Counter-intelligent: the surveillance and indictment of Lynne Stewart

LS: Well, it puts a crimp, but those of us who are not incarcerated at least have some alternatives. If we want to go to some small restaurant they don't know of, and choose it five minutes ahead of time, we can do that. Whereas, Sattar has no choice, being in jail.

SD: Why do you think so many Americans have so little to say about the increasing presence of the U.S. government in our lives?

LS: I think it goes back to...now, let me get the right person...Erich Fromm, who wrote about the desire on the part of people, even in democracies, to give up their rights to a father-figure who will protect them. They'd abdicate whatever rights they had in order to feel safe, and also righteous, of course. They're not going to give up their rights to a bad person--but as long as they're convinced that person is righteous--and, of course, who acts more righteous than iohn Ashcroft and George Bush?

SD: What about Robert Mueller, now head of the FBI? In the late 1980s, he was the prosecutor when you were the defense attorney for the Ohio Seven, a group of white, working-class activists who were charged with a series of protest bombings.

LS: It is interesting that Mueller was our adversary in the Ohio Seven sedition case. The government tried to assign [defense] lawyers from the panel, which was made up of ex-U.S. attorneys. Ray Levasseur, and Pat [Levasseur], and Jaan Laaman, and Richard Williams said, "No, we want our own attorneys."

They caused such a ruckus in the courtroom, Bill Kunstler got kicked in the ankle by a marshal, and the entire community rose up to say, "You can't put these people on trial with lawyers they don't want." It became such an issue for Mueller that he eventually had to agree not only to give them their lawyers of choice, but also to pay those lawyers from government funds.

So it did not come as a huge surprise to us that, following September 11, two of the federal prisoners who were locked down in the worst way were Ray Levasseur and Richard Williams. We all sort of grinned that it was Robert Mueller--because, of course, he lost the sedition trial.

But the spillover from my case affects some of my federal clients, particularly the ones I'm very close to. Richard Williams and I have done three trials together. We write, we stay in touch; I send him crossword puzzles every week from the New York Times. Out of all the political prisoners in America who were locked down after September 11, he is the only one locked down until February. Shortly after my indictment, I placed a call to him though the legal department and he was locked down again. As far as I know [October 2, 2002], he's still in lockdown.

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, and allow people who are under the heel of a corrupt and terrifying Egypt--where thousands of people are in prison, and torture and executions are, according to Amnesty International and Middle East Watch, commonplace--to do what they need to do to throw off that oppression. To denigrate them as rightwing, I don't think is proper. My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries, such as occurs in Iran, to liberate.