USA STASI
Matthew X
profrv at nex.net.au
Wed Apr 21 09:56:38 PDT 1999
Aug. 2, 2002 | When the Justice Department indicted defense attorney Lynne
Stewart in April on charges she helped client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the
Muslim cleric convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, communicate with his followers, civil libertarians and attorneys
of all political stripes saw it as one more example of Attorney General
John Ashcroft's determination to erode attorney-client privilege.
Now documents obtained by the defense in the Stewart case show that the
government was secretly taping meetings and phone calls between Stewart and
Rahman and others for over two years. While the government obtained a court
order authorizing some surveillance of their meetings in 1998, the scope of
what was monitored seems to extend beyond what is commonly authorized. And
at a hearing July 19, prosecutors refused to say whether they are currently
taping Stewart's conversations with her own attorney, Michael Tigar.
The indictment of Stewart has alarmed defense attorneys. "We take this as a
very serious threat to the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial," says Jim
Harrington, an attorney with the New York State Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers. "Since the founding of this country, one of the
fundamental rights our people have had is the right to a lawyer you can
confide in. In this situation, you have the government interfering with
that right." The association, he said, has already filed a
friend-of-the-court brief objecting to the government's seizure of paper
records and computer files from Stewart's office.
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