Thread: This is what the criminal state of Amerika does to its real heroes

This is what the criminal state of Amerika does to its real heroes

October 7, 2013 |



Guest Column by Stephen Lendman
This is what the criminal state of Amerika does to its real heroes:

Happy Birthday Lynne Stewart

Lawyer, 74, Wrongfully Jailed, Denied Cancer Treatment and Compassionate Release

By Stephen Lendman

October 07, 2013 "Information Clearing House - God bless Lynne Stewart! Many thousands of global supporters stand with you. We do so uncompromisingly.

We do it because it matters. We do it because it’s the right thing to do.
We wish you happy birthday and many more. We hope for lots more outside prison walls.
We want you free at last. We want you healthy in top form again. We want what you rightfully deserve. We support your liberating struggle.
On October 8, Lynne turns 74. She’ll add a year behind bars. She’ll do it for devoting her life to helping others.
For promoting right over wrong. For being above reproach. For giving so much. For wanting so little in return.
For supporting society’s most disadvantaged. For being a role model for others to emulate.
For wanting little more beyond knowing doing the right thing is its own reward.
What kind of society imprisons its best and most honorable? What kind mischaracterized as a democracy does so?
What kind operates the world’s largest gulag? What kind does so globally. What kind institutionalizes cruel and unusual treatment? What kind does it worldwide?
What kind runs a homeland police state apparatus? What kind made state terror, torture and other forms of abuse official policy?
What kind persecutes innocent people? What kind targets society’s most vulnerable? What kind spurns rule of law principles?
What kind builds prisons, not hospitals or schools? What kind ignores human need? What kind does so disdainfully? What kind thinks fundamental rights are quaint and out-of-date?
What kind ravages and destroys one country after another? What kind wages war on humanity? What kind does so for imperial dominance? What kind risks survival doing so?
What kind values wealth, power and privilege over equity, justice, and human life? What kind claims doing the wrong thing is right?
Numerous previous articles discussed Lynne’s ordeal. She and her husband Ralph are personal friends.
They’re both longtime human rights defenders. What’s more important than that? They support peace, equity and justice. They deplore war, imperial ruthlessness, and discriminatory intolerance.
Defending clients prosecutors wanted imprisoned got Lynne targeted. She was wrongfully indicted, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned.
Her original 16 month sentence was unjustifiably extended to 10 years. Imprisoning her for 10 seconds constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Nothing in today’s America surprises. Freedom, equity and justice are four-letter words. Rule of law principles don’t matter. Democratic values are verboten.
Criminal gangs run America. Rogue officials make policy. They do so for their own self-interest.
They conspire with corporate crooks and other societal miscreants. They partner for all they can get. They do so for wealth, power and privilege. They do it at the expense of public needs and common decency.

Imprisoning Lynne shows how low America has sunk. Its dark side has many forms. It champions wrong over right. It shames itself in the process.
Lynne’s a breast cancer survivor. It reemerged. It progressed to Stage 4. She’s dying. She’s denied expert life-saving treatment.
Her petition for compassionate release was turned down. She refiled and hopes for the best. Tens of thousands of world supporters endorse her fight for life.
They want her freed. She never should have been imprisoned in the first place.
On September 27, she commented from “Deep in the Belly of the Beast.” She’s at Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell, Ft. Worth, TX.
Her address is:
Lynne Stewart
#53504-054
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Ft. Worth, TX 76127
She wrote:
“Now another month has passed and I am getting increasingly irritable that these jokers are so cavalier with my life and what time I have left. (I also am getting weaker.)”
“My application for compassionate release is moving but glacially (Are there any glaciers left? Only in the bureaucracy…).”
“We learned that the request has left the General Counsel’s office of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in Washington and is now being considered by an ‘Independent Committee’ (whatever that means).”
“From there it will ostensibly go to (BOP) Director, Mr. Samuels, for the final recommendation and request for a motion to the Judge.”
“As you can appreciate, there is still plenty of room for slips between cup and lip.”
“I truly understand that I, with the strong and consistent support of all 30,000+ of you, do constitute a ‘threat’ in their small universe.”
“That is to say that, the will of the People cannot be ignored forever. With that in mind, I want to urge everyone to come on out on…
OCTOBER 8, TUESDAY, MY 74th BIRTHDAY
FOR A LOCAL SHOW OF OUR COLLECTIVE WILL
IN OPPOSITION TO THE ‘DEATH PENALTY’
ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE
YOU AND YOUR COMRADES, FRIENDS, ACQUAINTANCES CAN GATHER AT YOUR LOCAL FEDERAL (US) COURTHOUSE OR POST OFFICE TO REMIND THEM THAT WE WILL NOT LET ME DIE IN A JAIL CELL !!!”
“If you can do this, please notify Ralph (Poynter, Lynne’s husband) of your location (917 853 9759, 518 358 2525) or email my web site (Lynne Stewart.org).”
“We hope this will be nationwide, and we can spread the word of the senseless cruelty in the way the Bureau of Prisons administers a program that is supposed to be compassionate.”
“I may be the ‘poster child’ but this is done on behalf of all the prisoners who are languishing, in pain or worse, trying to go home.”
“Be Out there on October 8. It is already an historic day. Let’s make it More So!!! Let’s Win.”
Lynne Stewart
Join others across America. Do it to support Lynne’s liberating struggle. Locations include:
NEW YORK CITY
From 6 – 10 PM
80 St. Marks Theatre on the corner of St. Marks Place & 2nd Ave
(not the church)
ALBANY, NY
Tuesday, October 8, Noon
US Federal Building, 1 Clinton Avenue
More information at: http://projectsalam.org/events/10-08-13.html
SAN FRANCISCO
At Montgomery & Market.
Assemble at 5 PM. Rally/speakout at 5:30 PM
SEATTLE, WA
Tuesday, October 8, 4-5:30 PM
Federal Building, 2nd Ave and Madison St
Petitioning for Compassionate Release
Write:
PRESIDENT OBAMA
The White House
Pennsylvania Ave,
Washington, DC 20500
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER
US Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
CHARLES E. SAMUELS, JR.
Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons
320 First Street, NW
Washington, DC 20534
Re: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054 Compassionate Release
CALL:

PRESIDENT OBAMA
(202) 456-1111
ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER
(202) 353-1555
CHARLES E. SAMUELS
(202) 307-3250/3062
Sign the petition for her compassionate release:
http://www.change.org/petitions/free...ionate-release
Email Lynne at 1lawyerleft at gmail.com
Donate to Lynne’s defense fund one of three ways:
(1) Directly to her commissary account FMC Carswell by mail or Western Union.
Use her prison number (53504-054) and full name: Lynne Irene Stewart.
Send a US Postal money order to:
LYNNE IRENE STEWART
Inmate #53504-054

PO Boxo 474701
Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001
Non-postal money orders and non-government checks will be placed on a 15 day hold.
Personal checks and cash aren’t accepted.
The sender’s name and return address must appear on the upper left corner of the envelope.
Western Union Quick Collect Program
Inmates’ families and friends may also donate through Western Union’s Quick Collect Program.
Funds sent will be posted to the inmate’s account within two to four hours when sent from 7:00 AM and 9:00 PM Eastern time (seven days per week, including holidays).
Funds received after 9:00 PM Eastern time will be posted by 7:00 AM Eastern time the following morning. Funds may be sent one these ways:
1) At an agent location with cash: The inmate’s family or friends must complete a Quick Collect Form. Click here to view a sample Quick Collect Form.
To find the nearest agent, call 1-800-325-6000 or go to www.westernunion.com.
2) By phone using a credit/debit card: The inmate’s family or friends may simply call 1-800-634-3422 and press option 2.
3) ONLINE using a credit/debit card: The inmate’s family and friends may go to www.westernunion.com and select “Quick Collect.”
For each Western Union Quick Collect transaction, provide the following information:
Valid Inmate Eight-Digit Register Number (entered with no spaces or dashes) followed immediately by Inmate’s Last Name 2) Committed Inmate Full Name entered on Attention Line 3) Code City: FBOP, DC
Inmate’s committed name and eight-digit register number must be entered correctly.
If the sender does not provide the correct information, the transaction cannot be completed. The Code City is always FBOP, DC.
Any questions or concerns regarding Western Union transfers should be directed to Western Union by the sender (general public).
Questions or concerns should not be directed to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
For additional information concerning inmate Commissary account deposit procedures, please see the Bureau of Prisons Trust Fund/Warehouse/Laundry Manual (PS 4500.07) or 28 CFR Parts 506 and 540.
For information concerning a specific deposit, please contact Federal Bureau of Prisons’ staff at 202-307-2712 between 8:00 AM and 4:30 PM Eastern time.
(2) A tax deductible National Lawyers Guild Foundation contribution.
Make checks payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation.
Write “Lynne Stewart Defense Committee” in the memo line.
Send check to:
Lynne Stewart Organization
350 Broadway
Suite 700
New York, NY 10013
(3) Directly to Lynne Stewart Organization.
Make checks payable to “Lynne Stewart Organization.”
Send check to:
Lynne Stewart Organization
350 Broadway
Suite 700
New York, NY 10013
A Final Comment
Help Lynne any way you can. Do it because it matters. Sign her compassionate release petition. Urge others to do it.
Contribute to her defense fund. Encourage others to contribute what they can afford.
Attend public rallies on her behalf.
Lynne’s one of thousands of political prisoners languishing in America’s gulag. It’s the shame of the nation. It symbolizes what’s wrong and needs fixing.
It exposes an ugly dark side authorities don’t want people to see. It’s America’s true face. It’s ruthless. It’s merciless. It’s heartless. It’s inhumane.
It defiles what real democracies stand for. America never was one. For sure it’s not now.
Remember and tell others. Doing the right thing is its own reward. Liberating struggles aren’t won easily or quickly.
Join others for real change. Everyone can make a difference. Lynne did so much for so many for so long. Her struggle is ours.
We’re all in this together. Join the fight to free her. Do it while there’s still time. Above all, do it because it matters.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html - Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.c...sive-news-hour
See also
UN rights expert deplores US torture of prisoner's : A U.N. human rights expert on torture urged U.S. authorities Monday to end four decades of solitary confinement for a former Black Panther convicted of murdering a Louisiana prison guard. U.N. special rapporteur Juan Mendez said the indefinite solitary confinement imposed on Albert Woodfox "clearly amounts to torture."
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36451.htm

More about her here:

The Sentencing of Lynne Stewart by Michael Steven Smith


“At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.”—Karl Marx

Lynne Stewart is a friend. She used to practice law in New York City. I still do. I was in the courtroom with my wife Debby the afternoon of July 19th for her re-sentencing. Judge John Koeltl buried her alive.

We should have seen it coming when he told her to take all the time she needed at the start when she spoke before the sentence was read. It didn’t matter what she said. He had already written his decision, which he read out loud to a courtroom packed with supporters. It was well crafted. Bulletproof on appeal. He is smart and cautious.

After about an hour into his pronouncement, he came to the buried alive part. He prefaced it by citing the unprecedented 400 letters of support people had sent him, all of which he said he read. He noted Lynne’s three decades of service to the poor and the outcast. He stressed that she is a seventy-year-old breast cancer survivor with high blood pressure and other serious health problems. And then he laid it on her: 120 months.

Everyone in the courthouse divided 120 by 12. He had given her a death sentence, we all thought. She’ll never get out. He almost quadrupled the 28 month sentence he had originally pronounced. She had told him that 28 months was a horizon, that she had hope. But no more.

Lynne’s granddaughter gasped. Then started sobbing. She kept crying even as Judge John Koeltl kept reading. And reading. And reading. It was awful. The sentence was pitiless and cruel. How to understand it?

Lynne’s lawyer Jill Shellow Levine rose after the judge finished. She asked him why. He was candid. He was told to do it by his supervisors, the judges on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. This court is an institution of the elite. It is considered the second highest court in America next to the Supreme Court because it presides over the financial center of the empire, not its capital, that is in D.C., but its real capital. This court makes policy and Lynne Stewart was to be made an example of in “the war against terrorism” just as a half a century before, in the same court, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were condemned to death in the war against communism, told that they had caused the deaths of 50,000 U.S. soldiers in the Korean War, and found guilty of the ridiculous charge of “stealing the secret” of the atomic bomb, when there was no secret, it was only a matter of technology. The sentencing Judge Kaufman knew they would leave behind two orphan children, Robert and Michael, ages six and three.

In 1947 George Kennan, the ideological father of the cold war, wrote that the United States had but six per cent of the world’s population and fifty per cent of its wealth. The problem was to keep it. Anti-communism served as the ideological cover the U.S. ruling classes used. But communism ceased to exist after capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union in 1991. A new ideological cover has been constructed in the wake of the September 11th criminal attack on the World Tread Center and the Pentagon: the War against Terror. Nationalist opposition to U.S. economic and foreign policy in parts of the Arab world is no longer led by communists but by fundamentalist Muslims.

Lynne Stewart represented one of them, Sheik Abdel Rahman, who was the leading oppositionist to the U.S.-sponsored Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, which gets more money from America than any other country in the world except Israel. In 1993, at the behest of the Egyptian government, Sheik Rahman was criminally indicted and later convicted of the crime of “sedition” for suggesting to a government informer that rather than blow up New York City landmarks he choose “a military target.” It was on the occasion of a post-conviction prison visit that Lynne helped her client. She released his statement to Reuters press service announcing his withdrawal of support for a ceasefire between his group and the Egyptian government. This was in violation of a Special Administrative Measure (SAMs) that Lynne had agreed to with the U.S. Government. She wasn’t supposed to be a medium for communication between her client and the outside world. She should have challenged the constitutionality of the SAMs, she now realizes, and not just have violated them.

She wasn’t prosecuted for what she did, not under the Clinton administration, nor during the first years of George W. Bush. Then came 9.11. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft flew into New York City in 2003 and announced Lynne’s indictment on the David Letterman show. The crime? A novel one. Conspiracy to provide material aid to a terrorist organization. What was the material aid? Her client. When Ashcroft did that, as the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, he committed an ethical violation for which any other attorney would have been sanctioned. He made sure that from the very beginning of her ordeal Lynne Stewart never had a chance. Not with the level of fear the government was able to generate and the scare they put into her jury.

In 2006 she was convicted and sentenced. The maximum was 30 years, but thanks to the superb legal work of National Lawyers Guild attorneys Elizabeth Fink and Sarah Kunstler and the outpouring of public support Judge Koeltl gave her 28 months. The government appealed the sentence to their U.S. Court of Appeals. Game over. The selective prosecution of Lynne Stewart was accomplished.

Judge John Walker, George W. Bush’s first cousin, sits on that court. His family made their fortune selling munitions during WWI. He wrote that the 28 months was “shockingly low.” Judge Koeltl was given his orders. The seemingly kindly boyish-looking jurist about whom it was said that he walks to work and looks after an elderly mother—not exactly a sadistic old lady killer—then reversed himself and on the same evidence nearly quadruped the sentence, putting a seventy-year-old grandmother on chemotherapy away for ten years and two years’ probation after that for good measure. This is much more than meanness. It is ideology.

Michael Steven Smith is the co-host of the WBAI radio show Law and Disorder and sits on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

http://ccrjustice.org/sentencing-of-...l-steven-smith

Now from the other side:

No Tears for Lynne Stewart

By Michelle Malkin • April 10, 2013 10:42 AM

No Tears for Lynne Stewart
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013
The jihadists’ favorite American lawyer, Lynne Stewart, reportedly has stage-4 breast cancer. Her radical friends — ranging from the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” and “Workers World” to Pete Seeger, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal — want her freed from jail. There’s only one decent response to the Lynne Stewart Fan Club’s criminal-coddling demand:
No, hell, no.
The way the bleeding hearts tell it, this harmless grandma got thrown in the slammer by Big Bad Bush merely because she was “distributing press releases on behalf of her jailed client, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.” Oh, the outrageous inhumanity! How could America the Cruel do this to an innocent little old lady serving the cause of “social justice”? How can they just let her suffer and perish behind bars? All she did was “distribute press releases.”
1960s leftover agitator Dick Gregory is now on a hunger strike until the feds order the “compassionate release” of the left’s sweetheart “political prisoner” and she “receives medical treatment in the care of her family and with physicians of her choice.” He and Stewart’s apologists claim she was prosecuted “to intimidate the entire legal community so that few would dare to defend political clients whom the state demonizes and none would provide a vigorous defense.”
Spare me the proglodyte pathos. Allow me to smash the world’s smallest violin to bits. Stewart is no martyr, no heroine. She’s a menace to peace-loving society who illegally conspired with killers. And there’s a very good reason why her client was demonized. He is a demon.
Refresher course for the clueless: Stewart was convicted in 2005 of helping terrorist Rahman — the bloodstained Blind Sheik — smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.
Rahman, Stewart’s “political client,” had called on Muslims to “destroy” the West, “burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air or land.” He issued bloody fatwas against U.S. “infidels” that inspired the 1993 WTC bombing, the 1997 massacre of Western tourists in Luxor, Egypt, and the 9/11 attacks.
Defying a judge’s communications ban, Stewart ferreted messages to the Blind Sheik from fellow jihadist Rifa’l Ahman Tara urging him to support a new wave of Islamic violence in Egypt — and then smuggled out a coded order to his followers lifting a ceasefire between his terrorist group and the Egyptian government. Stewart personally delivered one of the messages to a Reuters reporter.
The Middle East Quarterly also described how Stewart created “covering noises” for the Blind Sheik’s translator to evade the communications ban: “On some surveillance videos, Stewart could be seen shaking a water jar or tapping on the table while (the translator) and the sheikh exchanged communications that were then later disseminated to the sheikh’s followers…”
After receiving a paltry initial sentence of 28 months for abetting terrorism, the disbarred civil rights attorney was re-sentenced to 10 years in the slammer. A federal panel of judges excoriated her for her sickening arrogance. “From the moment she committed the first act for which she was convicted, through her trial, sentencing and appeals,” Judge Robert Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, “Stewart has persisted in exhibiting what seems to be a stark inability to understand the seriousness of her crimes.”
Stewart failed to understand “the breadth and depth of the danger in which” her crimes had “placed the lives and safety of unknown innocents, and the extent to which they constituted an abuse of her trust and privilege as a member of the bar,” the panel found.
This case remains a shining example of just how dangerous it is for America to give foreign-born jihadists the full panoply of American constitutional rights and all the attendant benefits of a civilian trial. Stewart’s treacherous collaboration with the Blind Sheik endangered — and cost — innocent lives.
Stewart remains unrepentant. She called 9/11 an “armed struggle.” Upon her initial sentencing, she boasted that she could serve the term “standing on her head.” After she was convicted of aiding and abetting Rahman, she told an interviewer she “would do it again.”
Now she wants mercy, medical comforts and freedom? No, hell, no. This messenger gal for murderous barbarians made her prison bed. Die in it.

http://michellemalkin.com/2013/04/10...lynne-stewart/

http://michellemalkin.com/?s=lynne+stewart