On the stand, Ms. Stewart acknowledged that her decision had been a “close call.” But she said that continuing to represent Mr. Abdel Rahman while he was in prison and after he had lost all his appeals had been “a team effort” she shared with Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general, and Abdeen Jabara, a lawyer who specializes in Arab clients. She said the lawyers believed that the special prison restrictions imposed on the sheik included a “bubble” that allowed the lawyers to continue to develop their own defense strategy and exercise their attorney-client privileges.<\/p>\n
She said she had “an expansive view” of the prison rules, which she signed on to repeatedly after they were imposed in 1997. “I understood this meant we were permitted to do the necessary legal work to vigorously defend Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was incommunicado,” she said.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She relayed a message she didn’t understand, which was a clear call to violent conflict. And her response?<\/p>\n
Her approach, she said, was to do whatever she could to keep the sheik “in the public eye,” with the goal of building political support to eventually send him back to Egypt to serve out his sentence, she said. Although she does not speak Arabic, she said she understood that the sheik’s May 2000 message was intended only to start a debate among his followers about the Egyptian cease-fire, not to end it.<\/p>\n
\n“Did you think your client wanted people to pick up the gun and start shooting?” Mr. Tigar asked.<\/p>\n
\n“No,” Ms. Stewart said emphatically.<\/p>\n
\nAsked if she had ever passed to the news media an instruction from the sheik that “people should commit violence,” she said, “Absolutely not.”<\/p>\n
\nShe added: “It would not have been proper. We are not allowed to become part of the client’s effort to break the law.”<\/p>\n
\nMs. Stewart said she remained shocked that the government had made secret videotapes of her meetings with the sheik in federal prison in Rochester, Minn., and secret recordings of her phone calls to him. She said she had made diversionary comments in meetings when the sheik was dictating his cease-fire message to her Arabic translator because she distrusted the guards, whom she regarded as meddlesome.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Jail. For a long time.<\/p>\n
And for me, a commitment to work harder at refraining from judgment until I read the whole story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lynne Stewart, radical lawyer for terrorisk sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, relayed orders to commit violence and murder to his followers and distracted his guards while he dictated those orders. She deserves jail. For a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}