The Laughing Traitor

Investors Business Daily comments on the Lynne Stewart case:

Three days after 9/11, as the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldered with thousands entombed in the rubble, President Bush declared at the National Cathedral: "We make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid and comfort to them."

He could have been speaking of Lynne Stewart, attorney for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "blind sheikh." Rahman was the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 in which a truck bomb in the parking garage was intended to topple one tower into the other, killing tens of thousands. It almost happened.

Besides masterminding the 1993 attack, Rahman planned to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, as well as assassinate the president of Egypt. Since the Clinton administration, in its finite wisdom, decided to treat this as a crime and not a terrorist Pearl Harbor, the sheikh had the right to an attorney.

National Lawyers Guild member Stewart was recruited to defend Rahman by none other than LBJ's former attorney general, Ramsey Clark. Among his other claims to infamy, Clark volunteered to be on Saddam Hussein's legal team, saying the mass murderer was a victim of "selective prosecution."

Stewart wasn't content to simply be of counsel. She made the conscious decision to help Rahman carry out his murderous agenda from his prison cell by passing communications between Rahman to his followers in the Islamic Group, an Egyptian terrorist group.

In February 2005, after 13 days of deliberation and six months of testimony, Stewart was found guilty of "facilitating and concealing communications" between Rahman and his fellow terrorists. Specifically, she was convicted of smuggling into prison a message to Rahman from terrorist Rifal Ahman Tara. The message asked Rahman to support renewed Islamic violence in Egypt.

As the New York Post reports, Stewart then smuggled back a coded dispatch that led to the dissolution of a cease-fire between Rahman's Islamic Group and the Egyptian government. On the stand, she failed to exercise her right to remain silent, proclaiming support for Rahman's violent cause, saying: "I believe that entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence. I believe in the politics that lead to violence being exerted by people on their own behalf."

Enter Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge John Koeltl. Addressing the traitor before him, Koeltl hailed Stewart as a "lawyer to the poor and the unpopular," and added: "It is no exaggeration to say that Ms. Stewart performed a public service, not only to the court but to the nation."