Lynne Stewart, Etats-Unis

It may be ironic for me as an American addressing you, to raise my voice against my government on September 11th. But how can I not do that? There is repression in the United States. There is resistance to that repression. Although I am not one of the thousands of Muslims that were arrested after September 11th and I have not been incarcerated on Guantanemo, I haven’t been thrown in a military brig without a lawyer and forgotten about, I am still the living proof of both the repression and the resistance to that repression as it exists today and it has existed for centuries for Black, Latino and other minorities within the United States. I am a lawyer who has practiced criminal defence in New York City for the past thirty years. On April 9th 2002, the FBI came to my home, came up the steps and as they came up the steps, I heard my husband Ralph talking to them, he happens to be African American. What part of Africa, we don’t know, they never told the slaves. As they came up the steps of my home, I assumed they were here to arrest him. He’s the activist on the front lines. I said to Ralph, ‘don’t worry, we’ll have you out by lunch time’. The FBI said ‘no you won’t, we’re here for you, not for him’. I was astounded then. I am astounded today because I am completely innocent of any charge. The charge that they placed upon me, ‘materially aiding a terrorist organization’ and ‘conspiracy to aid a terrorist organization’ was all stemming from my representation, in 1995 and thereafter, of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rachman of Egypt. It was a vigorous defence. It was a spirited defence. It was a continuous defence, because that is my job. I couldn’t get him a ‘not guilty’ verdict, even in 1995 because the prejudice that existed in my country was so great. They made people feel they would be safer ‘if he was locked up somewhere’. This was what the jury said. So they sent him and 13 others to jail. I did not stop representing Sheikh Omar along with Ramsay Clarke and Abdeen Jabarra. We believe, then and now, that they are political prisoners. Imprisoned to please a government, not imprisoned because of what was done or said I was accused of ‘materially aiding a terrorist organization’ because as his lawyer, I made a press release to Reuters. It was not a secret thing. I had visited him in jail. He asked for a simple press release, a comment he wished to make on the political situation in Egypt, directed to his former lawyer there, but to be released publicly. I called Reuters, it was not secret. It was a simple message of solidarity yet for this I faced forty years in jail. They claimed that they had evidence, that they had wire tapped my co-defendants, one of whom was the interpreter and one of whom is an activist and that they had done this for the last thirteen years. They also told us that they had listened in to those most private of conversations, at least under our law, between an attorney and a client. These are privileged in our law, which means that no one can hear them except the lawyer and the client. And for that reason, these conversations cannot be heard by the government. They went further. They went into the jailhouse. They put up microphones and video cameras. They recorded our conversations. Now this is a violation of rights not like the ones you are used to. I have such sympathy for those of you who walk that fine line between life and death as you do your daily work. This is not on that level but in the United States where we claim to be so free and equal and everyone gets a fair trial it betrays the hypocrisy of the system. It says to us, ‘yes, that’s for some people, those who can afford it, those who are the privileged class.’ By that we usually mean white.

After I was arrested on that April day, the FBI went to my offices. They searched my offices. They seized the computer hard drives, my appointment books, my message books. Everything in my office was carried out in large boxes, all of which were photographed by the press waiting outside. They played this story of the terrorist lawyer, the terrorist interpreter and the terrorist paralegal on the front page of every paper in the country. That night, or that morning also, while the FBI came into my office, the Attorney General, who is a little bit strange, I think even by anybody’s definition, went to ground zero. I might say it’s ten blocks from my office and I saw the things unfold that morning as I sat across the river in Brooklyn waiting to go to court. Saw the black smoke, saw the fire and later in court was told that the entire building had gone, and I feared for my fellow countrymen that were trapped in there, that were lied to in there, that were told not to leave the building. But I also feel for the thousands of others that you know of. I have tremendous sympathy for them as well. Ashcroft went to ground zero to announce my arrest and how my arrest was going to make the world safe once again. That they were after the terrorists and that they had gotten them. That night he went to the David Letterman show, which is a nationally broadcast late night national television show in the US. He basically, went on this show, which also has comedians and movie stars and music, and he cheerlead the crowd in that theatre about his arrest of the terrorist grandma from Brooklyn. I can tell you I don’t think I was arrested because I was a terrorist grandma. I think I was arrested because I have been a political activist, I hope a thorn in their sides, for forty years at that point. So John Ashcroft didn’t pick up a Bar register and say ‘oh yes, let’s pick this grandma over here’. I was selected for this dubious honour and I hope that I have responded in a way John didn’t expect. Because I have defended since I became a lawyer, in the early 70’s, human rights persons. I never thought of them as such, the people who are political prisoners. I still fight for Mummia Abu-Jamal and for the countless Muslims that we deal with. Also for my client Sheikh Omar who is now relegated to a prison in the middle of Colorado where he has absolutely no human contact. A blind man in his mid sixties who speaks very little English, The guards push the food on a tray through the door so they may not even speak to him. With regard to my case, before I had even got out of the courthouse that day, we had resolved to fight back. That I was going to speak out.

First of all, I was absolutely outraged at being arrested. Secondly, I thought this was an attempt to intimidate my fellow lawyers. To make them feel that they should not be vigorous in their defence of people that the government felt were unpopular, people that the government wanted convicted. Thirdly, to send us another warning, ‘do your case the way the government wants you to do it and not do your case the way you believe and your client believes it should be done’. Do your case their way. When I got out of court I spoke out to a lot of cameras, a lot of media. I have been speaking out for my entire career. I spoke out when Sheikh Omar was on trial. But I spoke out and I asked the question ‘how far will they go?’ If being a lawyer for Sheikh Omar is aiding terrorism, what about the woman who cleans the cell, is she also aiding terrorism? How far do we go with this? And I also said, don’t ask what I was doing in that visiting room out in Rochester, Minnesota. Ask ‘what was the government doing there listening to everything that was said?’ And I have a great human rights lawyer and defender. It may not be a name known to you, his name is Michael Tigar. And indeed he is a tiger and indeed he fought the legal end of things and myself and Ralph, we took to the byways and highways of America and talked to the people. The great Joe Hill, an organizer of labour in the USA. Joe Hill said, ‘don’t mourn me, organize’. So we didn’t mourn, we organized. We went out we spoke to people, we organized people to come to the court room, I ended up with a website selling t-shirts, lots of literature. We were helped when we started out there was very little support. America is a very frightened country today. They hide. But as the Iraq war became more and more of a reality, more and more people would turn out. The passing of the Patriot Act, all of this was part of what some Americans, and I call them the resistance, could see as being a major problem, not only for us, but for the entire world. Because if they can get away with it at home, you know they will try to get away with it wherever you may live.

We prevailed.

The judge in late July dismissed the terror charges. He said, in his opinion, a brave man, there are only maybe three judges in the court house that have said things like this. But he got up and he said, ‘it’s hard to imagine how, under this construct, a lawyer would not be indicted for defending fairly and fully an alleged member of an FTO (foreign terrorist organization)”. And he dismissed the terror charges against me, against the interpreter and against the activist. Our fight is not over. There is still ten years of charges left against me and we intend to fight them just as hard as we have fought this.

I am very proud to have been invited to this gathering. I am happy to be in Ireland, my grandmother was Irish and I like to think that part of my will to resist comes from that heritage. I only have a minute left but I wanted to read from Seamus Heaney. I’m not reading the whole thing, it’s the ‘Cure of Troy’. But it seems so appropriate for this gathering and he is so Irish and so staunch as we all saw yesterday. I just thought it was appropriate. He wrote, ‘human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and they get hard. No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted and endured. History says don’t hope this side of the grave, but then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.

That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birthcry of new life at its term. It means, once in a lifetime that justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme. That is all our work, yours, and mine, let us continue to struggle and let us win.