Clarence Darrow She Ain’t

Lynne Stewart is the attorney for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (convicted of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) who has been indicted for illegally passing information from her client to outside terrorist groups. I have no idea if this woman broke the law, but if this interview with a far-left journal is any indication, she’s not going out of her way to win sympathy from the public:

SD: It’s a little frightening that left-wing political prisoners are conflated in the government’s eyes with right-wing Moslem fundamentalists.

LS: I don’t think it’s quite fair to say right-wing, because they are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination, and allow people who are under the heel of a corrupt and terrifying Egypt—where thousands of people are in prison, and torture and executions are, according to Amnesty International and Middle East Watch, commonplace—to do what they need to do to throw off that oppression. To denigrate them as right-wing, I don’t think is proper. My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries, such as occurs in Iran, to liberate.

Islamists: liberals in a hurry!

And then there’s this:

SD: Let’s say you were part of a government that you actually trusted and supported, and your country held political prisoners. At what point would you think monitoring and controlling these people was acceptable?

LS: I’m such a strange amalgam of old-line things and new-line things. I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution. The CIA pays a thousand people and cuts them loose, and they will undermine any revolution in the name of freedom of speech.

Remember kids: Mao and Stalin – OK; George Bush and John Ashcroft – Evil!

(link via Hit and Run)