On the Stand Lawyer for a Terrorist Sheik Shows Strain
October 28, 2004 On the Stand, Lawyer for a Terrorist Sheik Shows Strain By JULIA PRESTON n the final minutes of a long day on the stand yesterday, Lynne F. Stewart lost her lawyerly calm and began to cry, showing a moment of doubt about the unorthodox defense of a client that led to charges of terrorist conspiracy against her. Ms. Stewart suddenly struggled to speak after her lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, asked if she would "do it the same way" again, referring to her defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Islamic cleric who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for a thwarted bombing plot in New York City. "Sitting here today," she said in halting words, "it's a very difficult question. I am diminished by the loss of my clientele. My family has suffered tremendously. I don't know if I would. . . ." Her voice trailed off. Encouraged by Mr. Tigar to complete her thought, Ms. Stewart changed tone, recovering her composure. "I like to think that I would do it," she said, "because it was a duty owed to the client." She insisted that her actions did not "violate any command, any restriction of the United States of America." As she stepped down from the stand, she wiped away tears with her fingers. It was the third day of Ms. Stewart's testimony in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and the first time she gave the jury a glimpse of the toll the terror trial, now in its fifth month, has taken on her. It was also a day when Ms. Stewart laid out her legal rationale for conveying a message from Mr. Abdel Rahman to the international news media, even though she had agreed in writing to special prison rules that barred the sheik from communicating with reporters. Ms. Stewart and her two co-defendants are facing one of the most extensively documented and ambitious terror prosecutions brought by the Justice Department since the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Tigar's line of questioning yesterday centered on Ms. Stewart's decision, after a prison visit with the sheik on May 19 and 20, 2000, to telephone a Reuters correspondent in Cairo and release a statement in which the sheik withdrew his support for a three-year-old cease-fire by his militant followers in Egypt. Prosecutors have charged that Ms. Stewart relayed an order for terrorist war from her client when he was supposed to be incommunicado. 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. 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. 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. "Did you think your client wanted people to pick up the gun and start shooting?" Mr. Tigar asked. "No," Ms. Stewart said emphatically. Asked if she had ever passed to the news media an instruction from the sheik that "people should commit violence," she said, "Absolutely not." She added: "It would not have been proper. We are not allowed to become part of the client's effort to break the law." Ms. 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. "It's not because anything is being said that is illegal," she said. "It's because the confidence of the client is made to the lawyer. It is not to be shared with anyone else." Ms. Stewart's comment left clear that her view of her client was diametrically opposed to the government's. While she regarded him as an ailing religious figure who had been reduced to a "mental breakdown" by his near-total isolation in prison, to federal prosecutors he remains a committed terrorist whose words were as dangerous as bullets. After Ms. Stewart released the sheik's message, she received a letter from Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been a prosecutor in the sheik's trial, warning of a risk that buildings could get blown up because of Mr. Abdel Rahman's messages. Ms. Stewart said she dismissed the warning at the time. "I thought that was a Pat Fitzgerald rhetorical flourish," she said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/nyregion/28stewart.html?pagewanted=print&p osition= ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. 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