Who Is Behind Lynne Stewart?
By Michael Tremoglie
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 25, 2002
Lynne Stewart is the radical attorney who has been indicted by Attorney General John Ashcroft for enabling her client, the terrorist Sheik, Omar Abdul Rahman, to carry out his murderous agendas while in prison by helping him to communicate with his terrorist organization in Egypt. Rahman was the spiritual leader of a cell that carried out the first World Trade Center bombing and was planning to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. Stewart was recruited to the Rahman case by Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, who has a long history of anti-American causes dating back to the Vietnam War.
Ramsey Clark is the founder of the International Action Committee (IAC), a pro-Saddam, pro-Milosevic organization that regards America as the world's leading and most threatening terrorist state. In a previous article about the "peace" organization A.N.S.W.E.R (March 29, 2002), I noted IAC's interlinking directorate with the Workers World Party (WWP), a Stalinist organization which was created in 1959 as a splinter of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. In that year, WWP leader Sam Marcy and his comrades supported the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution which had sought unsuccessfully to break free from the Soviet empire. WWP cadres staff the IAC offices and share political platforms. For example, WWP leaders spoke at an IAC rally in 1995 condemning Republicans generally and The Contract with America, specifically. Among them was Gavrielle Gemma, who has been credited with recruiting Clark to the IAC.
Among its icons, like Cuba's dictator Fidel Castro, the Workers World Party has an unrestrained admiration for North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. In November 1986, Deirdre Griswold, an IAC executive, declared that North Korea was a socialist success story because there was no poverty, famine, or homelessness in North Korea. Griswold alleged that Kim Il Sung's birthday was celebrated both in North and South Korea.
The National Co-Director of the IAC is Brian Becker, who is a member of the secretariat of the WWP, and a member of the A.N.S.W.E.R coalition steering committee. A.N.S.W.E.R. is presently coordinating anti-American, pro-Iraq "peace" protests across the country. Becker is much admired by the Korean Communists for his loyalty to the terrorist state. In its March 16, 2002 edition, the Korean Central News of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea reported that , "Brian Becker, member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party of the United States, at a press interview held in Pyongyang before his departure from the DPRK, denounced the U.S. for having committed crimes against the Korean people. He said that his visit to the Sinchon Museum during his stay in the DPRK offered a good opportunity to know well about the thrice-cursed mass killings of peaceable people committed by the U.S. during the Korean War. The United States which is chiefly responsible for the division of Korea keeps almost 40,000 troops in South Korea, staging various war maneuvers and mercilessly killing innocent people, he noted. He demanded the U.S. troops be withdrawn from South Korea at once, taking their lethal weapons with them. He stressed that the Workers World Party of the United States would in the future, too, conduct a more vigorous solidarity campaign condemning the U.S. administration's moves to perpetuate the division of Korea and calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. troops from South Korea."
As well as being a moving force in the WWP, IAC and A.N.S.W.E.R., Becker is chairman of the U.S. Troops Out of Korea Committee and vice chairman of the International Committee of the same. He helped coordinate the protests at the inaugural of President Bush and in general seems to be involved in every anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic effort mounted by the political left.
Becker and the IAC are also staunch defenders of Slobodan Miloslevic, Kim II Sung and Kim Sung II and Mumia Abu-Jamal. On June 23, 2001 Becker directed a "people's tribunal" condemning US war crimes in Korea. One of the sponsors of the tribunal was Al-Awda, The Palestine Right of Return Commission. Clark and IAC members periodically meet with North Korean, Iraqi and Cuban government officials. Among other charges the group has made, the IAC has claimed that Usama bin Laden is the victim of an American imperialist plot. They contend that the military-oil complex is exploiting 9/11 to take control of the oil resources of the Middle East — a claim echoed by the Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel and other factions of the left.
The Workers World Party is an anti-semitic, Stalinist organization, whose goal is a communist revolution which would overthrow the American "ruling class" and establish a "workers state."The founder of the WWP, Sam Marcy, was a Communist who believed that Soviet leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were counter-revolutionaries. Marcy allied the WWP with the Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP) an anti-Semitic group that criticized Vladimir Putin for being too close to the Jews. The WWP decried perestroika — Gorbachev's attempt to reform Communism — and associated itself with Iraq after the USSR severed its contact with Hussein. They considered Saddam Hussein a victim of U.S. imperialism.
The FBI considers the WWP a terrorist organization. On May 10, 2001, FBI Director Louis Freeh stated that "Anarchists and extremist socialist groups — many of which, such as the Workers World Party, have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States."
The mainstream media has somehow missed the fact that the most ubiquitous organizer of "anti-war" protests is directed by a terrorist support group. It would seem that a question on this front to Ramsey Clark at one of his regular press conferences might be in order.
Clark's published views are interesting enough. In a December 1997 interview with "Impact International," Clark claimed that when the Cold War against the Communists ended, America decided to make Islam its new enemy. has resulted in American hostility towards Islam. According to Clark, "Islam would be the new enemy. At Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's trial, what we saw in both FBI and CIA files, and this is their phrase, 'the greatest threat to the international and domestic security of the United States is Islamic fundamentalism.' But actually, 'Islamic fundamentalism' to them is redundant. So they have to convict a blind Islamic scholar of terrorism to show that Islam is, at it highest levels of learning and attainment, nothing but a terrorist concept. How could a blind man be a terrorist, what could he do? They claimed that he was the leader of the conspiracy that set off the bomb in the World Trade Centre. They have now had two trials and two convictions of the defendants in the World Trade Centre cases, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's name wasn't even mentioned at either trial. He had nothing to do with it, but we have this war against Islam going on."
It was Ramsey Clark who urged Lynne Stewart to become the blind sheik's defense attorney. Clark's two previous choices, Center for Constitutional Rights attorneys and noted defenders of criminals and terrorists — including the Palestinian assassin of Meyer Kahane — William Kuntsler and Ron Kuby, had recused themselves. Stewart is also well known for her representation of "revolutionaries" and murderers. Most recently, she represented several cop-killers (whom she no doubt considered revolutionaries) and Sammy "the Bull," Gravano a Mafioso whom she no doubt considered just rebellious).
Stewart shares the Communist beliefs of the WWP and IAC and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is anti-capitalist and believes the USA is an imperialistic nation, and that anti-capitalist violence is justified. In a 1995 New York Times interview she said, "I don't believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support." Obviously, Stewart's worldview meshes seamlessly with that of Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat, the blind sheik and Osama Bin Laden. And with that of Deirdre Griswold Brian, Becker, Ramsey Clark and the Workers World Party.
Stewart and Clark's legal defense of the blind Sheik resulted in a conviction. They placed America on trial as a repressive, imperialist and terrorist state, and portrayed the Sheik as nothing more than an innocent holy man and political activist. It did not work.
Now Stewart's lawyer, Michael Tigar, is attempting the same legal strategy for her. This strategy has been formula of the anti-American legal left since the 1960s when Charles Garry, himself a member of the Communist Party, first devised it in the defense of Black Panther leader Huey Newton who was accused of murdering a California Highway Patrol Officer named John Frey. Garry put the United States on trial for racism, in a effort to distract the jury from the facts in the case (Newton was observed shooting the officer by a black bus driver who was only ten feet away.) The indict America defense was then developed by William Kuntsler and his disciples at the Center for Cosntitutional Rights, including Ron Kuby who represented Kahane's Arab assassin. Johnnie Cochran made the strategy world famous in his defense of O.J. Simpson. This was not merely coincidence, since Cochran began his criminal law career as a Black Panther attorney, defending Geronimo Pratt in the early 1970s. Lynne Stewart's counsel Michael Tigar was active in Communist Party groups while a student at Berkeley in the 1960s. One of Tigar's many accomplishments was to organize a U.S. delegation to the World Communist Youth Festival. Another was to defend Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.
There are many legitimate defense attorneys who provide legal defenses for clients with whom they do not themselves sympathize. Lynne Stewart, Ramsey Clark, Ron Kuby and Michael Tigar are not among them.
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