RUSH: Let’s start off here with the wrist-slap that Lynne Stewart got yesterday from a Clinton appointed federal judge. It’s not just the judge in this case, though, who needs to be examined. Lynne Stewart represented the blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman. She violated canons of legal ethics. As part of his sentence, he is not allowed to communicate with any of his terrorist buddies. She, his lawyer, did it for him. She could have received up to 30 years in jail, but she gets 28 months. She’s going to appeal that. She’ll remain out, I think, on appeal, and depending on which judge and court she gets on the appeal, she could have the whole thing stricken.
It was a very interesting case presented by her defense. (paraphrased) “Hey, she’s helped the poor! I mean, you gotta examine this woman’s life in toto. She helped the poor, and she’s had breast cancer, and she’s overweight, and that means that she’s more prone to producing more estrogen. That means the breast cancer could come back, and it’s harder to detect breast cancer in overweight women,” and the judge said, (paraphrased) “Yeah, you know what, I kind of like those arguments,” and decided on 28 months. The lesson there is that if you do good works earlier in your life and end up before a Clinton appointed federal judge and you are a Democrat, the good works early in your life will mitigate crimes that you commit later on in life.
Aside from looking at the judge, and we’ve got the judge’s pedigree here someplace. He’s straight out of the Clinton central casting. His name is John George Koeltl. He was nominated by Clinton in April 26th of 1994, confirmed by the Senate in August of 1994. It’s amazing how fast that Clinton appointees were confirmed to the federal bench back in 1995. Republicans had not taken over the House but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The Senate is where these things were decided. He received his commission on August 10th of 1994, went to Georgetown University for his AB, and got his JD in law at Harvard. He was a law clerk for Justice Potter Stewart, the Supreme Court assistant special prosecutor, Watergate special prosecution force, 1973 and 1974.
He was in private practice in New York from ’75 to ’94. However, the judge is only part of the equation here, ladies and gentlemen. The thing that stood out for me is that what we have in this sentence of 28 months of helping a terrorist communicate to his buddies, you could assume that these communications between Omar Abdel Rahman, facilitated by his attorney Lynne Stewart to his buddies, led to the deaths of more people. In full light, what we have here is a classic illustration of the Clinton administration record on terror, and it is well worth dwelling on and delving into. If the Clintons ever win the White House again, and Hillary wins in ’08, there’s a woman involved in this case that might end up being a candidate for attorney general, or nominated for a judgeship herself.
Her name is Jo Ann Harris. Jo Ann Harris was one of the people who came to the court yesterday to argue in defense of Lynne Stewart and on behalf of a reduced sentence for her. The New York Times did not opt to quote from a letter submitted to the sentencing judge on Stewart’s behalf and Jo Ann Harris. Jo Ann Harris was the Clinton justice department’s criminal division chief at the time the blind sheik was indicted. The indictment, by the way, came in 1993, not as the Times reported in 1994, and the Times also said that Jo Ann Harris authorized the indictment. She didn’t. The indictment was actually authorized by the Attorney General Janet El Re?o and the Manhattan US Attorney General Mary Jo White.
My source for this is Andy McCarthy, National Review Online, who led the prosecution of the blind sheik. Now, according to the article, “Jo Ann Harris told the judge that the terrorism counts against Ms. Stewart were ‘unwarranted overkill.’ Harris reportedly elaborated that Stewart ?didn?t have a clue that the stick she was poking in the government?s eye was going to have consequences beyond her imagination.” I’m reading here from a piece written by Andy McCarthy. “Counterterrorism, of course, remains the central national security issue as we head into the 2006 elections, with 2008 choices hard upon us after that. Thus, it is very much worth noting the stark contrasts here. The Bush Justice Department strongly believed that Stewart?s behavior warranted the strongest condemnation. A jury of twelve New Yorkers – not exactly the Red State heartland – unanimously agreed after hearing all the evidence. Still, one of the highest Clinton Justice Department officials evidently thinks the whole thing was ‘overkill.’ The contrast is starker still. Recall that President Bush, through Attorney General John Ashcroft, adopted a ‘spit on the street’ approach to terrorism – authorizing suspects to be locked up on any available, legally valid charge, in order to disable them and convey to terrorist groups that we were pursuing them aggressively. Compare President Clinton, who has spent a lot of time lately defending his national security record.
“In 1999, he pardoned 16 members of the FALN terrorist organization which, as Investors Business Daily editorialized last month, ‘carried out more than 150 bombings in the U.S., including the lunchtime bombing of Fraunces Tavern in New York on Jan. 24, 1975, that killed four.’ (Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris has indicated that this was done to help then-First Lady Hillary Clinton win the votes of Puerto Ricans in the anticipated New York Senate race.) On January 20, 2001, moreover, Clinton’s very last acts in power included pardons for two convicted Weather Underground terrorists, Susan Rosenberg and Laura Sue Whitehorn. Lynne Stewart is a figure who straddles the September 10 and September 11 worlds – the divergent Clinton and Bush counterterrorism models. As the lead-up to her sentencing shows, it matters a great deal which model we choose.”
So, yeah, you can focus on the judge, and that’s all well and good and it’s expected of a Clinton-appointed federal judge who was on the Watergate committee. It’s a bunch of libs. There’s no question about it. It’s why the argument over reorienting the entire judiciary, Supreme Court on down, has been such a huge argument this year. But don’t forget the name of the former A. G., Jo Ann Harris, who argued on behalf of the most lenient sentence possible, because if the Clintons ever get back in power, somebody like Jo Ann Harris would constantly be an attorney general candidate or nominated for a judgeship. And in this, in this ruling yesterday, this sentencing yesterday, as McCarthy writes, it is patently obvious the Democrat liberal view of terrorism and how to deal with it versus the George W. Bush model, and it’s on full display and is an indication of how that war on terror will be fought in the future, depending on who’s running the show.
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RUSH: So any of you out there looking for a reason to hope that the Republicans lose control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or whatever, just take a look at this sentencing decision for Lynne Stewart, who has represented the dregs of society. That actually worked in her favor. She has represented all kinds of domestic terrorists, what, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, that sort of thing, and she’s done so much work on behalf of the poor, and that shows a big heart and good intentions. You do that, and you’re buying yourself out of serious trouble later on. It’s almost crime insurance, and that’s essentially what the judge in the case determined. So if you’re of a mind that the war on terror is trumped up, doesn’t really exist and so forth, and you want to go back to fighting it in a lax way– In fact, if you want to go back and pretend we’re at September 10th, then go ahead and vote the Democrats into power. That is precisely what happens. Speaking of all of this, we got it go to the audio sound bites. First I want to take you back to July 27th, this year, me, on this program, talking about winning in Iraq.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Of course there’s some unsettledness out there. There always is. We are at war. We are at war. And we’re going to be at war for a while, no matter who’s in the White House. You gotta factor that in who you’re going to vote for because if we’re going to be at war, we want to win the war.
RUSH: Right. We want to win the war. So I play that for you because last night, President Bush sat down for the first of the three part of Bill O’Reilly and the Fox News Channel and the question from O’Reilly, “60% of Americans are now against the Iraq war. Why?”
THE PRESIDENT: Because they want us to win. They’re wondering whether or not we have the plans in place to win. They want to know whether or not we have the flexibility on the ground to constantly meet the enemy, and I can understand why there’s frustration, because the enemy knows that killing innocent people will create a sense of frustration, and they know America. They know that we’re a conscious driven people that value life, and the more people they destroy, the more innocent lives that are destroyed, it is more likely it is we’ll retreat, in their way of thinking.
RUSH: And that’s the bottom line; people want to win, that’s the source of the frustration, people are being led to believe that we are not only not winning, but that we can’t. In fact, let’s jump forward to audio sound bite number six. James Baker, who has been misquoted, by the way, in media outlets, never said, has not said that he doesn’t think we can win in Iraq. It’s been reported in certain places that he’s heading up a commission, the president asked him to head up the commission, and it’s been reported that he’s out there saying we can’t win, we gotta come up with something else because victory here is not possible. It caused a lot of people to raise a lot of hell when he said this. It turns out that he hasn’t said this, that this was some sort of a leak to ears and microphones that were receptive to believing such a thing. He was on Matthews’ show last night. Question: “What do you make of the National Intelligence Estimate that we’re creating more terrorists over there than we are killing?”
BAKER: The way I look at it, Chris, is even if Iraq was not the front line in the war on terror when we went in there, it damn sure is today, and the terrorists are there, and one of the difficult problems we have, people talk about getting out and all that. As I told you earlier, we have not closed on any recommendation whatsoever. But one of the problems in just picking up and leaving is you leave a failed state for the global terrorists to reproduce in, just like they did in Afghanistan with the Taliban.
RUSH: That is an excellent point. I hearken back to my trip to Afghanistan. My gosh, that’s a year and a half ago. It was a year and a half ago. It was a year ago February, and the head of USAID Andrew Natsios was on the trip, and we went to dinner one night at the home of an American who lived there and was working to help the effort to rebuild the country and bring back the Afghanistan economy and culture, and he got a brutal Q&A from some of the people there, and he said, “Look, the reason we must stay and the reason we must prevail is because terrorists thrive in places where there are no states, no governments, a stateless place,” which is what Afghanistan was after their civil war, and the Taliban was able to move in. That is why Somalia is so important now.
Somalia is now stateless. Al-Qaeda intended to take it over. That’s why Musharraf in Pakistan is consistently under the gun just to stay alive. He is probably the most targeted world leader out there right now from people in his own country, and so Baker is saying here to just cut-and-run and get out of there leaves that place as a cesspool breeding ground for those people to take over and run operations out of that part of the world. Bush is insistent that we have no intent to leave. However, takes us back to the Lynne Stewart decision. Depending on who ends up running this show, either in ’06 or ’08, the approaches and the theories, the strategies in dealing with militant Al-Qaeda terrorists, militant Islamist terrorists, is on full display here, and it is clear that the American left and the Democratic Party doesn’t take the threat seriously at all, is not prepared to deal with it as something other than a nuisance that needs to be dealt with on an episode-by-episode basis. Here’s Peter in Staten Island. We go to the phones early today. A lot of people want to weigh in on this Lynne Stewart business, and you’re first. Welcome.
CALLER: Yes, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Fine, sir.
CALLER: It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: You’re a great American, and this is from a long-haired Republican conservative.
RUSH: Well, it’s great to have you on the program, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Yes. I’ve been a long listener. This Lynne Stewart thing is like a slap in the face to all Americans. This was one of the most treasonous acts you can imagine. I think she’s a traitor. You know, she’s making a real example out of this woman instead of afterwards she’s talking about having a party and everything or at least life imprisonment with no parole.
RUSH: Well, she walked into the courtroom acting as though she were barely alive. She walked in looking haggard, looking ragged, looking like she was in ill health, full of stress, wanted to be full of remorse, wanted the court to see her as a haggard old woman who has been worn down to the bare edges over all this, and you’re right, once the sentence came down, oh, ho, let’s throw a party, why, I could do this time standing on my head, she said.
CALLER: Well, like I said, Ethyl Rosenberg was a good mother and everything, left behind two sons. We executed her many years ago and stuff for a treasonous act like that, and, like I said, you know, this woman here with her ways, her liberal ways and everything just disgusts me to no end.
RUSH: Well, I can understand it. You’re probably in the minority in New York, though it maybe close on this one. You know, liberals in New York still don’t get it. I mean, they don’t like seeing the World Trade Center video, and everybody had a conniption when Cory Lidle’s accident happened, and everybody’s first thought was, “Oh, no! Is this a terrorist attack?” When it comes to doing something about it, though, just don’t get much out of these people. Now, some of you may not even remember Lynne Stewart, you may not even know who she is other than what you’ve seen in the news. She represented Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik.
His plot was to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and he was convicted of having this plan. “His attorney, Lynne Stewart, was arrested six months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and accused of violating strict prison rules by helping Abdel Rahman spread the word to kill those who didn’t buy into his extreme interpretation of Islamic law. She’s admitting to knowingly violating prison rules but she denies condoning violence and claims that she was just trying to do her job as a lawyer by looking after Abdel Rahman’s interests. Now, the US attorney in the case, the assistant US attorney, Andrew Dember, refuted her defense that she was wrongly targeted by the feds in the wake of 9/11.
“He said, ‘The case has nothing to do with 9/11, Your Honor. She knew well what she was doing was a criminal act, and he didn’t want to be caught.’ When it came to Stewart the judge said prison time was necessary as punishment but praised the longtime civil rights lawyer for her dedication of her clients over the past three decades and noted that no one was hurt as a result of the crimes in the case.” No one was hurt? Oh, okay, well, we can’t even know that for sure. We can’t. We don’t know what the messages that she translated and transmitted from the sheik Rahman to his followers, wherever, we can’t know what happened as a result of those messages, but it’s clear leniency. It’s a lib deciding the fate of a lib, and the case really is irrelevant. The fact that it was about terrorism is not much. I’ll tell you, folks, this is why it’s dangerous, this war on terror fought in court, because this is how a lot of these cases are going to end up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: About Lynne Stewart, it should be pointed out, ladies and gentlemen, that it was George Soros “who poured millions of dollars into the effort to defeat the president, who made a substantial donation to do the defense fund for the radical lawyer Lynne Stewart. According to records filed with the IRS, Soros’ foundation, the Open Society Institute gave 20 grand in September of 2002 to the Lynne Stewart defense committee.” So the libs are thick in all of this, and there’s no other way to describe this other than an outrage, especially when you compare it to some of the other things that are going on in the news today. There’s something like six investigations, six FBI raids and investigations involving Curt Weldon? This is a two-and-a-half-year-old investigation. He finds out about it three and a half weeks out of the election. This is the Bush justice department doing this. We’re going out of our way to destroy anybody we can over the Mark Foley episode. There’s just a lot of head scratching stuff going on out there today, folks, that makes no sense — and in the meantime this sentence that Lynne Stewart gets is an insult, and you can tell by her reaction to it that it was.
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