February 15, 2005, 2:43 p.m.
Stewart’s Betrayal
Why the radical lawyer doesn’t deserve mainstream support.

By Rachel Zabarkes Friedman

Just don't call her a liberal.

Lynne Stewart, the activist lawyer just convicted of helping her terrorist client, "blind sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman, communicate with his Islamist followers while in prison, is, ideologically, an unrepentant radical. In the past she's expressed approval for the legacies of Stalin, Mao, and Castro, and she said during her trial that the "institutions which perpetuate capitalism and institutions of government do have to be attacked." In the process some innocents may be killed, she said, even if unintentionally: "Some people are in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Stewart's story has been analyzed as a case study in how the radical Left finds common cause with radical Islam: David Horowitz discussed Stewart in some detail in his book on the subject; and Joshua Kurlantzick, foreign editor of The New Republic, ruminated in an essay in Commentary on the "seemingly improbable partnership that has emerged in recent years between figures like Lynne Stewart and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman." Despite hints of compassion in Stewart — she reportedly refused to defend child molesters and declared herself against the wanton murder of civilians — she shared with her client an all-encompassing antipathy toward what she regards as capitalist, imperialist oppression and its primary perpetrator, the United States.

As I noted in National Review in August, relatively few lawyers came out in support of Stewart during her trial — to the disappointment, no doubt, of her most ardent defenders. This may have been due to a number of factors, among them a growing realization that she overstepped her bounds as a defense attorney (and perhaps thereby compromised the public image of a line of work already difficult enough from a public-relations perspective). Shortly after the verdict was announced, law professor Mimi Wesson told NPR's Sheilah Kast that "Certainly at the outset of this prosecution, many in the criminal defense community expressed the fear that it was intended as an effort to chill the efforts of zealous defense attorneys. As the trial has unfolded and the evidence has been disclosed, I think that fear is less than it was at the outset. The evidence suggested that Ms. Stewart, many believed, really had exceeded the boundaries of zealous advocacy and crossed over the line into aiding her client's efforts to continue communicating with terroristic organizations in Egypt."

As many have pointed out, it's not easy to defend the worst of the worst. But where far-leftists — and even some reasonable liberals — have gone wrong is in suggesting that the government is trying to make it harder to do so. The government is doing its job, protecting citizens from people who want to see them dead. If Lynne Stewart had been performing her job rather than the job of a political activist — if she hadn't put her own adulating view of the sheikh above the government's view of him as a dangerous terrorist — she would still be carrying on her merry way as a defender of the downtrodden and despised.

What, exactly, did Stewart do? The New York jury that rendered the verdict in her case found her guilty of conspiring to defraud the United States government, conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorists, providing and concealing that support, and making false statements — all of the charges against her. (She has said she will appeal the verdict.) Put more concretely, Stewart was convicted of working with two other defendants to provide the sheikh himself as a material resource to terrorists.

In order to do this, Stewart violated government security measures that were imposed on Rahman to ensure he didn't use his authority within the Egyptian Islamic Group to abet or orchestrate terror attacks from his prison cell. The measures prohibited his communicating with the outside world; yet in 2000, after agreeing to abide by them, Stewart publicly released a statement disclosing that the sheikh no longer supported a cease-fire agreement his followers had made with the Egyptian government. She also distracted prison guards while another defendant in the case, Mohammed Yousry, related messages between the sheikh and other Islamists.

Stewart claimed the sheikh was not a danger, and that she was working to have him transferred to a prison in Egypt. "If they knew anything about anything," she told me in an interview in August, "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" (though the content of the press release indicates otherwise). "We were pushing to get him repatriated — to get him out of the U.S. and let him do his time in an Egyptian jail. All of this was geared to making that happen." Last year, Stewart told the Washington Post that Rahman "wouldn't be the first man accused of terrorism who is later released from prison when times change."

Needless to say, working to repatriate a convicted terrorist (whose conviction had also been upheld on appeal) is not exactly the "Assistance of Counsel" protected by the Sixth Amendment. Stewart claimed it was for humanitarian as well as political reasons: "He's held in total isolation. The U.S. will be doing itself a favor to get rid of this lightning rod of discontent and get him into Egypt where he might be doing a benefit to the government over there, which has its own problems," she told me. When asked what kind of effect the sheikh might have inside Egypt, she added, "I'd have to say on a level, my own political level, I felt that he could be a tremendous political influence for change in Egypt."

Stewart acknowledged during her trial that she was well aware the sheikh had worked to overthrow the Egyptian government: According to the New York Times, prosecutor Andrew Dember asked her whether she knew "when she issued the press release, that Mr. Abdel Rahman had 'advocated violence,' that he favored overthrowing the secular Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak and replacing it with an Islamic state, that he opposed the United States' support for Mr. Mubarak and that he believed the state of Israel, in Mr. Dember's words, 'essentially should be destroyed.' To each question Ms. Stewart answered that yes, she had known that when she issued the press release."

Since the jury announced its verdict last week, the usual suspects have come out in support of Stewart. The National Lawyer's Guild released a statement condemning the verdict. Al Jazeera published a fawning article that quoted Center for Constitutional Rights director Jeff Fogel, whose group also condemned the verdict. Ron Kuby, who defended the sheikh at one point (and whose continued professional obligations should therefore be considered in evaluating his comments), told the AP that Stewart was convicted as a result of 9/11 "and the aftermath that created conditions where a fair trial on terrorism charges is all but impossible."

Stewart was clever to present her case as a free-speech and Sixth Amendment issue, and as an instance of the government's overstepping its bounds in the pursuit of terrorists and those who defend them. As a result, it seemed for a time that well-meaning liberals might spring to her defense, however misguidedly. Yet while the Times and others published their share of misleading articles, on the whole there hasn't been much support. (Had the verdict been otherwise things may have been different.) It's hard to see a "liberal" case for Stewart: Her client had no right to uninhibited speech; she was not performing lawyer's work; and she is clearly not a casualty in some larger government manhunt for attorneys who defend terrorists.

It would be heartening, in fact, to see mainstream liberals condemn Stewart's actions — and her ilk — more forcefully. Distaste for or concern about the Bush administration shouldn't undermine the rational judgment that Stewart did something unacceptable, and should pay a price for it. There is also a larger danger to think about: that, as Kurlantzick warns, "the ideas propagated by the hard Left-Islamist alliance could also seep into the wider political culture, poisoning the mainstream Left and otherwise sane liberals." In that regard, the intellectual danger of not condemning Stewart may be even greater than the practical danger she posed by what she did.

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