Let Lynne Stewart Rot

02 Feb, 2008 by John Stephenson

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If you don’t know who Lynne Stewart is, allow me to briefly educate you. She is a disbarred terrorist sympathizing lawyer that thinks the Blind Sheik was a remarkable man. She faced up to 30 years for conspiring with a terrorist and got a slap on the wrist of 28 months in October of last year. Last we heard about her she was planning on teaching ethics of all things.

What else can I say? I agree with Michelle Malkin and the NY Post!

Nevertheless, District Judge John Koeltl decided that Stewart had performed “a public service . . . to the nation” in representing “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman – regardless of any, well . . . overzealousness in his cause.

Yet Stewart went far beyond legal work in the service of Abdel-Rahman, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and numerous other plots against New York City landmarks.

Despite an explicit pledge to uphold Abdel-Rahman’s court-ordered isolation, Stewart, a jury found, smuggled in messages from terrorist Rifa’l Ahman Tara urging the sheik to support renewed Islamic violence in Egypt – then smuggled out a coded dispatch that torpedoed a cease-fire between the sheik’s terror organization and the Egyptian government.

If that’s not abetting terrorism, it’s hard to say what is.

Nor was this just some innocent mistake by a starry-eyed naif: Stewart, a hardened radical, boasted during trial of her belief that “entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence” and “you can’t always single out the combatants from the non-combatants.”

Unfortunately, Koeltl appears to have at least one booster on the panel.

“I find the work Judge Koeltl did admirable to a degree that is amazing,” said Judge Guido Calabresi, who is famous himself for comparing President Bush’s election to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

Amazing, sure – but admirable?

Try disgusting.

The plain fact is that Lynne Stewart broke her promise – and the law – in helping her terrorist client collude with his underlings when no one else could.

Twenty-eight months for that is an insult to justice – and dangerous to boot.