An American lawyer for the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of plotting numerous terrorist attacks, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was charged Tuesday with helping her client operate his terrorist network from prison.
Lynne Stewart, a Manhattan criminal defense attorney known for taking on unpopular and radical clients, was the only American among four people accused of unlawfully conveying messages to and from Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the Islamic Group, an Egyptian-based extremist organization affiliated with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who announced the indictments in New York, said Rahman’s group spreads “a message of hate that is now tragically familiar to Americans,” though the attorney general said the case had no apparent connection to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Although the indictment alleges specific instances of Stewart passing on messages to her client and disseminating messages from him to the media, it does not allege that those actions resulted in any specific violent act.
However, Ashcroft said, “The sheik is a person whose leadership is substantial in the community of terrorists.”
Rahman, who was convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up Manhattan landmarks, has diabetes and is serving a life sentence. He is alleged to have received and given messages while at a federal medical prison facility in Minnesota.
Also indicted Tuesday were Mohammed Yousry, an Arabic translator who interpreted jailhouse conversations between Stewart and Rahman; Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a New York-based Islamic Group leader whom the government called “a surrogate for Rahman”; and Yassir Al-Sirri, former head of the London-based Islamic Observation Center, who is accused of passing on Rahman’s messages to Islamic Group members and financing their activities. Ashcroft said the U.S. will seek to extradite Al-Sirri from the United Kingdom, where he is in custody.
Ashcroft said Stewart, 62, and Yousry, 45, “repeatedly and willfully violated” federal orders, called special administrative measures or SAMs, that are meant to severely restrict Rahman’s contact with the outside world and his ability to direct the Islamic Group.
Stewart had to sign an agreement swearing that she and her staff would fully abide by the SAM before she could have access to her client.
In violating that agreement, Ashcroft said, Stewart and Yousry facilitated Rahman’s communications with a group “which has as its credo a message of hate that is now tragically familiar to Americans, to oppose, by whatever means necessary, the nations, governments and individuals who do not share its radical interpretations of Islamic law.”
If convicted, Stewart faces a maximum of 40 years in prison and Yousry faces 35 years. Sattar could spend a maximum of 55 years in prison if convicted while Al-Sirri faces 50 years in prison.
Ashcroft said the charges are the result of a three-year investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which had been monitoring the conversations between Stewart and her client since December 1998 under a court order.
Ashcroft also said Tuesday that future communications between Rahman and his attorneys would be the first to be monitored under new, broader Justice Department regulations that give prosecutors the authority to monitor attorney-client communications involving federal inmates suspected of facilitating terrorist acts without officials first having to obtain a court order.
That announcement provoked waves of concern in the legal community, many of whose members already had pointed to the potential for abuse of civil rights posed by the greater powers accorded to the Justice Department, such as in arresting and detaining suspects, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pointing out that the new regulation would apply to less than two dozen inmates out of the 158,000 in the federal system, Ashcroft said it was created last October “with the knowledge, which could not be publicly shared for fear of exposing Americans to greater risk, that inmates such as Sheik Abdel Rahman were attempting to subvert our system of justice for terrorist ends.”
The indictment alleges that Stewart helped Rahman communicate with his extremist group continually since he was imprisoned. Specifically, it accuses her of allowing Yousry to read letters to Rahman from Sattar during a May, 2000 prison visit. Those letters concerned whether the Islamic Group should break a cease-fire against Egyptian authorities that had been in place since the group attacked and killed 58 tourists at the ruins of Luxor in Egypt in 1997.
Further, the indictment accuses Stewart of releasing Rahman’s statement withdrawing his support from the cease-fire to the media in June 2000.
The indictment also accuses Stewart of making a false statement to the media in January 2001 regarding Rahman’s medical condition. It alleges that Stewart was aware that prison officials had asked Rahman’s wife to tell him to take the insulin he was refusing to take for his diabetes. However, prosecutors say Stewart and Sattar agreed that Sattar should issue a statement falsely claiming that the Bureau of Prisons was denying medical treatment to the sheik.
“To this end, Stewart conveyed that this misrepresentation was `safe’ because no one on the `outside’ would know the truth,” according to the indictment.
More Top Picks Best Aquarium Chillers For Reef Tanks
Stewart appeared before U.S. District Court Judge John Koeltl Tuesday afternoon for arraignment. “Emphatically not guilty,” she answered when asked for her plea.
Stewart was released on a $500,000 personal recognizance bond to be co-signed by three financially responsible people, on the condition that she remain within the New York metropolitan area and surrender her passport.
Yousry also was released on $750,000 bond and a pledge of $200,000 in property made by a friend, with the same travel restrictions. Sattar will remain in detention until the end of the week, when his attorney hopes to return to court with bond arrangements for him.
The small courtroom was packed with spectators including more than 40 attorneys. Many of them were veterans of the civil rights movement and, like Stewart, had represented radicals and other unpopular clients.
Like many of them, Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was shocked by Stewart’s indictment. “This is a long, slow progressive build-up of the assault on the Bill of Rights. This is an attack on the bar,” he said.
Ron Kuby, a defense attorney who represented Rahman before Stewart took the case, said Stewart “is the first lawyer in American history to be accused of supporting a terrorist organization based on statements that she made to the news media. Before today, that was never thought to be a crime in America.”
Irwin Schwartz, president of the Criminal Defense Lawyers Assn., said he believes there will be litigation challenging the validity of the SAM Stewart signed early in her case.