FRYING LYNNE STEWART

By Jan Herman

Americans less brave than Lynne Stewart — which, frankly, means the rest of us — are easily cowed. It doesn’t take much to scare the shit out of people. As William Burroughs once wrote, “anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death,” and Dear Leader owns the biggest frying pan of all.

Of the news stories I’ve read about the conviction yesterday of Stewart, the civil rights defense attorney and left-wing activist, on charges of helping Islamic terrorists and deceiving the U.S. government, I prefer the Los Angeles Times report because it began this way: “In a case with broad implications for civil liberties and America’s war on terrorism …” and because, further down in the story, it followed through this way:

[C]ivil liberties experts warned that the case represented a dangerous attack on the rights of lawyers to represent their clients and an erosion of the attorney-client privilege that could prevent other lawyers from representing unpopular figures.

“We have all in our lifetimes seen well-meaning juries get caught up in the media-dominated government rhetoric of their time, based mostly on fear,” said Michael Tigar, Stewart’s lawyer, after the verdicts were announced. “I do not criticize these jurors. … I have every confidence this verdict will be set aside.”

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the government had prosecuted Stewart for political reasons.

The overriding goal of the case, he suggested, “was to send a message to lawyers who represent alleged terrorists that it’s dangerous to do so.”

The story acknowledged opposite opinions, such as those of Steven Lubet, professor and director of the Program on Advocacy and Professionalism at Northwestern University School of Law, who “was skeptical of Stewart’s claim that she was simply doing her job as a lawyer,” and of James Cohen, acriminal law professor at Fordham Law School, who said: “I don’t think this verdict will discourage potential defense attorneys in the future from taking on widely unpopular clients, because what she did was outside of a lawyer’s role.”

But the LA Times did not “balance” the story by going overboard in support of the government’s view, as I believe other news stories did. In any case, here’s The New York Times report.

The Times covered the story most extensively, with several sidebars and the longest mainbar. All the news stories necessarily offered many of the same details. Anyway, read them and weep for the country, especially when you see Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s widely quoted, bullying threat — couched, naturally, in sanctimonious terms — that the convictions of Stewart and her two co-defendants “send a clear, unmistakable message that this department will pursue both those who carry out acts of terrorism and those who assist them with their murderous goals.”

Americans who still believe in civil rights have been warned to get out of the way. Our
self-righteous U.S. regime will go on braying and scapegoating until it’s either thrown out of
office due to some unlikely development (war-crimes convictions? indictments à la Pinochet?) or
succeeds in a crackdown so complete, so intimidating, so Big Brother, that it only needs to
whisper.

Postscript: Democracy Now! devoted its broadcast this morning to Stewart, who was interviewed with her attorney Michael Tigar and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who testified at her trial. Go watch and/or listen.