Lynne Stewart Speaks at NYC Benefit
The Partisan Defense Committee was honored to have Lynne Stewart speak at our New York Holiday Appeal on 10 December 2004. Lynne Stewart, her translator Mohammed Yousry and her paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar, are the targets of an ominous "terrorism conspiracy" frame-up by the U.S. government stemming from their legal defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The government vendetta against Stewart threatens the basic democratic rights of everyone. If an attorney cannot defend the accused without being legally prosecuted for doing so, then nobody will have the right to legal defense.
Lynne's remarks are perfectly in the spirit of the PDC's tradition of non-sectarian defense work and open political debate. We oppose all the U.S. government's frame-ups and victimizations, including against reactionary Islamic fundamentalists. At the same time, we recognize that what these fundamentalists stand for has nothing to do with anti-imperialism and is counterposed to the interests of working people and the oppressed, much less human progress more generally. Our class-war prisoners, regardless of their political views, are among those who represent the cases and causes of working people—fighters against racist injustice, against U.S. imperialism, against the encroachments on the rights of labor by capital.
With regard to the mainly Muslim and other immigrants rounded up after September 11 and the Guantánamo prisoners, we say: Free all the detainees! Our denunciation of the government prosecution of Abdel Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was, sadly, all too prescient:
"The World Trade Center bombing trial and the conspiracy case against Sheik Rahman is being used to whip up an anti-Arab terrorism scare whose purposes range from whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria to reviving discredited sedition laws and intimidating all those who fall out of step with the government. We have no love lost for Sheik Rahman and his Afghan contras, but we nevertheless defend those who were caught in the web of government provocation against this witchhunt prosecution which aims to cover up the government's crimes. The ‘conspiracy' and ‘sedition' laws exist to be used against striking unionists, leftists and oppressed minorities, while the conspirators in power in Washington go free."
"FBI Provocateurs in World Trade Center Bombing," WV No. 591, 7 January 1994
Drop the charges against Lynne Stewart, Mohammed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar!
* * *
Well, they told me I was invited to a party [laughter]. And indeed it is a party. And then they told me, you just have to speak for maybe five minutes. Well, I'm going to differ with that, because as I look around this room, I need more than five minutes to just recognize—and I'm not going to say "thank"—but recognize the supporters who have shown up at the courtroom, who have stopped me and wished me well, all of the people in this room whose hearts and thoughts are with us in this trial, and with this case, and who recognize, as comrades, the real importance of an attack upon lawyers, and the role that lawyers—even though we may hate them at times [laughter]—do play in the movement. When the chips go down, and you're sitting in that police station with maybe your head feeling not quite so good from the end of a nightstick, you want somebody that's going to get in there and intercede on your behalf.
And let me tell you, this case is about making sure that there's nobody to call, that nobody will show up, that nobody will come to defend the righteous who protest, the righteous who take political action, or anything else, because the government wants to control that. And when I say "control that," I don't mean calling the lawyer and saying "do this and that," but control by means of rules and regulations, by "dos" and "do not." And most of all, by saying to the bar, if you don't obey our rules, we will get you. We will get you like we got Lynne Stewart.
That's why I address you as comrades, because this is not about me personally. This is really about the movement and where we're going, and where we have to go. I was thinking about Mumia. I spoke last night, as some of you know, at the Mumia Coalition, and I'm thinking about what I said about the judge in Mumia's case, the judge who said, "Well, innocence is no defense." No? So then we have to say, "Well, what is a defense in this country, if innocence is not a defense?" The people in this room well know. What is a defense? If you come from the upper classes, that's a defense. If your skin is the right color, that's a defense. If you have a lot of money, regardless of what class you come from, that's a defense [applause]. It's not a defense to be innocent. It's not a defense to hold the Constitution out there. And that's what we fight. And that's what we make them be honest about.
I've been on trial now for eight months. I regret most not being out there to do the work, to pick up the work, as Safiya Bukhari, who was a great worker for prisoner rights, said. I looked at your table over there, Jaan Laaman, Ray Levasseur —I defended the Ohio 7, met them. My client was Richard Williams, who's currently at Butner [Federal Correctional Institution], currently undergoing chemotherapy for cancer that they just happened to discover. The political prisoners are getting older. They need our support. We are indeed defined by these political prisoners, and whether or not we have the will to get them to a place of freedom.
But you know, it's still about Mumia. Mumia is the point person. His is the most egregious case. He is the one that speaks. And when he speaks, it's all of us speaking, with his words and his wisdom, just as were read here tonight. And as I said, my greatest regret, it may sound strange, is not the 40 years I'm facing, not the angst that goes into that, but really not being out here to do the work. To do the work that lawyers do, to do the work fighting for the rights of people, keeping those conditions lawsuits, keeping them on their toes, making them do the right thing.
People like Ray Levasseur, a working-class guy who went to Vietnam, who got religion there—when I say religion, I mean politics [laughter]—came back and opened a bookstore up in Portland, Maine, set up a bail fund for use of poor people to get folks out of jail, and eventually ended up, because of the attention, mainly, but also the threats to his life, went underground, and was of course arrested many years later. He served 20 years in prison, and now as he himself writes, he is now a retired soldier, living in Portland, Maine. It is folks like you, and the Partisan Defense Committee, and the money that comes in every month, that's what keeps those folks alive.
I can also say to you: write to these people, because I tell you, you are enriched by their correspondence, and they can never have enough from the outside. I know I have never visited a so-called political prisoner, or a prisoner of war, that I didn't leave feeling that I had had the visit, not them. They are really special people. They are people that were out there, and now they have honed their outlooks by years and years of dealing with the prison system. Not an easy task.
But as for me, we're winding down. I'm in my endurance mode. We're hopefully going to get to the summations and charge. I do still maintain great hope in the jury system. It does depend on the climate, as one of my lawyer friends reminded me today. But I do believe there can be nothing probably more communal than 12 citizens who are complete strangers coming together to decide what are the facts of a case. While we know how the people of this country are written upon by media, how they are written upon by just the facts of their daily lives, we still hold out the hope that ordinary people coming together can make an important decision in a fellow human being's life, can do that openly and honestly. And we believe with all our hearts that they will find us not guilty [applause].
So once again, because I don't want to stop the party, I am very happy to be here. I am so happy to recognize so many people who have meant so much. The trial goes on; we're over there at 40 Centre Street in the same courtroom as the Rosenbergs were in. And whatever your politics are, or were, or could be, this is a case worth defending. We feel we're not going to end up like Julius and Ethel—I heard "hope not"...we're not going to hope even—we are not going to end up there because we have taken the aggressive stance [applause].
I spent three weeks on that witness stand explaining to the jury how we do the work we do, what it is all about. How we are guided, not by rules and regulations set out by the Bureau of Prisons, but how we are guided by ethical rules that guide our productivity, the most important of which is to zealously defend. And in that we are not answerable, we are autonomous in our decision-making, and how that works and why it works.
And Lord knows, I'm no Islamic fundamentalist [laughter]. But I will say to this assembled group, at some risk, that I think that when we talk about political prisoners, we have to recognize that there are almost a hundred Muslims who are there, and they were framed up. Certainly Sheik Omar was framed by the U.S. government, acting in conjunction with the Egyptian government. And while I don't adopt his politics—that's for sure—I still am enough of a believer in self-determination to say that we are going to have to address international problems such as this, and not be so narrow that we can only say we'll take our political prisoners, but not those political prisoners [applause]. Most of these Muslims are held in a special wing of Florence, Colorado [Administrative Maximum Unit Prison (ADX)]. It was built after 9/11. Florence, as most of you may know, is the most repressive federal jail. It is small rooms and dog runs and no human contact whatsoever.
I do want to say that I thank everyone for coming tonight, for putting up with this longer speech than I was scheduled to give, and I would ask you to come to court. I would ask you particularly to come to court when we do the summations. Michael Tigar is worth the price of admission, which is free. He's worth a great deal more than that to me, because he is fearless. He is not afraid of my politics. He is not afraid to have put that out in front of a jury, that when an oppressed person defends himself, and may be forced to use violence against an oppressor, that is not only to be recognized; it is to be commended [applause]. So I urge you to keep up with the Web site. It's very simple: lynnestewart.org. Come out to court if you have some time.
We're [presenting] the co-defendants' case. It's a lot more interesting than the government's case, which, as the people who were there know, was endless. There was not one live person as a witness, except a reporter from Egypt, who was so frightened up there he could hardly testify. Everything else, wiretaps, videotapes, pictures, newspaper clippings. We of the left, we love newspaper clippings; we're always cutting something out— "we have to be able to use this to organize somebody." I'm going to warn you all, this is what they have against us: "You had this clipping" [laughter].
But to close, I just want to say that it's always clear in a political trial who is with the government and who is on the side of righteousness. And I can only say that in a trial, where the judge has allowed in every bin Laden reference the government has cared to make, after he told the jury this case has nothing to do with 9/11, and then videotapes, press releases and pictures [were allowed] in on the flimsiest connection to the third co-defendant; but when the third co-defendant, Ahmed Sattar, the activist, wanted to put in that remarkable video footage of the young boy being killed by the Israeli tank in Palestine, the judge said, "No, no, that will confuse the jury; it's not relevant." Sattar wanted to use that to explain his state of mind in doing the things that he is accused of doing.
I see my friend Farouk Abdel Muhti [on the poster] over there [applause]. He was taken from us much too early. A real gap in our movement, not to have him. He filled so much space. A most remarkable man. I always felt he was like my (excuse the expression, Ralph and others) "soul brother." We were arrested I guess about the same day, but of course because he was an "alien," he was taken away to prison for the next year, where I have no doubt the treatment he received killed him. And if we don't believe that, then we don't know what's going on in those four walls. They are vicious, brutal, uncaring places. So I'm happy to see his picture up there next to my friends, the political prisoners.
And I'd like to just recognize all of you for supporting me and understanding the importance of this struggle. Thank you very much.
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 840, 21 January 2005.