USA STASI

[Matthew X]

Aug. 2, 2002 | 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.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 1680 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/attachments/19990421/5383cfff/attachment.txt>