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Zionists In Our Courts
By Edward W. Miller, MD
"I'll be the judge, I'll be the jury" said cunning old
Fury. I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to
death."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
By Lewis Carroll
On Friday, February 10, 2005 Civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart, after a tedious 7-month trial, was convicted on all five counts of conspiring to aid terrorists and lying to the government. She was convicted of smuggling out messages from her jailed client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, of helping the Sheik contact followers in Egypt with messages that could possibly have ignited violence in Egypt by ending a cease-fire that had been established between the Jamaa a' Islamiya and president Hosin Mubarak's government.
Stewart's co-defendants, Ahmed Sattar who acted as paralegal for the Sheik and Arab translator, Mohammed, were also convicted of all charges against them. Stewart's indictment way back in April 2002 had been personally announced to the media by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Bush's new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, said when the verdict was announced: "the convictions sent 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 (www.democracynow.org)
During Stewart's trial he government called few witnesses, basing its case primarily on 85,000 secretly recorded video and audio clips of meetings in prison between Stewart and the Sheik, as well as the home phone of Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
The prosecution also played a pre-9/11 video tape in which Osama bin Laden threatens to attack the United States as a means of winning the Sheik's release from prison www.slate.com/toolbar 2/16/2005)
Judge John Keoltl had originally set Stewart's sentencing for July 15th, but has advanced the date into September 2005. Stewart's lawyers will file post-trial motions with the judge in attempts to reverse her conviction. Convicted of a felony, Stewart is barred from practicing law. While free on bail, She cannot travel outside New York State. She faces up to 35 years in prison.
Amy Goodman of station KPFA on February 10th, met Stewart and her husband as they emerged from the courthouse after the verdict had been announced. Lynne commented: " I'm still very shook up and surprised that the jury didn't see what we sawÉ.but when you put Osama bin Laden in the courtroom and ask the jury to ignore it, that's asking a lotÉ We are going to fight onÉ I hope it will be a wake-up call to all the citizens of this country that you can't lock up lawyersÉ you've got to let them operateÉ." (www.democracynow.org)
Lynne Stewart's troubles began when she bravely undertook the defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman some twelve years ago. That blind and diabetic Muslim cleric was finally convicted with nine others in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. The Sheik was sentenced to life in prison in solitary confinement though he was NOT found guilty of involvement in the bombing plot. Attorney Lynne Stewart who felt strongly the Sheik Rahman had been wrongly imprisoned managed, along with Ex-Attorney-General Ramsey Clark the Sheik's appeals, appeals eventually turned down by the appellate courts. Stewart continued to visit the Sheik, hoping to achieve a retrial or transfer to Egypt to serve out his sentence.
As David Teather remarked in his column (www.guardian.co.uk 2/11/20005) Stewart "had built a fierce reputation fighting for the poor, the dispossessed, radicals and revolutionaries over her 30-year career." Prior to her legal work Stewart had been a teacher in the NY school system,. She is the mother of three, ( a lawyer, a teacher and a physician), stepmother of four and grandmother of seven.
Stewart's meetings with Sheik Rahman in the Federal Prison in Minnesota to which he had been transferred, had not escaped the prying eyes of the Bush Administration, and its Attorney-General John Ashcroft, and every effort was made to delay and interfere with this attorney-client relationship. Ashcroft's Justice Department, as columnist Jaret Decker put it, was: "pursuing a course that threatens the Sixth Amendment right to legal representation, and exposesÉ any attorney who represents a suspected terrorist to the risk of prosecution" (www.reason.com/0406/fe.jd.criminal.)
The blind and diabetic Sheik Rahman, confined in solitary, was barred from contact with the outside world beyond his immediate family and attorneys. Lynne Stewart was not only closely guarded while meeting with her Sheik client, (which meetings required an interpreter), but restricted by having to sign an agreement to abide by Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) imposed by the Bureau of Prisons. These measures included the right of prison authorities to capture on camera and tape her conversations with the Sheik; measures which, by permitting a third party to intrude, SAMS not only defied her Sixth Amendment rights to consul but also infringed on both lawyer and client's Fifth Amendment right NOT to witness against themselves.
Captured on tape sometime in May 2000, Lynne Stewart may have violated her SAMS obligation by acting as a conduit between the Sheik and his followers in an Egyptian Islamic group. The Bush government's heavy-handed response may well determine how Lynne spends the remainder of her life.
Zionist plans to weaken the power of Islam and retain land seized during the 1967 war surfaced at Camp David during Jimmy Carter's presidency when Egypt's president Sadat was seduced into splitting the Arab league by making a separate peace with Israel. Sadat was later murdered for this betrayal. Nassar, who succeeded Sadat led a more independent Egypt until his murder, after which the US helped a secular Husin Mubarak into the presidency. Sheik Rahman's capture and imprisonment in he US was intended to further weaken the strong anti-Israel Muslim constituency present in Egypt, which explains the intense Zionist interest in the Sheik's trial.
Back in the early 1980s in Cairo, an Egyptian imam, or holy man, quietly moved from mosque to crowded mosque, preaching the tenants of Islam while condemning the corruption of his government. Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a Ph.D. from Al-Azher University, denounced the plundering of Muslim lands by Israel in Palestine, as well as President Mubarak's treachery in cooperating with Israel and the US to support repression of both the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and his own people. The Sheik commanded his followers to stand up against Mubarak, "a military dictator whose prisons brimmed with 70,000 of the nation's best sons and daughters." In his country where ideas were censored by Egyptian "Thought Police," Sheik Rahman had been jailed by Mubarak for his political activity in the early 1980s, released in 1984 only to be imprisoned again in 1985,1986 and 1989.
At each trial he was acquitted of wrong-doing, and continued to advocate the values of Islam and to protest against government corruption.
When Sheik Rahman traveled to this country in 1994, Egyptian foreign minister Amar Moussa and US ambassador to Egypt, Robert Pelletreau, connived to have him arrested under the pretext of "violating immigration laws." American Zionists, including US Senator Alphonse D'Amato (D-NY) and Assemblyman Dov Hikind (NY), made it their personal business to reinforce the indictment. Egyptian secret police spy Emad Salem was sent to the US with specific instructions to keep close tabs on the Sheik. After some months of imprisonment in solitary, this blind and diabetic cleric was finally brought to trail in what was to become one of the most corrupt legal procedures in US history. Ex Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, famous for defending the politically-targeted, assisted Attorney Lynne Stewart in managing the Sheik's defense.
The Sheik's trial was corrupted at every turn by America's Jewish organizations. Jury selection began on January 9, 1995, at which time the Zionist media began an assault on this Muslim scholar. The day before the jury date, The New York Times led the attack with a defaming article. Prior to this, the prosecution had published excerpts from the scholar's 22-year-old Ph.D. dissertation, taking bits and pieces out of context to bias potential jurors.
Even NPR (National Public Radio) joined the chorus on January 9 with a lengthy news report by columnist and author Judith Miller who claimed the case against the Sheik "was strong." Judith Miller has been a militant anti-Muslim writer and biased reporter on the Mideast for The New York Times.
At the beginning of the trial, the Sheik's lawyers had demanded the strongly-biased Zionist Judge, Michael B. Mukasey, recluse himself from the trial. Mukasey, a committed Zionist and long-time supporter of Israel whose wife was active on Zionist issues, refused. ( Federal Law requires a sitting judge to recluse himself where his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.)
Sheik Rahman was first denied the lawyer of his choice by Judge Mukasey, and when he asked the court to permit an expert to explain the practices of Islam to his ignorant American jury, he was refused this due process.
Eventually after a long and biased trial, on January 17, 1996, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman was sentenced by this Jewish judge to imprisonment for life plus 65 years." The extra 65 years were added under the court's Count #3: Conspiracy to murder Hosin Mubarak (Egypt's president). Those 65 years added to the sentence were related to the "conspiracy theory," and the judge's interpretation of conversations Sheik Rahman had had with supposed international terrorists.
Both judge and court were strongly influenced by an inflammatory and largely fictitious documentary, JIHAD IN AMERICA, produced by a Zionist Jew, Stephen Emerson, and shown nationwide on PBS. The prosecution and the judge employed guilt by association in their judgment. The prosecution had also presented to the jury, as evidence of his terrorist links, recorded phone calls to the Sheik supposedly made by Muslim militants, but provided no translations to the jury.
The prosecution's conspiracy theory was supposedly supported by the testimony of Abdo Haggag, an Egyptian, who quoted an unrecorded conversation he allegedly had with the Sheik. At the trial, Haggag admitted under oath to having received $100,000 for his testimony, plus another $60,000 for "his children's education." The Sheik was NOT, however, convicted of implication in the 1993 New York Trade Center bombing.
After receiving his lifetime sentence, this elderly, sick and blind sheik, standing before the Jewish judge, spoke quietly and at length in Arabic, "Sheik Rahman debunked the prosecution's theory that he heads an international terrorist organization, noting that he was in jail in Cairo in the early 1980s at the time the so-called "international terrorist group" was allegedly being formed.
Judge Mukasey, visibly irritated by the Sheik's remarks, interrupted the scholarly cleric repeatedly and rudely. Columnist and author Edward C. Coughlin, Jr., noted in an article in New Trend (January/February '96): "Since the days of the 'Star Chamber' proceedings in England, governments have used the conspiracy laws to destroy their political enemies. In an America controlled by the Zionist Gang, a decision was made at the highest level "to get" Sheik Rahman... The evidence against the sheik É was purely circumstantial and built on the most dubious kind of foundation. His trial in Zionist-dominated New York City in front of a card-carrying Zionist jurist and in a society swarming with an Islamic-bashing media and pro-Zionist tabloids and news readers, guaranteed his ultimate conviction."
The Sheik's imprisonment, isolated from his fellow prisoners continues to be cruel and physically threatening. Amnesty International reported the Sheik was not allowed to join in Muslim prayers with other Muslim prisoners, was deprived of his prayer rug and allowed no short-wave radio to hear Arabic news (his only language). He was subject to frequent strip searches. Amnesty International pointed out that under Articles 7 and 10 of the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights: "All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person." Attempts by the Stewart-Ramsey Clark team to return Sheik Rahman to his native Egypt to serve out his sentence were denied by the court.
In attacking Sheik Rahman, our Zionist lobby effectively silenced a protester against Mubarak's suppression of political dissent, along with a voice supporting a Palestinian state. Twelve years later, US Attorney General Ashcroft's abrogation of Lynne Stewart's constitutional rights under the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments was supported at every turn by our Zionist-influenced media, so that Stewart's conviction became "collateral damage" in a political arena where Washington's support of expansionist Israel is endangering the political rights of all Americans.
Writer David Cole in THE NATION( March 7th 2005) notes the prosecution's use of fearmongering and guilt by association. Stewart was tried together with Ahmed Sattar, an Egyptian-born American citizen against whom thousands of hours of wire tap conversations with a so-called "terrorist group" included a "fake fatwa urging followers to kill (Jews)" had been recorded by the government. Though Stewart had no relations with Sattar and no knowledge of these communications, the prosecutor in his closing remarks repeated Sattar's "kill the Jews" fatwa more than seventy times.
On March 19th demonstrations in support of Lynne Stewart will be held in cities across the country. See (www.lynnestewart.org)