Posted on 12/29/2004 8:55:50 PM PST by Ellesu
A federal prosecutor told a Manhattan jury yesterday that Lynne F. Stewart, a lawyer accused of aiding terrorists, had been an eager conspirator in a plot to restart a suspended campaign of attacks by Muslim fundamentalists against the government of Egypt.
On the first day of his summations in the government's case against Ms. Stewart, the prosecutor, Andrew Dember, sought to show that she played an active and politically committed role in a plan to promote Islamic violence overseas. Synthesizing the evidence that the government has offered in the six months of trial, Mr. Dember charged that Ms. Stewart was more deeply and knowingly involved in supporting terrorism than even prosecutors had suggested in their opening arguments in June.
Mr. Dember, an assistant United States attorney, also sought to persuade the jurors in Federal District Court that Ms. Stewart had failed in her basic obligations as a lawyer, joining an imprisoned terrorist client in breaking the law out of arrogance because she "thought she was above it, it didn't apply to her."
The government's evidence has consisted overwhelmingly of transcripts of secret recordings of telephone calls and prison visits involving Ms. Stewart and two co-defendants: Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a Staten Island postal worker who once worked for her as a court-appointed paralegal, and Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic translator. They are accused of helping a client of Ms. Stewart, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, smuggle messages advocating violence out of the federal prison where he was serving a life sentence for terrorism.
Mr. Dember admitted to the jury that he had faced a big job in tracing connections and drawing conclusions from the evidence, which has been dense and often meandering. In a full day of argument yesterday, Mr. Dember completed only about half of his summary. But the jurors, eight women and four men, remained keenly attentive, many scribbling notes as the prosecutor replayed exhibits they had first seen months ago.
"It is a very simple case," Mr. Dember said. He said that Ms. Stewart had consciously carried concealed messages from a known terrorist to the sheik in prison, and also relayed the sheik's response favoring violence to that terrorist and to all the sheik's militant followers in Egypt. He charged that Ms. Stewart had willfully violated severe federal prison restrictions imposed on the sheik that she had agreed to respect several times in writing.
Speaking outside the courthouse at midday, Ms. Stewart dismissed the prosecutor's argument.
"It sounds a little more like a screenplay that what we heard in the evidence," Ms. Stewart said. She noted that the prosecutors had never showed that any act of violence ever resulted from from any events described at in the trial.
Mr. Dember argued that Ms. Stewart and Mr. Sattar knew that Rifai Taha, an Egyptian militant who is at the center of the case, was "a horror, a terrorism nightmare for the civilized world." A letter from Mr. Sattar that Ms. Stewart took into prison in May 2000 contained a message from Mr. Taha asking the sheik whether his followers should continue to observe a three-year-old cease-fire in Egypt. In a news release that Ms. Stewart issued in mid-June, the sheik withdrew his support for the truce.
Mr. Dember said that Ms. Stewart's comments about some terrorist kidnappings in the Philippines, made during her May 2000 visit with her client, showed that she supported violence in the cause of freeing him from prison. Ms. Stewart disputed the government's transcription of those comments and presented her own version during her testimony, suggesting that she lamented the kidnappings.
Mr. Dember's main line of attack was an effort to demonstrate that Ms. Stewart's actions conveying messages from the sheik had nothing to do with her legal work for him. Using the transcripts, the prosecutor asserted that two other lawyers who represented the sheik had refused to carry similar messages. He said that Mr. Abdel Rahman was ready as early as September 1999 to urge his followers to give up the cease-fire. But one lawyer, Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general, had declined after a prison visit to publicize the sheik's views. In one phone call Mr. Sattar quoted Mr. Clark as saying that such a move could "cause a negative reaction, particularly for the legal side here."
Soon after, another lawyer on the team, Abdeen Jabara, bluntly refused to allow the sheik, who is blind, to dictate a letter to Egyptian militants about the cease-fire, according to the transcripts. Mr. Jabara understood that releasing a statement from the sheik, in violation of the prison rules, "had nothing to do with being a good lawyer, with vigorously representing a client," Mr. Dember said.
its going to be hard to convict her with a Manhattan jury. sorry to say it, but all you need is one person from the upper west side or the village to hang it up.
Yes, you are correct and it's too bad. The charges should be treason and the punishment death IMO.
The irony here is that she could care less about militant Islam, she's just a sleazy litigator out for cheap publicity. And that's just what she got.
AND, she's paying the price for it.
Ping
I dunno... You wanna be known around NYC, in the aftermath of 9/11, as the juror who let a human frog that helps islamic terrorists off the hook?
That probably won't play that well even in the "Other" parts of NYC... the fruitcakes there got to actually *smell* the Twin Towers burning for days and days, y'know... that might even penetrate something as thick as the skull of a liberal
Now, if they were to try the fat leftist gargoyle in Berkeley, or Cambridge... well...
"But one lawyer, Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general, had declined after a prison visit to publicize the sheik's views."
Wow. Even Ramsey Clark thought that was out of line.
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