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Tue 26 Oct, 2004 06:11 am
Full New York Times story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/nyregion/26stewart.html?ex=1256529600&en=51f9f64a034dc0a0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
On Stand, Terrorist's Lawyer Denies Aiding Violent Cause
By JULIA PRESTON
Published: October 26, 2004
After sitting silently for four months while federal prosecutors portrayed her as an eager accomplice of her terrorist clients, Lynne F. Stewart spoke at her trial yesterday for the first time, saying she was a "very, very adversarial" lawyer but had never crossed the line to aid violence.
Ms. Stewart, a tenacious, unorthodox lawyer who has represented a long list of unpopular clients over her 30-year career, sought from the first words of her testimony in Federal District Court in Manhattan to show that everything she had done to help one particular terrorist client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, had been part of a full-tilt defense inspired by her "anti-authoritarian view of the world."
But she insisted that she had never abetted or even endorsed the Islamic holy war preached by Mr. Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks.
"I'm not in the habit of fundamentalism," Ms. Stewart said.
Ms. Stewart's testimony had been long awaited in a case that accuses her of aiding terrorism by relaying the sheik's messages of war to his followers. The government says she violated a fundamental oath to obey the law and crossed over to become a terrorist conspirator herself. She and her lawyers say the case against her is a clear example of overreaching by prosecutors in a post-9/11 world, and violates the sacrosanct relationship between lawyer and client.
Her testimony, on the first day of the defense presentation of its case, brought new electricity to a long trial that is examining the limits of what lawyers can do to represent terrorists, in one of the most ambitious terror cases brought by the Justice Department of Attorney General John Ashcroft........
How far is too far for a lawyer to go? Or - "overreaching by prosecutors in a post-9/11 world"??????
Ms. Stewart said she had agreed to represent the sheik despite his furious sermons calling for violence against the United States and Egypt because she saw that he was "a blind man, he came from a very different culture." She said she viewed him as a major Islamic scholar and believed that he had been railroaded by prosecutors with little evidence that he had actively participated in the bomb plot.
"I believe government is best when government is little," said Ms. Stewart, touching on a rare point of agreement between her leftist outlook and the Republican administration that is prosecuting her. "A government can overreach. A government is very, very powerful."
But Ms. Stewart insisted that she had always kept her distance from the sheik's politics. "I'm my own person, I have my own beliefs," she said. She said she had grown skeptical of religious fanaticism when she attended an evangelical Christian college.
"You have to take a step to the side," she said of her strategy with politically controversial clients. "You can't be too close to the client or too close to the cause, whatever that may be."