>And you [Nathan Newman] also know that the indictment and criminal
>prosecution of lawyers who defend politically unpopular clients (it
>doesn't matter whether they are despicable or not) is not going to
>deter the nonexistent malfeasance of lawyers who conspire with
>terrorists, because there aren't any.
In addition to the case of <a href="http://www.lynnestewart.org/">Lynne Stewart,</a> there is another recent case of attack on lawyers who defend unpopular clients -- the case of Brandon Mayfield:
"The man was identified as Brandon Mayfield, a convert to Islam who is tangentially linked to one of the chief defendants in the so-called 'Portland Seven' case-a suspected terror cell in Oregon whose six surviving members pled guilty last year of plotting to fight for the Taliban against U.S. soldiers during the war in Afghanistan" (Michael Isikoff, "An American Connection?" <em>Newsweek,</em> <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4918333/site/newsweek/">May 6, 2004</a>).
<blockquote>He's been home for more than a week now, back with his wife and kids and grateful to be putting his life back together. But Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Ore., lawyer who was wrongly jailed for 14 days as a "material witness" in the deadly Madrid bombings, is still mad as hell. Mad at the FBI, for insisting his fingerprint had been found on a plastic bag used by the terrorists-even though Mayfield hadn't traveled abroad in a decade and the Spanish authorities doubted the print match. Madder still at the Justice Department, for using the material-witness law to round him up on flimsy evidence and then bolstering the shaky case against him by painting him as a Muslim extremist. (<strong>The affidavit that helped secure his arrest made much of the fact that he had converted to Islam, is married to an Egyptian-born woman and had once briefly represented a member of the "Portland Seven" in a child-custody case.</strong>) "Even though I was arrested as a material witness, don't be confused," Mayfield told NEWSWEEK in a phone interview Friday. "They were telling the judge and the world that they've got a fingerprint that's a 100 percent match ... What are the implications of that, legally? It's a death sentence." (Andrew Murr, "The Wrong Man," <em>Newsweek,<em> <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5092810/site/newsweek/">June 7, 2004</a>)</blockquote>
I'm sure there will be other attacks on lawyers (or there may already have been others that I have not heard about) in the endless "war on terrorism." -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>