013
Phone (212) 406-4252 E-mail: partisandefense [at] earthlink.net

PRESS CONTACT: Helen Cantrell

PRESS STATEMENT
For immediate release: 16 February 2005

PDC Denounces Government Conspiracy Against Everyone's Rights, Demands:
"Fight the Frame-up of Lynne Stewart,
Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar!"

The government’s victory in the Lynne Stewart trial is, as Lynne Stewart herself said outside New York City’s federal courthouse on February 10, "the beginning of a longer struggle.” All three defendants—veteran leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart, her translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar—were convicted on all counts in a frame-up trial. Stewart and Yousry face decades behind bars on charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. Abdel Sattar could face life imprisonment on the more serious charge of conspiracy to “kill and kidnap persons in a foreign country.” The defendants plan to appeal.
Even the government admitted that not a single act of violence arose from this alleged terror conspiracy. All Lynne Stewart did was publicize a statement by her client, the blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman—who is imprisoned for life on conspiracy charges stemming from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—against a cease-fire between the Islamic Group and the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt.
The Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League, understands that the political implications of this conviction threaten the rights of everyone. PDC spokesman Kevin Gilroy stated: "The verdict opens the door to the government prosecuting lawyers for the alleged crimes of their clients, rendering void the right to effective counsel. If people can't get a lawyer to zealously defend them from prosecution, because the lawyers themselves are afraid of being prosecuted, then fundamental liberties, from the right to a trial and an attorney, to even the right of free speech and assembly, are threatened. In this racist, anti-immigrant, post-September 11 climate, Mohamed Yousry and Abdel Sattar, both American citizens, were pre-judged guilty by reason of being Arab."
Gilroy charged: "The U.S. government is the world's biggest terrorists. They're the ones who should be tried by their victims for, among other things, arming, financing and training the Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin, including Osama bin Laden's 'training camps,' to kill Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was behind the destruction of the Twin Towers in the criminal attack that killed thousands on September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon was also hit. The U.S. government prosecuted Sheik Abdel Rahman in part to cover its own bloody tracks."
The PDC calls for mobilizing the tremendous social power of the working class to fight in defense of all victims of capitalist injustice, and in so doing, advance the struggle for a society where those who labor rule. Just as the prosecution of Lynne Stewart has ominous implications, so too does powerful protest against it have broader portent. The American labor movement has every interest in fighting against this conviction. All defenders of democratic rights and civil liberties should be mobilized behind the power of the multiracial working class. Put otherwise, the PDC says, "her fight is ours and yours."
The Stewart trial verdict comes in the context of increased attacks by the Bush White House—and the Democrats—on civil liberties. In power is a dangerously demented regime that wants to brand every protest against its policies de facto “terrorism.” What next? Is publishing a column by Mumia Abu-Jamal—who was framed up effectively as a “terrorist” for his political views—“material support to terrorism”? How about buying his books? What about signing a petition on behalf of Irish nationalist IRA or Basque ETA prisoners?
The irregularities in this seven-month trial could fill several very large tomes. The judge allowed highly inflammatory and utterly irrelevant “evidence” to be presented by the prosecution. Everyone admitted that the charges had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. But in the very week of the anniversary, the prosecution was allowed to screen a videotape for the jury of Osama bin Laden speaking. As Lynne Stewart said, “When you put Osama bin Laden in a courtroom and ask the jury to ignore it, that’s asking a lot.”
The Partisan Defense Committee understands that dirty tricks and frame-ups are the stock in trade of the “justice” system. There are contradictions between the formal guarantees of freedom and the reality of capitalist state repression. While strongly believing in using every legal means available to defend democratic rights, the PDC places all its confidence in the class struggle, not the courts. The courts are not neutral, but an integral part of the capitalist state, which masks the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with eyewash about equality before the law in a society where those who own the means of production make the laws to rule over those whose labor they exploit.
The Partisan Defense Committee urges everyone to come to the sentencing hearing on July 15, and to send donations to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee, 350 Broadway, Suite 700, New York, NY 10013.
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The Partisan Defense Committee is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.