-I don't like this either (from the same interview):
>SD: It's a little frightening that left-wing political prisoners are
>conflated in the government's eyes with right-wing Moslem
>fundamentalists.
>
>LS: I don't think it's quite fair to say right-wing, because they
>are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as
>persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people,
>should fasten on the need for self-determination,
-But whether we like her or agree with her isn't the point. The point
-is that the government is trying to make it very hard for any lawyer
-to take up the defense of people it accuses of "terrorism." And it
-makes sense that they'd pick on someone that it's easy to dislike.
But here's the big problem with making this a story about punishing "lawyers" for defending clients. Lots of lawyers defend clients whose politics they disagree with on the principle that everyone deserves a defense.
But when a lawyer expresses support for the exact criminal activity they are defending, folks rightly question whether the lawyer doesn't merge into being a co-conspirator. On the fringe right, David Hale among the neo-Nazis was denied a law license on that basis.
In some cases, lawyers will defend the criminal activity under "necessity defense" arguments, that civil disobediance or even some more militant action (such as self-defense against police brutality) was necessary to prevent a worse harm, but that's based on convincing people that the criminal activity is minor compared to what was being protested or defended against.
The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center has zero chance of eliciting such a response, and I think it's dangerous for the Left to fit this case into the general paradigm of righteous political lawyering.
The point here is that the best lawyers for those accused of being terrorists are people who don't sympathize with their politics.
Nathan Newman