The government’s case is based in part on putting Stewart on trial for expressing her political views. In questioning her on the witness stand in early November, the prosecutors tried to prove that Stewart is a willing conduit for “terrorist” activity because she said she is “revolutionary” and stated that ridding the world of “the entrenched voracious type of capitalism” cannot come about nonviolently.

The violence-baiting from the mouths of U.S. prosecutors reeks of hypocrisy. At the same time as the government lawyers were questioning Stewart, Washington was in the midst of a steamroller assault on Fallujah in central Iraq. The brutal U.S. war and occupation of Iraq has taken thousands of lives. It is one of many examples of the lengths the U.S. rulers will go to defend their position as the dominant imperialist power and win out in their conflicts with capitalist competitors over the division and redivision of the world.

In attempting to prove its charges against Abdel-Rahman’s attorney, the prosecution is also taking a swipe at freedom of the press. As the trial opened this summer, the government issued subpoenas against four journalists who had interviewed Stewart. Because newspaper articles alone are rightly regarded as hearsay and can’t be used as evidence in court, the government is trying to force the reporters to testify under oath and affirm the quotations in their articles to establish the content of Stewart’s political views. Such a step would set a dangerous precedent and should be vociferously opposed.

Washington’s lack of evidence against Stewart is highlighted by the prosecutors’ own admission that government wiretapping of her conversations with Abdel-Rahman form “the backbone of the government case.” This flagrant violation of lawyer/client privilege is also a direct attack on workers’ ability to defend themselves against government persecution.

The U.S. government has a history of going after lawyers that defend those whom Washington targets as its political enemies. In the Dennis case in the early 1950s, for example, leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were convicted of “conspiracy” under the thought-control Smith Act. As soon as the trial ended, their attorneys, also from the CP, were framed up on contempt of court charges, imprisoned, and then disbarred. (The Stalinist party undermined its own defense in the case because a decade earlier it had cheered on the prosecution when Washington indicted and imprisoned 18 leaders of the Teamsters union and Socialist Workers Party in the first case brought under the Smith Act.)

Workers and farmers have a lot at stake in opposing the chipping away at civil liberties by Democratic and Republican administrations. The wealthy minority who runs this country is not carrying out sweeping assaults on democratic rights today. Instead, Washington is putting in place laws and establishing legal precedents that lay the groundwork for such assaults down the road, as working people defend ourselves against the bosses’ antilabor offensive and begin to challenge the prerogatives of the capitalist class.

Defeating the government’s case against Lynne Stewart is part of this struggle.
 
 
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Gov’t violence-baits N.Y. lawyer in ‘terror’ trial  
 
 
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