Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life, she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is serving a 10-year sentence. Stewart\u2019s family is pleading with the state for \u201ccompassionate release\u201d and numerous international human rights campaigners, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have signed a petition calling for her to be freed on medical grounds. It is not only a crime in the U.S. to be poor, to be a Muslim, to openly condemn the crimes committed in our name in the Muslim world, but to defend those who do. And the near total collapse of our judicial system, wrecked in the name of national security and \u201cthe war on terror,\u201d is encapsulated in the saga of this courageous attorney\u2014now disbarred because of her conviction. <\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that my imprisonment sends the wake up call that the government is prepared to imprison lawyers who do not conduct legal representation in a manner the government has ordained,\u201d she told me when I reached her through email in prison. \u201cMy career of 30 plus years has always been client centered. My clients and I decided on the best legal course, without the interference of the government. Ethics require that the defense lawyer DEFEND, get the client off. We have no obligation to obey [the] \u2018rules\u2019 government lays down.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that since 9\/11 the government has pursued Muslims with an ever heavier hand,\u201d she wrote, all messages to her and from her being vetted by prison authorities. \u201cHowever, cases such as the Sheikh\u2019s in 1995 amply demonstrate that Muslims had been targeted even earlier as the new ENEMY\u2014always suspect, always guilty. After 9\/11, we discovered that the government prosecutors were ordered to try and get Osama Bin Laden into EVERY Muslim prosecution inducing in American Juries a Pavlovian response. Is it as bad as lynching and the Scottsboro Boys and the Pursuit of Black Panthers? Not as of yet, but getting close and of course the incipient racism that that colors\u2014pun?\u2014every action in the U.S. is ever present in these prosecutions.\u201d<\/p>\n