Posted on 12/10/2004 1:15:38 PM PST by genefromjersey
Amazing how everything always 'circles back'.
>>>>In just under two hours of questioning by Mr. Tigar, Ms. Stewart spoke of how her career had grown from the days when she commuted by motorcycle to Rutgers University law school in New Jersey. She said she built a low-budget community law practice in Lower Manhattan, defending "any case that came through the door."<<<
NY Times: On Stand, Terrorist's Lawyer Denies Aiding Violent Cause
On Stand, Terrorist's Lawyer Denies Aiding Violent Cause
By JULIA PRESTON, The New York Times
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.
On the stand, Ms. Stewart, 65, looked much like the public school librarian she once was, wearing her gray hair in a proper bowl cut and dressed in a conservative black and brown dress and orthopedic lace-up shoes. But, in a presentation full of contrasts, she described an approach to the law that had led her to the no-holds-barred defense of unpopular, unsavory and dangerously violent clients.
"We are bound to accept the cases of even those people who are hated by the public," Ms. Stewart said. "We are adjured by the ethical system to fight as hard and as vigorously and as zealously as we possibly can for our clients."
Ms. Stewart was clearly unaccustomed to sitting in the courtroom dock. She had to be reminded by the court clerk to swear an oath to tell the truth at the start of her testimony, and at first her face looked flushed and she struggled to steady her hands. When her lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, asked her to describe her defense strategy for one client, she instinctively bridled, hesitating to reveal trade secrets.
"I'm still a tenderfoot here," she said.
The first day of her testimony was intended to humanize her for the jury, which has been listening since June 22 to a case consisting mainly of thousands of pages of transcripts of secretly recorded phone calls and of meetings between Ms. Stewart and Mr. Abdel Rahman in federal prison.
In just under two hours of questioning by Mr. Tigar, Ms. Stewart spoke of how her career had grown from the days when she commuted by motorcycle to Rutgers University law school in New Jersey. She said she built a low-budget community law practice in Lower Manhattan, defending "any case that came through the door."
She said she agreed to represent Mr. Abdel Rahman in his 1995 terror trial, against the advice of many colleagues and friends, because she thought "it was the right thing for me to do."
Ms. Stewart's presence on the witness stand radically changed the atmosphere of the trial. She and her two co-defendants have been heard until now only on scratchy recordings made by the F.B.I. over several years up to 2001, when Ms. Stewart continued to represent Mr. Abdel Rahman, who is blind, after he was sentenced to life in prison for the thwarted bombing plot. The federal authorities imposed severe restrictions on the sheik to silence him in prison, restrictions she had agreed to in writing.
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."
Ms. Stewart said she had never made much money in her practice, and her defense of the sheik was no exception. She received a total of $47,000 in federal payments during the sheik's 10-month trial.
Ms. Stewart is facing five counts of lying to the government and conspiring with Mr. Abdel Rahman to convey a call for terrorist war in Egypt to his militant followers. Her lawyers said she faces up to 35 years in jail if convicted on all charges.
Her two co-defendants are Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic translator who worked with Ms. Stewart, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a postal worker and paralegal aide in the sheik's trial who is facing the most serious terror charges. Mr. Tigar has said Ms. Stewart's defense will last about seven days.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Interesting, Cal ! The fact he had access to secured areas of JFK .....phew !
I wonder when he was actually taken into custody ?
>>>Interesting, Cal ! The fact he had access to secured areas of JFK .....phew !
Another tidbit. Egypt Air comes into JFK. No security checks are done on anything that goes on EgyptAir leaving Egypt.
Go back and see the article again. He was taken in the same time as Linda.
Good point ! If the "plume hypothesis" is correct, there could have been many people with "sudden chest colds", or "flu". There could even have been people with a tiny cutaneous lesion that went away after a while.
That assumes, of course,there was a "plume". ( I've gotten a lot fonder of the plume in recent months.)
What jumps out at you about the anthrax attacks is that the attackers weren't actually trying to kill anyone.
This sound like AQ to you?
Kon, if you check any list of known terrorists, you will find a lot of "Abu"s in leadership positions.
The names they take usually include the name of some (bloodthirsty) early Muslim "saint",and are followed by a distinguishing description: al-Masri (the Egyptian),al-Zarqawi (the Jordanian),etc.
True enough.
They also take Sheik and a few other names too. Its a perfect way to hide in plain site, by using a term of endearment so that wiretaps will seem to reveal they are talking to friends.
Its effective, because its so common in the arab world.
Hope this doesn't cast suspicion on me when I call Aunt Tillie.
I think that would depend on what you called her....
I had an Aunt Tillie,believe it or not. She lived in County Mayo,in the auld sod. She was a grand old girl! You could call her anything-but late for supper !
I'm no longer sure of that. By the time the second wave of mailings had been done, the first wave had caused fatalities.
If the letters were only for "publicity",the death of Robert Stevens in Fla. should have brought the mailings to a halt...but they continued.
100% of the whole deal can be explained with a single mailing of about 6 letters at the Boca Raton, FL post office, probably in one or more street collection boxes on the evening of September 7, 2001, or anytime on September 8, 2001.
The strange distribution pattern and delays are readily attributed to the ordinary handling hand addressed, single-piece rate, First-Class mail receives when not otherwise sent to a credit card company or utility.
The attack was totally successful from the perspective of the terrorists. The main post office serving America's capital city was shut down. The most important periodicals in America lost their editorial offices.
In a typical third-world country, this would spell economic and social disaster ~ might even precipitate a popular uprising and civil war.
In the United States it caused us to reroute the mail and find a new office.
The attackers had also planned to take out several major airports, but due to the mishandling of this mail in Boca Raton, none of it actually went through those airports. Instead, it was carried by surface the whole way!
The answer is: CIPRO WORKS!
The postmarks indicate different mailing dates: the 1st (as I recall) on 9/18;the 2nd on 10/08 .
As is all too often the case, perfectly good mail got caught up in "Empty Equipment Otherwise Believed to Be Empty" and hauled in a truck from South Florida, where empty equipment piles up, to New Jersey, where empty equipment is needed by major mailing companies. When the mailer's folks found the letters, they dropped them in a tray they keep on hand for such items, and took it to the post office with the rest of their mail in the afternoon.
That's when the letters got canceled. That's also why they didn't go through a collection box in New Jersey, or get placed in a residential delivery box for pickup by a carrier.
We can even explain the New Jersey carrier's infection this way ~ she got it from cross contamination from the letter tray that'd previously held an anthrax letter. That would have happened in the morning when she got that tray filled with mail for delivery on her route.
The FBI spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on fruitless searches because they never bothered once to find out how single-piece rate mail of this kind travels and what can happen to it.
This is new to me ! I thought they had located a mailbox in Princeton and found it contaminated.
So the whole thing might have started in the Florida area !
What ever happened to the Pakistanis that picked up in the Trenton area that had all those letters in the plastic bag?
That's one I'm unfamiliar with. I know some Paks got picked up,questioned and released, but don't recall anything about plastic bags of letters.
By the way, I've set up a link to this discussion on my own bulletin board at
http://listeningpost.mywowbb.com/forum1/15.html
This isn't the article I was looking for....but worth a read:
Anthrax probe: FBI raids homes of Pakistanis
WASHINGTON: FBI agents armed with search warrants raided two houses in a southwestern suburb of Philadelphia yesterday, backed by members of a hazardous-materials squad wearing full protective gear.
Located less than two blocks apart in Chester, Pa., some 15 miles southwest of Philadelphia, the houses are owned by Dr. Irshad Shaikh, a Pakistani physician and specialist in epidemic diseases who is Chester's city health commissioner, and by Asif Kazi, the Chester city accountant, who also is a Pakistani native.
It was the first known raid of private residences in the FBI's ongoing investigation into an anthrax attack on America that has killed four persons.
FBI spokeswoman Linda Vizi confirmed yesterday that search warrants had been signed and served, although she said they were based on an FBI affidavit that a federal court had sealed. She said she could not comment on what information, if any, FBI agents might have been seeking at the two houses.
"Two search warrants have been issued and two places have been searched," she told The Washington Times. "An affidavit in the matter has been sealed. No one has been detained and no one has been arrested.
"This is a young investigation, a new investigation," she said. "We do not know where it might take us." Officials at FBI headquarters in Washington confirmed that the warrants had been served, but also declined comment. More than two dozen FBI agents were involved in the raids, supported by a hazardous-materials team.
Chester Mayor Dominic F. Pileggi said FBI agents and hazardous-materials specialists clad in protective suits and gas masks spent "several hours" at the two houses, but "wrapped things up" during the afternoon.
He said the agents had search warrants and were working from a sealed FBI affidavit and that the FBI did not advise Chester city officials and police authorities on what investigators were looking for or had found.
"We were assured that there was no danger to the public health and that residents of the city are safe, but I have no information on what they were doing or why," Mr. Pileggi said.
Miss Vizi also declined to say whether agents were looking for traces of anthrax or other biological materials at the two houses, and she refused to offer any explanation on the presence of the fully protected hazardous-materials specialists, who set up a secure decontamination tent and trailer alongside one of the houses.
Investigators moved several green plastic trash bags to vans and other vehicles from the two houses, one located in the 2300 block of Edgmont Avenue and the other in the 100 block of Crozer Circle.
Jodi Masusock, who works at a dentist's office down the street from the house on Edgmont Avenue, said FBI agents blocked off the street during the raid. "But I didn't hear or see anything until it was over," she said. "The house that was raided is hard to see because there are a lot of bushes."
Agents also removed a computer from Dr. Shaikh's Chester city office. City records show the Edgmont Avenue home is owned by Dr. Shaikh, while the house on Crozer Circle is owned by Mr. Kazi.
Dr. Shaikh did not return calls left at his office for comment, although he told the Associated Press in Philadelphia that he had "fully cooperated" in the search. He said agents questioned him but declined to say what they asked.
Mr. Kazi and Masood Shaikh, Dr. Shaikh's brother who lived in the Edgmont Avenue house, were unavailable for comment. All three were questioned by the FBI. It was not clear yesterday whether Dr. Shaikh also lived in the Edgmont Avenue house.
The two houses are located about 50 miles from where anthrax-laced letters are believed to have been mailed from a post office in Hamilton Township, N.J. Those letters eventually went through a postal facility in Trenton, N.J., and then to NBC News in New York and the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington.
Two postal workers who were believed to have handled the Daschle letter later died from inhalation anthrax. Two other persons died from inhalation anthrax in New York and Florida, although the source of those infections had not been determined.
Mr. Pileggi said Dr. Shaikh had served as the city's health commissioner since 1994 and described him as "well respected." He added that Dr. Shaikh had done "a fine job" for the city and doubted he would be involved in anything nefarious.
"I would be extremely surprised if Dr. Shaikh has any connection to anything the FBI might be investigating," the mayor said. Records showed Dr. Shaikh completed his medical degree in community medicine in Pakistan and was considered an expert in epidemiology and international health. He received a master's degree in public health and a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he held a faculty appointment.
Found it.
http://www.ict.org.il/spotlight/det.cfm?id=703
November 7, 2001
Three Detained in U.S. Anthrax Probe
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reportedly taken three people into custody over the past week in connection with the recent postal anthrax attacks in the U.S.
The three men, all from Pakistan, were detained for questioning after FBI agents conducted searches of their homes. They all lived in neighborhoods near the Trenton, New Jersey postal facility that handled at least three anthrax-tainted letters. Investigators say they are now fairly sure that all 17 confirmed cases of anthrax in the United States can be traced to a small number of letters that passed through this New Jersey sorting office.
So far, the FBI has detained 31 people in New Jersey since the September 11 terrorist attacks, out of about 1,000 people taken into custody nationwide. No one has yet been charged with criminal offenses related to the attacks, nor has any direct link been established between the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the postal anthrax campaign.
Plastic bag full of letters
On Friday, a Pakistani national, identified as Allah Rakha, was taken into custody at his rented apartment. His brother, Ilyas Chaudry, said that FBI agents wearing protective gear searched Rakha's apartment and a nearby mailbox. Chaudry said his brother's car, which had Florida license plates, was searched and towed away.
Rakha's landlord said the house had been under surveillance for several days, and that FBI agents had asked Rakha and possible associates for handwriting samples. Neighbors said that "four Middle Eastern men" lived in the building.
One neighbour said he had reported one of the suspects to the FBI after seeing him carrying a suspicious-looking plastic bag containing letters. He said that the man had held the bag away from his body before locking it in his car. "I noticed the gentleman late at night -- maybe 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock -- take a plastic bag, a clear plastic bag, with envelopes in it and placed it softly in the car, on the passenger side of the car, and locked it," the neighbor said.
On October 29, two men living in Hamilton, a few kilometers from the postal processing center, were detained after a search of their apartment. An FBI spokeswoman said that the two had been turned over to the Immigration and Naturalizaton Service (INS).
Cyanide letter unrelated to anthrax attacks
On Friday, a letter containing cyanide was found at the main Newark, New Jersey post office. The letter, addressed to a northern New Jersey police department, was picked out by an alert postal worker looking for possible anthrax contamination.
Tony Esposito of the Postal Inspection service was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the envelope contained trace amounts of copper cyanide blended into laundry detergent. Officials said Sunday that there was little question that the cyanide incident was a domestic act with no connection to the anthrax crimes.
Possible domestic involvement?
The domestic angle has been taken more and more seriously in the search for the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks as well. The Los Angeles Times quoted a Bush administration official as saying that the lack of any obvious link to foreign groups had led the FBI to focus on a possible "lone wolf" or domestic extremist group as the source of the anthrax letters.
"If it were international we would have seen something in the [intelligence monitoring] traffic and we've seen nothing," the official said. Investigators speculate that the anthrax used could have come from a university laboratory, and have begun subpoenaing the records of laboratories where anthrax was stored. At the same time, the otherwise unexplained meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, thought to have been the ringleader in the September 11 attacks, and a senior Iraqi intelligence agent has encouraged speculation that Iraq may have supplied biological warfare agents to Atta, who may in turn have handed them over to others to use as they saw fit.
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