The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC
July 23, 2002
Dear Concerned Citizen:
Thank you for your recent letter roundly criticizing our treatment of the Taliban and El Qaeda detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
My administration takes these matters seriously, and your opinion was heard loud and clear here in Washington. You'll be pleased to learn that, thanks to the concerns of citizens like you, we are creating a new division of the Terrorist Retraining Program to be called "Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers" program, or LARK for short.
In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided to place one terrorist under your personal care. Your personal detainee has been selected and scheduled for transportation under heavily armed guard to your residence next Monday. Ali Mohammed Ahmed bin Mahmud (you can just call him Ahmed) is to be cared for pursuant to the standards you personally demanded in your letter of admonishment.
It will likely be necessary for you to hire some assistant caretakers. We will conduct weekly inspections to ensure that your standards of care for Ahmed are commensurate with those you so strongly recommended in your letter.
Ahmed's meal requirements are simple, but we strongly suggest serving meals that do not require utensils, particularly knives and forks. Also, these should be "finger foods"; Ahmed will not eat with his left hand since he uses it to wipe himself after purging his bowels (which he will do in your yard)- but look on the bright side... no increase in the toilet paper bill!
He generally bathes quarterly with the change of seasons, assuming that it rains, and he washes his clothes simultaneously. This should help with your water bill. Also, your new friend has a really bad case of body lice that hasn't been completely remedied.
Please heed the large orange notice attached to your detainee.
Although Ahmed is sociopath and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity and kindness will help him overcome these character flaws.
Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. He will bite you, given the chance, but his rabies test came back negative so not to worry. We understand that you plan to offer counseling and home schooling.
Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We do not suggest that you ask him to demonstrate these skills at your next yoga group. He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless (in your opinion) this might offend him.
Ahmed will not wish to interact with your wife or daughters (except sexually) since he views females as a subhuman form of property. However, he will be eager to assist with the education of your sons-have several copies of the Q'uran available for their use.
Oh - and rest assured that he absolutely loves animals especially cats and dogs. He prefers them roasted, but raw is fine, too, if they aren't more than 2 or 3 days dead.
Thanks again for your letter. We truly appreciate it when folks like you, who know so much, keep us informed of the proper way to do our job. We think this watching over each other's shoulder is such a good way for people to interact that we will be sending a team of federal officials with expertise in your line of work to your place of business soon, just to help you do your job better.
Don't be concerned that they have the power to close your business, seize your property, and arrest you for any violation of the 4,850,206 federal laws, codes, regulations and rules that apply to your profession. They're really there just to make sure you're doing everything the proper way.
That is what you wanted, right?
Well, thank you for this opportunity to interact with such a valued member of the citizenry. You take good care of Ahmed - and remember... we'll be watching.
Cordially,
George W. Bush
The Justice Department insists Lynne Stewart helped the man behind the 1993 WTC bombing. Her defenders say she's a victim of John Ashcroft's jihad against attorney-client privilege.
When the Justice Department indicted defense attorney Lynne Stewart in April on charges she helped client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim cleric convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, communicate with his followers, civil libertarians and attorneys of all political stripes saw it as one more example of Attorney General John Ashcroft's determination to erode attorney-client privilege.
Now documents obtained by the defense in the Stewart case show that the government was secretly taping meetings and phone calls between Stewart and Rahman and others for over two years.
While the government obtained a court order authorizing some surveillance of their meetings in 1998, the scope of what was monitored seems to extend beyond what is commonly authorized. And at a hearing July 19, prosecutors refused to say whether they are currently taping Stewart's conversations with her own attorney, Michael Tigar.
The indictment of Stewart has alarmed defense attorneys. "We take this as a very serious threat to the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial," says Jim Harrington, an attorney with the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "Since the founding of this country, one of the fundamental rights our people have had is the right to a lawyer you can confide in. In this situation, you have the government interfering with that right."
The association, he said, has already filed a friend-of-the-court brief objecting to the government's seizure of paper records and computer files from Stewart's office.
"This is a case that puts the attorney-client privilege in great jeopardy," adds Martin Adelman, a defense attorney and spokesperson for the New York State Bar Association.
Stewart, currently free on $500,000 bail, is formally charged with "providing material support and resources to the Egyptian-based terrorist organization known as the Islamic Group." The government alleges that Stewart, in a conspiracy with Rahman's Arabic translator, Mohammed Yousry (Rahman speaks little or no English; Stewart no Arabic), passed messages to and from the sheik, who was being held virtually incommunicado in his federal prison cell.
Specifically, the government's indictment charges that Stewart, in violation of a prison order (to which she had signed her agreement) barring any communications between the sheik and the outside world, passed along a message from him to his followers saying that a cease-fire in Egypt announced by his terrorist organization, the Islamic Group, should be terminated.
Stewart did make that decision public, in a press conference June 14, 2000. She says she did it in response to a reporter's inquiry. Though she says she now thinks it was "a mistake" to go public with the information, she also contends that releasing the information was in the public interest, since the public needed to know that the Islamic Group, which had masterminded a bloody massacre in Luxor, Egypt, that killed 58 tourists and four guards in 1997, was back in action.
As her attorney, Tigar, puts it, "The statement was not a punishable incitement and was certainly protected speech under the Supreme Court's current clear-and-present- danger test."
Bar association attorney Adelman puts the matter more bluntly, saying, "Without getting to the moral issues, telling Egyptians to kill Egyptians is not an American crime."
The other charges against Stewart are that she attempted to distract guards while her client and translator discussed Islamic Group strategy, and that she engaged in an effort to falsely claim that Rahman was being deprived of medical care for his diabetes condition. The attorney pled not guilty to all the charges.
Stewart is a longtime radical activist known for defending politically unpopular clients, from Black Panthers to Mafia leaders. Her flair for inflammatory rhetoric is unlikely to endear her to a New York jury pool still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center less than a year ago. In a 1995 interview, for example, she told the New York Times that she believes violence is sometimes necessary to correct American injustices. "I don't believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence," she told the Times.
"That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support." There is no indication, however, that she has ever been involved with terrorist organizations or activities, except in her role as defense attorney.
Tigar claims that Stewart was deliberately targeted by Ashcroft to have a chilling effect on the defense bar during the war on terror. Although secret monitoring of Stewart's conversations with Sheik Rahman began back in 1998 under a court order obtained by the Justice Department during the Clinton administration, certainly Ashcroft made a spectacle of her arrest and the search of her office. The raid and arrest were timed to coincide with the attorney general's April 9 visit to the site of the Sept. 11 attack in New York, and in a prepared statement, Ashcroft depicted it as another front in the terror war.
Stewart also charges that the warrant for her arrest and the search of her home and office, which was supposed to be sealed, was deliberately left unsealed, and reporters were tipped off in advance so that TV cameras were on hand. "There is wrongdoing here," Tigar states in brief filed with the court on Monday. (The bizarre nature of this case is demonstrated by the brief, in which the defense responds to a declaration filed by the U.S. attorney's office regarding the warrant, but can't actually cite the declaration, since it, too, is sealed.)
U.S. Attorney Joseph Bianco earlier told the court the failure to seal the warrant had been an oversight.
That warrant was not the only government leak in a case where every piece of evidence is supposed to be sealed at the request of the government on grounds of national security. At the time of the indictment, some snippets of taped conversations involving Stewart and her client were leaked to the press. In those, Rahman is heard apparently referring to his attorney and her Arabic translator as "trained doves" who are passing messages between him and his supporters outside of the prison, and Stewart allegedly made jokes about her role, saying she should "get an award" for her acting. Defense attorneys note that allegedly deflecting the guards' attention, and falsely claiming that a client was being medically mistreated by the prison, while perhaps ethically wrong, would not in themselves be crimes, but could be used by the government as evidence of conspiracy.
For years predating the Bush administration's war on terror, federal prison authorities have had the legal right to monitor certain prisoners' jailhouse conversations with their attorneys, but only after notifying the prisoner and the attorney of that activity, or after having obtained a court order permitting secret monitoring. But the USA PATRIOT Act (the acronym stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"), which was passed by Congress last fall in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has expanded that authority, both in the jailhouse and beyond prison walls. Under the terms of the act, prosecutors are permitted, with judicial approval, to covertly monitor lawyer-client conversations anywhere. In addition, the act allows the attorney general to authorize such monitoring without judicial approval, though only after notifying attorneys and their clients that their conversations will be monitored.
Coincidentally, the day before Stewart's arrest the New York Bar Association issued a statement condemning the PATRIOT Act's new monitoring provisions, saying they undermined the right to counsel. In any event, the taping of Stewart's prison conversations with her client -- which might be legal under the Justice Department's new post-9/11 rules -- predate that new authority by a year or more. Stewart's attorney says that although the government apparently had a warrant to monitor Rahman's conversations, it is not clear which of Stewart's conversations were monitored under court order and which were not.
The scope of the monitoring certainly seemed to go beyond jailhouse conversations between the lawyer and client. The government so far has refused to provide any information on its monitoring in the case.
It also appears that besides having her jailhouse conversations with her client monitored, Stewart was spied on and monitored outside of the prison, and that this monitoring may be continuing to include her conversations with her own attorney, Michael Tigar.
The government's gag on Sheik Rahman -- technically a Special Administrative Measure imposed by the federal Bureau of Prisons -- is itself highly unusual. Even John Gotti, the mob boss who died recently in prison, was not barred from communicating, though he clearly was staying in touch with his Mafia cronies on the outside.
But the government's aggressive monitoring of Rahman's conversations with Stewart, and her subsequent indictment, are what has triggered the legal hue and cry about the case.
"No one contests that the government has a right to monitor and indict a lawyer who is involved in something like helping a client plan a bank heist," says the New York State ABA's Adelman. "But it's not clear that Stewart did anything like that. She doesn't even speak Arabic, so it's not clear she even knew what her client was saying."
At a July 19 hearing in federal court in Manhattan, defense attorney Tigar blasted the government's violation of attorney-client confidentiality. "In my 35 years working as an attorney I have never been arrested or jailed for anything," he said. "Yet I don't know whether the government is secretly monitoring my conversations with my client."
Tigar asked the judge, John G. Koeltl, to order the government to notify him if they were conducting such surveillance. He also requested that any evidence derived from the monitoring of Stewart's conversations, either with him or with her client, Rahman, be suppressed, and that if the monitoring jeopardized Stewart's right to a fair trial, that the charges be dismissed outright. "You have the power to tell the executive branch to come clean to your honor," he told the court.
The judge took the issue under advisement without issuing an immediate ruling. Earlier this month Stewart succeeded in getting Koeltl to appoint a special court master to examine her files before releasing any to the government.
U.S. Attorney Bianco did tell the judge that no one was monitoring the prison conversations between Stewart's co-defendant Ahmed Abdel Sattar and his attorneys. Sattar, a postal worker currently in prison without bail, is described in the indictment as an active Islamic Group leader and surrogate for Rahman. Sattar is a codefendant with Stewart and Yousry. (Under the terms of the Bureau of Prison's Special Administrative Measures regulations, Bianco would have had to announce such monitoring of prison conversations in advance.) But Bianco said he was unwilling to state whether Stewart and her attorney, Tigar, were under surveillance and monitoring. He argued that for surveillance to be effective it had to be done covertly, and insisted that judicial review of wiretaps provided adequate safeguards to protect a defendant's rights. "We are operating on the assumption" that conversations are monitored, says Tigar, who also handled the murder case of Terry Nichols, who had been charged as an accomplice of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Federal courts have traditionally taken a dim view of police spying on lawyers and their clients. Back in 1996, a federal court in Pennsylvania, after hearing evidence that then Gov. Tom Ridge's office had obtained privileged mail communications between death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and his attorneys, which had been intercepted and photocopied by the death-row prison's warden, ruled that the prisoner had been "actually injured" by the action, which was condemned and ordered halted. (Ridge is now head of the Office of Homeland Security.)
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has been making a number of controversial attempts to interfere with the right to counsel of terror suspects. John Walker Lindh, the former Taliban fighter who recently reached a plea-bargained guilty plea, was prevented from seeing a lawyer for the weeks during which he was in military custody in Afghanistan. The Justice Department is currently attempting to have the courts remove the public defender who is representing Yaser Esam Hamdi, a second American detained on terrorism charges who is being held in military custody in Virginia. A third American, Abdullah al Muhajir -- aka Jose Padilla -- has been denied access to an attorney altogether, though he is being held without any charge in a military brig in South Carolina.
The American Bar Association strongly lobbied last fall against a provision in the PATRIOT Act giving the attorney general the authority, without a court order or a showing of probable cause, to order monitoring of attorney-client conversations. ABA president Bob Hirshon says the Stewart case demonstrates what's wrong with that act. "This arrest was trumpeted by the Justice Department as the first test of the new regulation, but in fact, the indictment seems to be based on monitoring that was done before September, presumably under the old rules and with a court order. If that's the case, it shows that there was no need to give the attorney general the power to order monitoring without a court order."
He adds, "The new law is counterproductive. If you tell people you're going to be monitoring their conversations, every lawyer is now going to tell his client that he better assume he's being monitored. Not doing that would be legal malpractice."
Adelman contends that none of the specific charges against Stewart "in and of themselves" appear to be criminal violations. In Stewart's case, he said, the government will have to prove that a conspiracy existed, and that Stewart's actions were a conscious effort to further that conspiracy. But he concedes that the case has sparked debate within the association. "A lot of lawyers say nothing she did was illegal, but others say that there is a war going on and what she did was wrong." he says.
Stewart's case is not expected to go to trial for some time. The judge has acknowledged that faced with having to go over so much government evidence, most of it in Arabic, the defense will need a long time to prepare its defense.
Meanwhile, Stewart and her attorney Tigar are being cautious. "We're not stupid people," says Stewart. "When we have something important to talk about, we won't do it on the phone or in an office. We will go out for a hamburger or something."
About the writer
Philadelphia-based journalist Dave Lindorff writes regularly for Salon.
Osama Bin Laden, your time is short;
We'd rather you die, than come to court.
I have a question, about your theory and laws;
"How come you never die for the cause?"
Is it because you're a coward who counts on others?
Well here in America, we stand by our brothers.
As is usual, you failed in your mission;
If you expected pure chaos, you can keep on wishing
Americans are now focused and stronger than ever;
What you tried to kill, doesn't live in our walls;
It's not in buildings or shopping malls.
If all of our structures came crashing down;
It would still be there, safe and sound.
Because pride and courage can't be destroyed;
Even if the towers leave a deep void.
We'll band together and fill the holes
We'll bury our dead and bless their souls.
But then our energy will focus on you;
And you'll feel the wrath of the
Red, White and Blue.
So slither and hide like a snake in the grass;
Because America's coming to
THE LADY
I wonder what she thought
As she stood there, strong and tall.
She couldn't turn away,
She was forced to watch it all.
Did she long to offer comfort
As her country bled?
With her arm forever frozen
High above her head.
She could not shield her eyes
She could not hide her face
She just stared across the water
Keeping Freedom's place.
The smell of smoke and terror
Somehow reduced her size
So small within the harbor
But still we recognized...
How dignified and beautiful
On a day so many died
I wonder what she thought,
And I know she must have cried.
Just a note on the airline offering the free tickets. This site is busy and you might have to try a few times to get the link to connect. Try going directly to their site and keep trying.
http://www.spiritair.com
The prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui as the alleged 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks is creating friction with fundamental civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution.
At issue is the extent to which federal prosecutors may continue to impose strict, special security measures on Mr. Moussaoui that directly hinder his ability to serve as his own lawyer and develop an effective defense.
Moussaoui is being held in solitary confinement and barred from nearly all contact with the outside world.
Prosecutors say the harsh tactics are necessary to shield the nation from possible acts of terror carried out by Moussaoui from his cell.
Defense lawyers familiar with Moussaoui's situation say it is a constitutional "train wreck" in the making. They say that unless the government allows Moussaoui to consult with legal experts, find and talk to defense witnesses, and gain access to key evidence, his right to a fair trial will be effectively denied.
No direct precedent
The fair-trial issue is particularly acute in cases like Moussaoui's in which the US government is seeking the death penalty, these lawyers say. In fact, no American judge has ever directly ruled on the issue emerging in this case: whether federal prosecutors may impose security restrictions that significantly tie the hands of a defendant who is representing himself in a capital-punishment case.
"I can't think of an analogous circumstance in which you hand the keys to the defense over to the prosecutors and say, 'You get to decide the kind of access [Moussaoui] has to the outside world, even as it affects his ability to defend himself," says Gerald Zerkin, an assistant federal public defender who is on a team of experienced lawyers appointed as standby counsel for Moussaoui.
Because of the very real dangers of the ongoing war on terror, the Moussaoui case raises difficult questions about how to balance the right to a fair trial against the government's duty to safeguard national security.
The issue arises at a time when a wide range of government antiterror initiatives have put civil liberties in a different light.
The indefinite detention of "enemy combatants," as well as the secret jailing of up to 1,200 individuals on suspicion that they might possess useful information, has generated controversy.
Despite these government actions, a federal judge in Boston has ordered a relaxation of the special security measures applied in the case of alleged shoe-bomber Richard Reid. "[Mr. Reid] has the right to the most vigorous, skilled defense that our society can afford, and I'll see that he gets it," US District Judge William Young said in a June ruling. Unlike Moussaoui, Reid is represented by counsel.
The judge in the Moussaoui case, Leonie Brinkema, has declined to alter in any way the security arrangements.
Federal prosecutors say Moussaoui accepted many burdens on his Sixth Amendment rights to a fair trial when he fired his court-appointed lawyers and asserted his right to serve as his own attorney. "Are you aware that by being your own attorney, it will become more difficult for you to have access to evidence, access to witnesses, access to legal research, because of the restrictions under which you are presently housed?" asked Judge Brinkema at a June hearing. Moussaoui answered: "Absolutely." The judge added, "Whereas, if you had an attorney ... these lawyers are able to see information, to contact witnesses, and do things that you cannot do from your cell. Do you understand that?"
"I do," Moussaoui replied.
Later in the same hearing, the judge told the defendant: "I just want to advise you that there will be ... national-security types of information, as well as sensitive airport information, that could be relevant to your defense to which you will not be able to get access. Do you understand that?"
Moussaoui answered, "I understand this."
Requesting bin Laden video
Despite this assertion of understanding, Moussaoui filed a legal motion last week "to get access to so-called secret evidence." Moussaoui is requesting, among other items, a copy of the now-famous videotape of Osama bin Laden discussing the Sept. 11 attacks.
The video was released by US officials and broadcast internationally. But, Moussaoui says, the government has since classified it as "secret," which prevents him from seeing it.
"When special administrative measures interfere with the defendant's right to prepare and present a defense, they violate the Sixth Amendment. It's as simple as that," says Michael Tigar, an American University law professor and defense attorney with experience in terrorism trials.
"He can be subject to some restriction," Mr. Tigar adds. "But the government must give him the opportunity to prepare and present an effective defense."
Others see it differently. "He has chosen to represent himself, knowing full well that he has these restrictions on him," says Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor now at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. "Having made his own bed, he has to sleep in it."
Copyright - Christian Science Monitor
August 07, 2002
The federal courts have raised needed questions about the way the Bush administration is trying to prevent another terrorist attack. From their legal standpoint, some judges are saying that certain detentions stray too far from American standards of justice, even in times of emergency.
The most recent such decision was handed down by US District Court Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington. She ruled in favor of a coalition of civil liberties groups that brought a Freedom of Information Act suit and ordered the Justice Department to release the names of those detained in the US by federal investigators probing the 9/11 attacks.
While the judge said secret arrests and detentions are "antithetical" to a free and open society, she also showed some awareness of the necessity of secrecy in times of war. For instance, she rejected the plaintiffs' request to also release place and time of arrests, acknowledging that information could give terrorists some insight into the government's investigative tactics. Further, she said the government could withhold information about some so-called "material witnesses" if a court had reviewed the specifics of the case and so ordered.
Even this forcefully worded ruling, therefore, doesn't carve out an absolutist stand of no secrecy. Rather, it attempts to reaffirm that openness is the norm for US justice, and judges must play a role in setting the limits.
The ruling is one in a series that have tried to temper Justice Department methods. Earlier, federal district judges in New Jersey and Michigan had ordered that immigration-court hearings for detainees be open. Soon after 9/11, the government ordered all such hearings closed. A judge in New York has ruled against the policy of holding material witnesses indefinitely. These decisions have been appealed, however.
The government's argument that terrorists might use information about the detentions to plan another attack will need to be made more forcibly than it has been up to now. Citizens should be reassured that the courts are able to balance the right to liberty against a need for security.
Copyright - The Monitor's View
Dear Sirs:
I have the solution for the prevention of hijackings, and at the same time getting our airline industry back on its feet.
Since men of the Muslim religion are not allowed to look at naked women we should replace all of our female flight attendants with strippers. Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing a naked woman, and of course, every businessman in this country would start flying again in hope of seeing a naked woman.
We would have no more hijackings, and the airline industry would have record sales.
Now why didn't Bush think of this? Why do I still have to do everything myself?
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
While trying to escape through Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden found a bottle on a beach and picked it up. Suddenly, a female genie rose from the bottle and with a smile said: "Master, may I grant you one wish?"
"You ignorant unworthy daughter-of-a-dog! Don't you know who I am? I don't need any common woman giving me anything!" barked Bin Laden.
The shocked genie said, "Please, I must grant you a wish or I will be returned to that bottle forever."
Osama thought a moment. Then grumbled about the impertinence of the woman, and said, "Very well, I want to awaken with three white women in my bed in the morning, so just do it and be off with you!" The annoyed genie said, "So be it!" and disappeared. The next morning Bin Laden woke up in bed with Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, and Hillary Clinton. His dick was gone, his knee was broken, and he had no health insurance.
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