Les Jones

News > Lynne Stewart

Jim Miller on Lynne Stewart, the attorney and self-described radical who was recently sentenced to prison for aiding her terrorist clients.

Anyone who thinks that Lynne Stewart is a civil rights lawyer should look at her own list of famous cases. Again and again she has defended terrorists in court. I don't see a single true civil rights case in that entire list — unless you think that murder and skyjacking are civil rights.

And she has, by her own admission, a narrow view of where civil rights should apply. Here's a quotation from Wikipedia

She described her position in an interview as "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."

In other words, those living under communist rulers have no civil rights. That's the view of many communists, but it is seldom stated so plainly. (And, contrary to what she says, there is nothing new about it.)