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Cindy Sheehan
Sheehan said she considered Lynne Stewart her Atticus Finch, the lawyer who defended an innocent Black man accused of rape in the book and film “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
“They’re not waging a War on Terror but a War of Terror,” she said. “The biggest terrorist is George W. Bush.” She claimed “it costs $66,000 to recruit one soldier, not including training, and $49,000 a year to house a prisoner, yet only $6,000 per year is spent to educate a child in California. (Recruiting costs are actually $15,000 per soldier, the cost of housing a prisoner in California for one year is $26,000.)
Sheehan continued, “9/11 was Pearl Harbor for the neo-conservatives’ agenda” and declared the U.S. government a “morally repugnant system.” Then she raged:
We have no Constitution. We’re the only country with no checks and balances. We want our country back if we have to impeach George Bush down to the person who picks up the dog sh-t in Washington! Let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq. It’s OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons but we are waging nuclear war in Iraq, we have contaminated the entire country. It’s not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. Hypocrites! But Israel can occupy Palestine? Stop the slaughter!
While one might dismiss some of Sheehan’s hyperbole due to grief over her son’s death,
a little research about Casey Sheehan revealed that contrary to being tricked by military recruiters, Casey Sheehan had re-enlisted in the U.S. Army voluntarily when he was 24-years-old, after serving his first hitch successfully. Casey Sheehan was in fact a hero who received a Bronze Star. He was attached as a mechanic to the artillery division of the 1st U.S. Cavalry in Iraq. When a convoy of soldiers from Casey’s unit was attacked in Sadr City by insurgents, Casey volunteered to join a rapid rescue force to get them out. His commanding sergeant told him he did not have to go into combat, because he was a mechanic and not an infantryman. Casey was quoted telling his officer, “I go where my chief goes.” He was tragically killed during the rescue attempt. The source for this story? Cindy Sheehan herself.
I also visited an army recruiting office on my way home and asked about Casey being promised a job as a chaplain’s assistant only to be thrust into harm’s way. The recruiter explained to me that on re-enlistment, the Army’s B.E.A.R. program (Bonus Extension and Retaining) guarantees everything in writing. If Casey was a mechanic during his first hitch, that was the only thing he would have been guaranteed per his re-enlistment contract. Further research showed that a chaplain’s assistant is a combat infantry position, whereas Casey was deployed in a non-combat job as a mechanic. Casey Sheehan sought combat duty for his country and should be honored for it, not used as a symbol of how evil the United States is.
The final warm up before Stewart spoke was handled by Jess Mackler from The Defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal Movement. He said, “The Supreme Court has decided that innocence is no defense. Lynne Stewart is charged with conspiring to aid and abet a conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks against unnamed people at unknown places in foreign countries. She didn’t harm anyone is any way.” He also said that Omar Abdel Rahman was an “innocent man,” despite incontrovertible proof of his complicity in the 1993 bombings at the World Trade Center. Mackler called the prosecution of Stewart “the new McCarthyism promoted by the U.S. government” and concluded, “You wonderful people in the ISO will be the best defenders of Lynne and Mumia. We have to make the price of corruption too high to pay.”
Finally, Lynne Stewart rose to speak. A roly-poly grandmother, Stewart doesn’t look the part of a revolutionary and friend to terrorists. But just as her appearance was deceiving, so was her discussion about her case.
Stewart maintained all she did was disseminate some press releases relating to Abdel Rahman, which she claimed was her duty to protect her client. She was neither remorseful nor even willing to admit she made a mistake.
What she didn’t say was that Abdel Rahman, being a well-known cleric and having contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (he was involved in the assassination of Anwar Sadat), was using Lynne Stewart to pass messages to tell his terrorist followers he did not support a ceasefire with Egypt – the very reason the Blind Sheikh was being held incommunicado. He had already refused treatment for his diabetes in prison to inspire militant Islamists overseas to take action to release him before he died. (Stewart claimed the government “refused” him medication.) Nonetheless, she compared what she did with asking for a pair of glasses for a client who is under arrest and cannot read the charges against him or her.
She also never mentioned that the government had not just a few, but hundreds of recordings of her in which she discussed with Abdel Rahman how to rally his followers to return to violence, and a major turning point in her case was when the prosecution played a tape of Osama Bin Laden and his aides discussing the need to “spill blood in the fields of jihad unless Abdel Rahman was released.” Over the years, she advocated violence openly at private meetings of radical groups such as Worker’s World Party
and the Spartacist League. Her slipup was allowing herself to be quoted advocating violence in their newspapers such as the Worker’s Vanguard over several years, all of which was used as evidence against her. She was also taped at later radical leftist meetings telling people that what was getting her convicted was the fact that these groups were writing down what she said.
But Stewart’s final denouement came on the witness stand when her attorney, Michael
Tigar, asked her if she knew Abdel Rahman was writing out fatwas to kill Jews and her reply was that yes, she could not deny this to him because the Blind Sheik said that killing Jews was a good thing. She and Tigar thought the jury would buy their revolutionary zeal as much as the radical types in the ISO at San Francisco State would.
The jury didn’t buy it. Only the academic elite believe her.
Stewart also lashed out at former Attorney General John Ashcroft for “prosecuting a grandmother from Brooklyn,” whimpering, “Why me?” She said she was out on $500,000 bail after being found guilty and was awaiting sentencing from the judge. She was now on a tour of college campuses nationwide to raise money for an appeal and to get people to write the judge and ask for leniency in her case – both of them greatly aided by her appearance at SFSU.
All attendees received a press packet during her appearance containing a copy of Stewart’s keynote speech to the National Lawyer’s Guild convention. Congress once referred to the NLG as “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party”; today, they exemplify the unholy alliance between leftists and Islamists. At their national conference, Stewart referred to the NLG lawyers as “warriors” against the United States government:
We now resume our everyday lives, but we have been charged once again, with, and for, our quests, and like Hippolyta and her Amazons; like David going forth to meet Goliath, like Beowulf the Dragonslayer, like Queen Zenobia, who made war on the Romans, like Sir Galahad seeking the Holy Grail; and modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara.
Like those she calls “heroes,” Stewart has blood on her hands. After al-Qaeda conducted a bombing in Bali that killed many people, she was recorded describing this as good news because it meant her client would be released. Some have theorized that the Egypt Air jet that went down over the Atlantic killing all the Egyptian Army soldiers on board around the same time may have been a result of the fatwa she released, although the Egyptian government ruled it an accident.
When time came for questions and answers, she contradicted previous, public statements. According to her own website, one of the individuals that Stewart agreed to pass messages to was Layth Shubuylat (sometimes spelled Laith Shubeialat), a known terrorist in Jordan and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was involved in a failed assassination plot against the King of Jordan. Shubuylat also was involved in the oil for food scandal and is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and an active supporter of Hamas. Shubuylat also spent time in prison with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader leading the Insurgents in Iraq who are killing American soldiers. I asked Stewart at SFSU if she was aware of who Shubuylat was. She claimed she never heard the name. When I mentioned Shubuylat’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood, she claimed it was a nonviolent group. (She also claimed she never heard of Iraqi terrorist Zarqawi.) Ironically, just moments later she said she has an excellent memory and never forgets a detail—except Shubuylat’s name on her own website.
At the end of her speech, those who came to support this convicted terrorist-enabler gave her a loud standing ovation. They should have been ashamed of supporting a “grandmother” whose talk of civil rights and legal etiquette was really just a smokescreen for a woman who advocates murder and violence against her political opponents when the cameras and recorders are off.
Stewart requested that people write the judge in her case. Undoubtedly, FrontPage Magazine readers will want to comply with her requests. You may write:
Judge John G. Koeltl
United States District Judge
Southern District of New York
United States Courthouse
500 Pearl StreetNew York, New York 10007
Lee Kaplan is a contributing editor to Frontpagemag.com.