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The New York Times - December 30, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/n.../30stewart.html

Terror Case Against Lawyer Is Summed Up

By JULIA PRESTON

A federal prosecutor told a Manhattan jury yesterday that Lynne F.
Stewart, a lawyer accused of aiding terrorists, had been an eager
conspirator in a plot to restart a suspended campaign of attacks by
Muslim fundamentalists against the government of Egypt.

On the first day of his summations in the government's case against Ms.
Stewart, the prosecutor, Andrew Dember, sought to show that she played
an active and politically committed role in a plan to promote Islamic
violence overseas. Synthesizing the evidence that the government has
offered in the six months of trial, Mr. Dember charged that Ms. Stewart
was more deeply and knowingly involved in supporting terrorism than even
prosecutors had suggested in their opening arguments in June.

Mr. Dember, an assistant United States attorney, also sought to persuade
the jurors in Federal District Court that Ms. Stewart had failed in her
basic obligations as a lawyer, joining an imprisoned terrorist client in
breaking the law out of arrogance because she "thought she was above it,
it didn't apply to her."

The government's evidence has consisted overwhelmingly of transcripts of
secret recordings of telephone calls and prison visits involving Ms.
Stewart and two co-defendants: Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a Staten Island
postal worker who once worked for her as a court-appointed paralegal,
and Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic translator. They are accused of helping a
client of Ms. Stewart, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, smuggle messages
advocating violence out of the federal prison where he was serving a
life sentence for terrorism.

Mr. Dember admitted to the jury that he had faced a big job in tracing
connections and drawing conclusions from the evidence, which has been
dense and often meandering. In a full day of argument yesterday, Mr.
Dember completed only about half of his summary. But the jurors, eight
women and four men, remained keenly attentive, many scribbling notes as
the prosecutor replayed exhibits they had first seen months ago.

"It is a very simple case," Mr. Dember said. He said that Ms. Stewart
had consciously carried concealed messages from a known terrorist to the
sheik in prison, and also relayed the sheik's response favoring violence
to that terrorist and to all the sheik's militant followers in Egypt. He
charged that Ms. Stewart had willfully violated severe federal prison
restrictions imposed on the sheik that she had agreed to respect several
times in writing.

Speaking outside the courthouse at midday, Ms. Stewart dismissed the
prosecutor's argument.

"It sounds a little more like a screenplay that what we heard in the
evidence," Ms. Stewart said. She noted that the prosecutors had never
showed that any act of violence ever resulted from from any events
described at in the trial.

Mr. Dember argued that Ms. Stewart and Mr. Sattar knew that Rifai Taha,
an Egyptian militant who is at the center of the case, was "a horror, a
terrorism nightmare for the civilized world." A letter from Mr. Sattar
that Ms. Stewart took into prison in May 2000 contained a message from
Mr. Taha asking the sheik whether his followers should continue to
observe a three-year-old cease-fire in Egypt. In a news release that Ms.
Stewart issued in mid-June, the sheik withdrew his support for the truce.

Mr. Dember said that Ms. Stewart's comments about some terrorist
kidnappings in the Philippines, made during her May 2000 visit with her
client, showed that she supported violence in the cause of freeing him
from prison. Ms. Stewart disputed the government's transcription of
those comments and presented her own version during her testimony,
suggesting that she lamented the kidnappings.

Mr. Dember's main line of attack was an effort to demonstrate that Ms.
Stewart's actions conveying messages from the sheik had nothing to do
with her legal work for him. Using the transcripts, the prosecutor
asserted that two other lawyers who represented the sheik had refused to
carry similar messages. He said that Mr. Abdel Rahman was ready as early
as September 1999 to urge his followers to give up the cease-fire. But
one lawyer, Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general, had
declined after a prison visit to publicize the sheik's views. In one
phone call Mr. Sattar quoted Mr. Clark as saying that such a move could
"cause a negative reaction, particularly for the legal side here."

Soon after, another lawyer on the team, Abdeen Jabara, bluntly refused
to allow the sheik, who is blind, to dictate a letter to Egyptian
militants about the cease-fire, according to the transcripts. Mr. Jabara
understood that releasing a statement from the sheik, in violation of
the prison rules, "had nothing to do with being a good lawyer, with
vigorously representing a client," Mr. Dember said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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