Lawyer’s jail torment marks US totalitarian state

Half a century ago this month Martin Luther King wrote his famous prison protest against racial injustice, entitled ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. An excerpt reads: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Fifty years on to this very month, King’s defiant cri de coeur could hardly be more apt to express the barbarous injustice being committed by the US government against one of that nation’s bravest defence lawyers – Lynne Stewart.

Ms Stewart (73) is dying in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, from cancer that has spread from her breast to the rest of her body. Her family has little doubt that her life-threatening illness has been induced by the vindictive conditions of her incarceration by the US authorities.

Ralph Poynter, her husband for the past 50 years, and more than 10,000 petition signatories from across the world are mobilising to face down the barbarity of the American regime. Her supporters are demanding Lynne’s immediate release from her prison cell on compassionate and legally entitled grounds.

Lynne Stewart’s story is not just one of personal harrowing torment. The US state’s cruel persecution of this woman epitomises the general destruction of human rights and the rise of draconian police powers across America in the aftermath of 9/11 and the fraudulent “war on terror”.

This climate of repression and xenophobia also became evident last week in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings, where one of America’s major cities was put under a state of virtual martial law for several days while the security apparatus hunted down two brothers, who were already known to these authorities.

Lynne Stewart came of age politically in the turbulent 1960s. Growing up in the poor New York working-class districts of Brooklyn and Harlem, she became a defence lawyer with the express purpose of upholding the rights of the oppressed, marginalised and downtrodden – many of whom were her friends and neighbours.

She witnessed how many of her friends from the African-American community were harassed and brutalised by American racist police forces. She saw how the courts denied justice to poor communities and how these communities were neglected and abandoned by elitist governments, to live in open-air prisons called inner-city ghettoes.

With irrepressible passion and wit, Lynne Stewart saw her duty to her fellow human beings as representing those who had been cast aside as untouchable and unwanted in an American society where all too often poverty and racial prejudice automatically impose a harsh life sentence of misery and suffering at birth. Without fear or favour, Lynne saw her vocation as, in her own colourful words, to not just defend those who couldn’t make it to the finish line, but to defend those who couldn’t even make it to the starting line.

Once, she stated publicly her purpose as a defence lawyer: “Our quests are formidable. We have in Washington poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe. There is a consummate evil that unleashes its dogs of war on the helpless. Our enemy is motivated only by insatiable greed, with no thought of other consequences. In this enemy there is no love of the land or the creatures that live there, no compassion for the people, no thought of future generations. This enemy will destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink as long as the dollars keep filling up their money-boxes… We go out to stop police brutality; to rescue the imprisoned.”

Lynne’s words were not those of a bookish lawyer, but rather those of an impassioned human being who clearly saw injustice as an enemy of the people, as a political oppression that must be fought with all her body, heart, mind and spirit.

Her trenchant defence of the principle of presumed innocence saw her take on cases that many other attorneys shunned. These cases included members of the Black Panther movement and other radical social movements, such as Anti-Vietnam War, Weather Underground and Irish freedom fighters. She defended a great many other unknown ordinary citizens who were victims of daily American police brutality and racism. For Lynne Stewart, the courts were not a place to make a moneyed career in – they were battlegrounds to take up the plight of people who were victims of elite privilege and abusive state power.

During the 1990s, typically Lynne recognised the plight of American Muslims who were increasingly being harassed and demonised by America’s state security and police services. She took on the case of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh”.

Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombings in New York, the Egyptian-born cleric was accused in 1995 of “seditious conspiracy” in another plot to blow up various city landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the United Nations Building. Many observers denounced the prosecution as a set-up, pointing out that Sheikh Omar was poor, blind and disabled. Also, it was well known in the communities that FBI undercover agents had been for months going into mosques inveigling youths with these very same hare-brained terror schemes.

As with the recent Boston marathon bombings, there are many unanswered questions about the shadowy role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1993 New York blasts and the subsequent alleged landmarks bombing plot. There are strong suspicions that the FBI used “sting” tactics to entrap unwitting felons – in much the same that many people have questioned how the two Tsarnaev brothers in Boston were permitted to apparently evade known security concerns.

Lynne Stewart was not intimidated out of defending Sheikh Omar even though the increasingly unhinged American corporate media portrayed him as the “embodiment of Islamic terrorism”. By then, there was a growing pernicious climate of Islamophobia in the US – a disturbing trend that has since become a hate-filled crescendo in the decade following the 9/11 explosions in 2001.

Sheikh Omar was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 along with nine other defendants. His prosecution was seen then as a travesty, owing to Lynne Stewart’s vigorous defence and evidence. For many observers, she proved in court not only the sheikh’s innocence, but also that the American government, the legal system and the law enforcement agencies were all implicated in insider-job terrorism and perverting justice. Recall that these revelations made by Lynne Stewart’s legal work were six years before 9/11 and the so-called “war on terror”.

True to her humanitarianism, Stewart maintained professional client relations with the incarcerated Sheikh Omar – who is currently serving out his sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina. The sheikh may have been behind bars, but Lynne Stewart continued working to clear his name and for his eventual acquittal.

This legal representation of an unfairly demonised man would lead to Lynne Stewart’s downfall in the following decade at the hands of the increasingly militant US authorities.

After 9/11, President George Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft instituted a raft of laws that would target defence lawyers and prevent their exercise of constitutional rights of free speech. Under these new stringent so-called anti-terror laws in the aftermath of 9/11, Stewart was accused of aiding terrorism because of her prison visits to Sheikh Omar and for allegedly passing written communications to his supporters on the outside. This latter accusation was based on a highly contaminated misrepresentation of a press release Lynne Stewart sent to the Reuters news agency concerning the case of her client. In the pre-9/11 era, such legal activities would have been considered normal confidential defence-client relations. Not any more; they are now seen as “collaborating with enemies of the state”. That is a measure of how extreme political and legal conditions in the US have deteriorated.

Lynne Stewart was arrested in 2002 and charged with “materially supporting terrorism”. Bizarrely – and indicating the witch-hunt climate that has gripped the US following 9/11 – the arrest was announced by Attorney General Ashcroft during an appearance on the David Letterman Late Show aired on the television channel CBS.

After a lengthy controversial legal battle, Lynne Stewart was herself sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment at the end of 2009 for aiding and abetting terrorists. She has now served more than three years of that sentence. Such is the sadistic nature of her incarceration, for some of the time she has been shackled with arm and leg irons to her prison bed, even while receiving medical treatment for her cancer.

The conclusion from this American state-sanctioned barbarity is clear. Lynne Stewart’s imprisonment is an attempt by the US regime to bury her alive behind bars. Of all people, Lynne Stewart knew best how the Washington shadow government of corrupt politicians and secret services were constructing the war-on-terror charade to demonise Muslims and create a climate of fear and paranoia in American society – a climate that would soon enable the shadow government to strip citizens of their human rights and constitutional protections. In a word, Lynne Stewart had to be silenced and got rid off. She knew too much and was too articulate about the vile inner-workings and scheming of the US secret state.

If voices like those of Lynne Stewart had remained free and active, it is probable that the US secret government would not be able to get away so easily with expanding its panoply of barbarities, such as the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, torture of detainees held without charge, the wholesale collapse of civil liberties, spying and surveillance on citizens, the illegal invasions and aggression towards other countries, and – perhaps the ultimate totalitarianism – the extrajudicial murder of foreign and American nationals with assassination drones by presidential order.

Owing to her life-long commitment to defending the rights of others and her rapidly deteriorating health, Lynne Stewart’s prison ordeal has won a growing public call for her immediate release, both within the US and across the world. Her case has also drawn widespread awareness and concern about the repressive trajectory of US society and the encroachment of a full-blown totalitarian police state.

Her cause has gained support from thousands of ordinary people who recognise Stewart’s towering defence of society’s weak and vulnerable members. Her supporters include human and social rights activists, UN special rapporteur on human rights Richard Falk, and many renowned thinkers and writers, such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Ralph Schoenman, Alice Walker and Cornel West, as well as former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu has added his voice calling for Stewart’s immediate release, as has veteran American actor Ed Asner, who said: “Given the enormous good that Lynne Stewart has done for humanity throughout her life as a courageous lawyer for the poor, the oppressed and the unjustly accused, I am shocked by the cynical perversity of an American government that has pursued her savagely and vengefully.

Asner continued: “Lynne Stewart must be freed. The law requires her compassionate release and the medical care that can save her life. We must deny the US state a death sentence aimed at the freedom of us all. The state power that torments Lynne Stewart invades countries at will, murders hundreds of thousands with impunity and creates a climate of fear and repression to prevent the people of this country from calling those in power to account.”

Author and media commentator Ralph Schoenman said: “We must mobilize world opinion to stop the judicial and political murder of Lynne Stewart, an ominous measure of the mass repression in preparation for all working people and the oppressed. Few cases encapsulate so fundamentally the destruction of democratic rights in the United States as the persecution of Lynne Stewart.”

African-American comedian and political commentator Dick Gregory has vowed to continue a hunger strike until Stewart is freed. Nearly three weeks after refusing food, Gregory said: “The prosecution and persecution of Lynne Stewart is designed to intimidate the entire legal community so that few would dare to defend political clients whom the state demonizes and none would provide a vigorous defense. It also was designed to narrow the meaning of our cherished first amendment right to free speech, which the people of this country struggled to have added to the Constitution as the Bill of Rights.”

In sum, we may return to the words of the late Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

It is high time for the US authorities to free Lynne Stewart from her unjust imprisonment.