Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and
hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A
73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the
marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel
Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to
demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And
now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph
nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life,
she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort
Worth, Texas, where she is serving a 10-year sentence. Stewart’s family
is pleading with the state for “compassionate release” and numerous
international human rights campaigners, including Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, have signed a petition
calling for her to be freed on medical grounds. It is not only a crime
in the U.S. to be poor, to be a Muslim, to openly condemn the crimes
committed in our name in the Muslim world, but to defend those who do.
And the near total collapse of our judicial system, wrecked in the name
of national security and “the war on terror,” is encapsulated in the
saga of this courageous attorney—now disbarred because of her
conviction.
-- Chris Hedges, "The Persecution of Lynne Stewart" (Truth Dig).