February 2003
20 min 20 sec
REPORTER: Ginny Stein
So these are all the grandkids here?
LYNNE STEWART:
Some of them are grandkids, some of them are nieces, some of them is me with Karl Marx's burial place in London.
Lynne Stewart is a 62-year-old grandmother and accused traitor...
LYNNE STEWART:
My wonderful daughter, Sinobia, Ralph's and my daughter, Sinobia.
..a defence attorney who's devoted her life to keeping her clients out of jail. She now faces a 40-year prison sentence. Her crime - helping her client, a convicted terrorist, convey a message to his followers.
LYNNE STEWART:
It looks like somebody broke this, though.
MC AT PRESS CONFERENCE:
I'd like to introduce the Attorney-General of the United States, John Ashcroft.
Last year, Lynne Stewart's arrest was declared a major victory in the war against terror.
JOHN ASHCROFT PRESS CONFERENCE (9 April, 2002):
Today's indictment charges four individuals including Rahman's lawyer, a United States citizen, with aiding Sheik Abdel Rahman in continuing to direct terrorist activities of the Islamic group from his prison cell in the United States.
REPORTER:
When you hear yourself labelled as a terrorist, what do you think?
LYNNE STEWART:
Well, I think it's absurd. It's a word, it's a label, it's meant to engender in people terrible fear, and I say to you that I'm guilty of nothing criminal. I have never participated in a terrorist conspiracy or materially aided one. I have politics. I don't consider them to be terrorist by their definition or by anyone else's definition, but my politics are strong and I believe them fully.
REPORTER:
And you stand by them?
LYNNE STEWART:
I do stand by them.
LYNNE STEWART (Looking at photographs):
These are actually the children of my co-defendant, Ahmed Sattar.
CARL HERMAN, DEFENCE ATTORNEY:
Lynne Stewart on a personal level is an extremely dedicated, extremely able lawyer, who fights for her clients in court and out of court and I have a tremendous respect for her, professionally. But I think there's a judgment issue that's involved here and I think that, as a lawyer, there are lines that you simply, you don't want to cross.
Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman is the client for whom Lynne Stewart has risked her career and her freedom. Until his imprisonment, Sheik Rahman was seen by many, including Osama bin Laden, as the spiritual leader of the international jihad. The Blind Sheik, as the Egyptian cleric is known in America, came to public attention after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, in which six people were killed and 1,000 more injured. Carried out by al-Qa'ida, the bombing was a precursor to the September 11 attacks. Rahman was not accused of the bombing, but of involvement in a conspiracy to blow up other New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations.
LYNNE STEWART:
I must say I was intrigued by the case. I knew nothing or next to nothing about the Islamic movements. I had always been a supporter of Palestine, but I had never really been into at all the Islamic movements, the roles they played, even what the nature of the Muslim belief was. I mean, I had no idea, so I had a crash course and I took on the case and entered a completely new world for me.
It was not the first time Stewart had thrown herself into the unknown. Raised as a white, middle-class child by Republican parents, she went to work as a librarian in Harlem in the 1960s. There, she met her husband, Ralph Poynter, who was then a teacher and activist.
LYNNE STEWART:
I would say that our politics basically developed through struggle.
RALPH POYNTER:
Developed, definitely.
LYNNE STEWART:
You know, in other words, you can't be involved with people and fighting political issues and not have your politic develop.
The couple threw themselves into revolutionary politics, demonstrating for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. By today's standards, they were certainly militant.
LYNNE STEWART:
I support self-determination and I do believe that, if we're realistic about the world in which we live, or the world that has always been here, that isn't accomplished by people sitting down at a table and talking nice and agreeing to something. It's a power struggle. It's always got to be a power struggle and that power struggle has to be almost by force of arms.
In the 1970s, Stewart went to law school and soon she was defending the violent members of far-left groups like the Weather Underground. She's a so-called 'movement lawyer', embracing the politics of those she represents.
LYNNE STEWART (Giving speech at fundraiser):
I am far from being left behind. I feel that I, I'm in the vanguard and I'm in the vanguard with the people I know and I love.
Out of jail on $500,000 bail, Lynne Stewart is meeting friends and supporters to raise money for her trial later this year.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
This, too, is my family. This is my family of friends from the Lower East Side, people I've defended, people I've struggled with in many, many fronts, whether it was graffiti in the ladies' room on 107th Street right down to anti-war - "We won't go to Vietnam."
Despite the apparent differences between an atheist feminist and an Islamic fundamentalist, Lynne says she identified with Sheik Rahman's politics.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
And I tell you that, in all my dealings with Sheik Omar, he never was more than an Egyptian nationalist looking for a solution for his own country. His solution was religious, but it was religious within a political context.
Ultimately, though, Sheik Rahman's patriotism failed to win over the jury in his 1995 trial.
LYNNE STEWART: He was found guilty of all charges. He was ultimately sentenced and received life plus 65 years in a federal institution, a sentence which is not uncommon these days. It certainly was a death sentence and was viewed as one by people in the Middle East who had respect and honour for him.
In 1997, his followers in Egypt murdered 58 foreign tourists in Luxor, leaving behind leaflets demanding his release. Stewart continued to defend Rahman through years of appeals, visiting him at this high-security prison in Minnesota. After the massacre in Luxor, he was placed in solitary confinement and Stewart was made to sign an agreement not to convoy his views to the outside world. In June of 2000, she broke that agreement.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
In my case, I made a press release, done very publicly, to Reuters, which basically dealt with the sheik's political opinion about a ceasefire the organisation that he had been a part of for many years had issued.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the violent fundamentalist organisation responsible for the Luxor massacre had declared a ceasefire the previous year. Rahman wanted to call off the creasefire and asked Lynne Stewart to convey the following message - "I just offer to you my advice that it seems that the jails are still filled, torture still occurs, arrests are taking place and I say to you that if the ceasefire is not working, we ought to think maybe about withdrawing from it.
LYNNE STEWART:
When I signed the agreement, I certainly had no intention of breaking the agreement. But when I was confronted with the circumstance with a client saying, "I need to speak out on this issue. I feel very strongly that I need to advise the people back in Egypt of my opinions on this very important issue for us politically," at that point, I felt that it should be released.
REPORTER:
But you knew that, in doing it, in speaking out, that you were going against the very document that you had signed?
LYNNE STEWART:
Yes, and I assumed that, if they were really going to be problematic about it, that they would probably bar me from seeing him, which is what they did initially.
Then, in April last year, almost two years after she issued the press release, Lynne Stewart was arrested by FBI agents. She was handcuffed in front of her neighbours and charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organisation. A few hours later, America's top law official trumpeted Lynne Stewart's arrest on the hugely popular David Letterman show.
JOHN ASHCROFT, US ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We simply aren't going to allow people who are convicted of terrorism to continue to achieve terrorist objectives by sending messages and directing the activity from their prison.
Former Republican staffer and lawyer David Rivkin believes the government was right to target Stewart.
REPORTER:
Why do it?
DAVID RIVKIN, ATTORNEY:
Well, why do it? Again, what are the alternatives? You have a terrorist in prison. You believe he is continuing to run, if you will, his network. You want to be able to give him effective assistance of counsel because, if we didn't, we'd be, we'd be criticised for depriving him of his due process rights. And he happens to choose counsel - I mean, being a lawyer does not necessarily make you a saint - whom we believe is part, if you will, of the same terrorist organisation, or at least a terrorist sympathiser. What choice do we have?
REPORTER:
What about when people say that, by speaking out on behalf of the sheikh, you crossed the line?
LYNNE STEWART:
Well, I don't believe I did. I think even the most despised person - by this government - still has a right to speak and still has a right to be political and still has the right to have opinions, especially if those opinions are counted for something in other parts of the world. So they may say I crossed the line, but they're not the judges of that. I think a jury is an ultimate judge of that and I'm confident a jury will not find that I crossed any line whatsoever.
The jury in Lynne Stewart's trial is going to be presented with evidence that includes the transcripts of 97,000 wire taps. Unbeknownst to Stewart, the FBI had been bugging the lawyer's meetings with her client. According to the indictment against Stewart, she actively concealed the true nature of a conversation with the sheik and her translator by making extraneous comments in English to mask the Arabic, thereby distracting the guards.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
And I always say to folks, you know, maybe 35 or 40 years ago, when I used to teach over here on 135th Street and my hair was as long as my skirts were short, I could have distracted those guards. But I think at the ripe old age of 60, which I was when all my charges were brought, in the year 2000, that distraction was not possible. The distraction they talk about is that we had a method of working, because we had to use an interpreter, we had very limited time...
Stuart says that to avoid wasting time on translation, she prepared questions with the interpreter in advance. She says her "extraneous comments" were a way of keeping the guards from becoming suspicious of the Arabic conversation between Rahman and the interpreter. It might have fooled the guards but, for those listening closely, the ploy rang alarm bells. According to a sealed affidavit from an FBI agent, Lynne Stewart, the sheik and the translator "shared laughs" about the "fine acting job she was doing in successfully tricking the guards". It adds that Lynne Stewart joked, "I can get an award for it." At the time, the authorities clearly didn't take these alleged offences seriously. Stewart was only charged with acting as the sheik's go-between, a full two years after she spoke to the media on his behalf. What had changed that transformed Stewart from a merely unconventional attorney into an accessory to terror?
CARL HERMAN, DEFENCE ATTORNEY:
If it hadn't been for September 11, she may have just gone on and no-one would have taken any notice of it, but now she gets into the sights because we're looking for whoever we can find and blame whoever we can blame.
GEORGE W. BUSH, US PRESIDENT:
Either you're with us or you are with the terrorists.
Since the September 11 attacks, the government has gone to great lengths to harass those it perceives as the enemy, including its own citizens.
GEORGE W. BUSH:
It is now my honour to sign into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001.
Six weeks after September 11, Republicans and Democrats alike granted the Justice Department unprecedented new powers of surveillance. The government can now bypass the courts if it wants to tap a suspect's phone or record a suspect speaking to his lawyer - something it couldn't do when it listened in on Lynne Stewart's prison conversations.
CARL HERMAN, DEFENCE ATTORNEY:
When I go to see my client at the jail and they say, "Well, how do I know that what I tell you is going to be kept in confidence," and you know, I used to be able to say, "I'm not concerned about that. No-one's listening." Now I don't know if they are listening.
DAVID RIVKIN, ATTORNEY: As far as preparing new legislation, I mean, I do think that new legislation was clearly needed. There is a fundamental difference between how you balance liberty and national security or I should say people security in wartime and peacetime.
Elaine Cassel is a lawyer and academic. She believes these new, tougher laws are themselves a threat to freedom.
ELAINE CASSEL, LAWYER:
They talk about freedom and they talk about a war on terrorism being a fight for freedom but what type? For what? What freedom is there if there's not freedom to associate? I mean, the terrorist laws themselves - we've been talking about the role of defence attorneys, but the terrorist laws themselves now allow the guilt by association that is a return to the McCarthy era.
Lynne Stewart is afraid that the new laws deny her clients effective representation.
LYNNE STEWART:
Defendants in high-profile cases, such as all the Muslim cases, do not have faith that they are not being listened in to, that they are frozen at this point from having real relationships with their lawyers. There have been cases where people have asked on the record in court "Am I being listened in to?" and the government refuses to answer those questions.
DAVID RIVKIN, ATTORNEY: Attorney-client privilege, of course, is a very sacred principle but it's always been the case, and it goes back to hundreds of years, that that privilege cannot be used to actually assist, facilitate the commission of a new crime.
REPORTER: If she is convicted, what signal will that send about the American justice system?
ELAINE CASSEL: Oh, well, if you don't toe the line, I mean, if you don't get approval from the Justice Department for everything you do, it could be you behind bars and not just your client.
The irony is that Lynne Stewart hasn't changed. America has. The same woman who fought against the Vietnam War now rails against US-backed regimes in the Middle East. Only this time, she's found herself on the wrong side of history.
REPORTER:
How likely do you view the prospect that you could end up in jail for 40 years?
LYNNE STEWART:
Well, I believe that no-one who is an alive person cannot wake up at three o'clock in the morning like I do and say, "Hey, you know, I could really be in jail on those very lumpy mattresses without much medical care, being able to see the people I love and care about on a very restricted basis," but you know, one lives one's life and, if that's the price that they're going to exact from me, I still would prefer to have lived the principled life that I have lived and defended people with my whole heart and mind, than to pull back and do any less, even if it means that I have to go to jail. But, if you're saying do I look forward to being? No, I'm no martyr. I look forward to being up in the country watching the leaves change and watching the grass grow.
20 min 20 sec
REPORTER: Ginny Stein
So these are all the grandkids here?
LYNNE STEWART:
Some of them are grandkids, some of them are nieces, some of them is me with Karl Marx's burial place in London.
Lynne Stewart is a 62-year-old grandmother and accused traitor...
LYNNE STEWART:
My wonderful daughter, Sinobia, Ralph's and my daughter, Sinobia.
..a defence attorney who's devoted her life to keeping her clients out of jail. She now faces a 40-year prison sentence. Her crime - helping her client, a convicted terrorist, convey a message to his followers.
LYNNE STEWART:
It looks like somebody broke this, though.
MC AT PRESS CONFERENCE:
I'd like to introduce the Attorney-General of the United States, John Ashcroft.
Last year, Lynne Stewart's arrest was declared a major victory in the war against terror.
JOHN ASHCROFT PRESS CONFERENCE (9 April, 2002):
Today's indictment charges four individuals including Rahman's lawyer, a United States citizen, with aiding Sheik Abdel Rahman in continuing to direct terrorist activities of the Islamic group from his prison cell in the United States.
REPORTER:
When you hear yourself labelled as a terrorist, what do you think?
LYNNE STEWART:
Well, I think it's absurd. It's a word, it's a label, it's meant to engender in people terrible fear, and I say to you that I'm guilty of nothing criminal. I have never participated in a terrorist conspiracy or materially aided one. I have politics. I don't consider them to be terrorist by their definition or by anyone else's definition, but my politics are strong and I believe them fully.
REPORTER:
And you stand by them?
LYNNE STEWART:
I do stand by them.
LYNNE STEWART (Looking at photographs):
These are actually the children of my co-defendant, Ahmed Sattar.
CARL HERMAN, DEFENCE ATTORNEY:
Lynne Stewart on a personal level is an extremely dedicated, extremely able lawyer, who fights for her clients in court and out of court and I have a tremendous respect for her, professionally. But I think there's a judgment issue that's involved here and I think that, as a lawyer, there are lines that you simply, you don't want to cross.
Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman is the client for whom Lynne Stewart has risked her career and her freedom. Until his imprisonment, Sheik Rahman was seen by many, including Osama bin Laden, as the spiritual leader of the international jihad. The Blind Sheik, as the Egyptian cleric is known in America, came to public attention after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, in which six people were killed and 1,000 more injured. Carried out by al-Qa'ida, the bombing was a precursor to the September 11 attacks. Rahman was not accused of the bombing, but of involvement in a conspiracy to blow up other New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations.
LYNNE STEWART:
I must say I was intrigued by the case. I knew nothing or next to nothing about the Islamic movements. I had always been a supporter of Palestine, but I had never really been into at all the Islamic movements, the roles they played, even what the nature of the Muslim belief was. I mean, I had no idea, so I had a crash course and I took on the case and entered a completely new world for me.
It was not the first time Stewart had thrown herself into the unknown. Raised as a white, middle-class child by Republican parents, she went to work as a librarian in Harlem in the 1960s. There, she met her husband, Ralph Poynter, who was then a teacher and activist.
LYNNE STEWART:
I would say that our politics basically developed through struggle.
RALPH POYNTER:
Developed, definitely.
LYNNE STEWART:
You know, in other words, you can't be involved with people and fighting political issues and not have your politic develop.
The couple threw themselves into revolutionary politics, demonstrating for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. By today's standards, they were certainly militant.
LYNNE STEWART:
I support self-determination and I do believe that, if we're realistic about the world in which we live, or the world that has always been here, that isn't accomplished by people sitting down at a table and talking nice and agreeing to something. It's a power struggle. It's always got to be a power struggle and that power struggle has to be almost by force of arms.
In the 1970s, Stewart went to law school and soon she was defending the violent members of far-left groups like the Weather Underground. She's a so-called 'movement lawyer', embracing the politics of those she represents.
LYNNE STEWART (Giving speech at fundraiser):
I am far from being left behind. I feel that I, I'm in the vanguard and I'm in the vanguard with the people I know and I love.
Out of jail on $500,000 bail, Lynne Stewart is meeting friends and supporters to raise money for her trial later this year.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
This, too, is my family. This is my family of friends from the Lower East Side, people I've defended, people I've struggled with in many, many fronts, whether it was graffiti in the ladies' room on 107th Street right down to anti-war - "We won't go to Vietnam."
Despite the apparent differences between an atheist feminist and an Islamic fundamentalist, Lynne says she identified with Sheik Rahman's politics.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
And I tell you that, in all my dealings with Sheik Omar, he never was more than an Egyptian nationalist looking for a solution for his own country. His solution was religious, but it was religious within a political context.
Ultimately, though, Sheik Rahman's patriotism failed to win over the jury in his 1995 trial.
LYNNE STEWART: He was found guilty of all charges. He was ultimately sentenced and received life plus 65 years in a federal institution, a sentence which is not uncommon these days. It certainly was a death sentence and was viewed as one by people in the Middle East who had respect and honour for him.
In 1997, his followers in Egypt murdered 58 foreign tourists in Luxor, leaving behind leaflets demanding his release. Stewart continued to defend Rahman through years of appeals, visiting him at this high-security prison in Minnesota. After the massacre in Luxor, he was placed in solitary confinement and Stewart was made to sign an agreement not to convoy his views to the outside world. In June of 2000, she broke that agreement.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
In my case, I made a press release, done very publicly, to Reuters, which basically dealt with the sheik's political opinion about a ceasefire the organisation that he had been a part of for many years had issued.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the violent fundamentalist organisation responsible for the Luxor massacre had declared a ceasefire the previous year. Rahman wanted to call off the creasefire and asked Lynne Stewart to convey the following message - "I just offer to you my advice that it seems that the jails are still filled, torture still occurs, arrests are taking place and I say to you that if the ceasefire is not working, we ought to think maybe about withdrawing from it.
LYNNE STEWART:
When I signed the agreement, I certainly had no intention of breaking the agreement. But when I was confronted with the circumstance with a client saying, "I need to speak out on this issue. I feel very strongly that I need to advise the people back in Egypt of my opinions on this very important issue for us politically," at that point, I felt that it should be released.
REPORTER:
But you knew that, in doing it, in speaking out, that you were going against the very document that you had signed?
LYNNE STEWART:
Yes, and I assumed that, if they were really going to be problematic about it, that they would probably bar me from seeing him, which is what they did initially.
Then, in April last year, almost two years after she issued the press release, Lynne Stewart was arrested by FBI agents. She was handcuffed in front of her neighbours and charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organisation. A few hours later, America's top law official trumpeted Lynne Stewart's arrest on the hugely popular David Letterman show.
JOHN ASHCROFT, US ATTORNEY-GENERAL: We simply aren't going to allow people who are convicted of terrorism to continue to achieve terrorist objectives by sending messages and directing the activity from their prison.
Former Republican staffer and lawyer David Rivkin believes the government was right to target Stewart.
REPORTER:
Why do it?
DAVID RIVKIN, ATTORNEY:
Well, why do it? Again, what are the alternatives? You have a terrorist in prison. You believe he is continuing to run, if you will, his network. You want to be able to give him effective assistance of counsel because, if we didn't, we'd be, we'd be criticised for depriving him of his due process rights. And he happens to choose counsel - I mean, being a lawyer does not necessarily make you a saint - whom we believe is part, if you will, of the same terrorist organisation, or at least a terrorist sympathiser. What choice do we have?
REPORTER:
What about when people say that, by speaking out on behalf of the sheikh, you crossed the line?
LYNNE STEWART:
Well, I don't believe I did. I think even the most despised person - by this government - still has a right to speak and still has a right to be political and still has the right to have opinions, especially if those opinions are counted for something in other parts of the world. So they may say I crossed the line, but they're not the judges of that. I think a jury is an ultimate judge of that and I'm confident a jury will not find that I crossed any line whatsoever.
The jury in Lynne Stewart's trial is going to be presented with evidence that includes the transcripts of 97,000 wire taps. Unbeknownst to Stewart, the FBI had been bugging the lawyer's meetings with her client. According to the indictment against Stewart, she actively concealed the true nature of a conversation with the sheik and her translator by making extraneous comments in English to mask the Arabic, thereby distracting the guards.
LYNNE STEWART (At fundraiser):
And I always say to folks, you know, maybe 35 or 40 years ago, when I used to teach over here on 135th Street and my hair was as long as my skirts were short, I could have distracted those guards. But I think at the ripe old age of 60, which I was when all my charges were brought, in the year 2000, that distraction was not possible. The distraction they talk about is that we had a method of working, because we had to use an interpreter, we had very limited time...
Stuart says that to avoid wasting time on translation, she prepared questions with the interpreter in advance. She says her "extraneous comments" were a way of keeping the guards from becoming suspicious of the Arabic conversation between Rahman and the interpreter. It might have fooled the guards but, for those listening closely, the ploy rang alarm bells. According to a sealed affidavit from an FBI agent, Lynne Stewart, the sheik and the translator "shared laughs" about the "fine acting job she was doing in successfully tricking the guards". It adds that Lynne Stewart joked, "I can get an award for it." At the time, the authorities clearly didn't take these alleged offences seriously. Stewart was only charged with acting as the sheik's go-between, a full two years after she spoke to the media on his behalf. What had changed that transformed Stewart from a merely unconventional attorney into an accessory to terror?
CARL HERMAN, DEFENCE ATTORNEY:
If it hadn't been for September 11, she may have just gone on and no-one would have taken any notice of it, but now she gets into the sights because we're looking for whoever we can find and blame whoever we can blame.
GEORGE W. BUSH, US PRESIDENT:
Either you're with us or you are with the terrorists.
Since the September 11 attacks, the government has gone to great lengths to harass those it perceives as the enemy, including its own citizens.
GEORGE W. BUSH:
It is now my honour to sign into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001.
Six weeks after September 11, Republicans and Democrats alike granted the Justice Department unprecedented new powers of surveillance. The government can now bypass the courts if it wants to tap a suspect's phone or record a suspect speaking to his lawyer - something it couldn't do when it listened in on Lynne Stewart's prison conversations.
CARL HERMAN, DEFENCE ATTORNEY:
When I go to see my client at the jail and they say, "Well, how do I know that what I tell you is going to be kept in confidence," and you know, I used to be able to say, "I'm not concerned about that. No-one's listening." Now I don't know if they are listening.
DAVID RIVKIN, ATTORNEY: As far as preparing new legislation, I mean, I do think that new legislation was clearly needed. There is a fundamental difference between how you balance liberty and national security or I should say people security in wartime and peacetime.
Elaine Cassel is a lawyer and academic. She believes these new, tougher laws are themselves a threat to freedom.
ELAINE CASSEL, LAWYER:
They talk about freedom and they talk about a war on terrorism being a fight for freedom but what type? For what? What freedom is there if there's not freedom to associate? I mean, the terrorist laws themselves - we've been talking about the role of defence attorneys, but the terrorist laws themselves now allow the guilt by association that is a return to the McCarthy era.
Lynne Stewart is afraid that the new laws deny her clients effective representation.
LYNNE STEWART:
Defendants in high-profile cases, such as all the Muslim cases, do not have faith that they are not being listened in to, that they are frozen at this point from having real relationships with their lawyers. There have been cases where people have asked on the record in court "Am I being listened in to?" and the government refuses to answer those questions.
DAVID RIVKIN, ATTORNEY: Attorney-client privilege, of course, is a very sacred principle but it's always been the case, and it goes back to hundreds of years, that that privilege cannot be used to actually assist, facilitate the commission of a new crime.
REPORTER: If she is convicted, what signal will that send about the American justice system?
ELAINE CASSEL: Oh, well, if you don't toe the line, I mean, if you don't get approval from the Justice Department for everything you do, it could be you behind bars and not just your client.
The irony is that Lynne Stewart hasn't changed. America has. The same woman who fought against the Vietnam War now rails against US-backed regimes in the Middle East. Only this time, she's found herself on the wrong side of history.
REPORTER:
How likely do you view the prospect that you could end up in jail for 40 years?
LYNNE STEWART:
Well, I believe that no-one who is an alive person cannot wake up at three o'clock in the morning like I do and say, "Hey, you know, I could really be in jail on those very lumpy mattresses without much medical care, being able to see the people I love and care about on a very restricted basis," but you know, one lives one's life and, if that's the price that they're going to exact from me, I still would prefer to have lived the principled life that I have lived and defended people with my whole heart and mind, than to pull back and do any less, even if it means that I have to go to jail. But, if you're saying do I look forward to being? No, I'm no martyr. I look forward to being up in the country watching the leaves change and watching the grass grow.