I want to just say how honored I am really, and pleased and moved to be here with Lynne Stewart.

You hear this very, very depressing stuff, basically in a lawless country right now, overseas and abroad, one in which because of fear, the civilization that we had is just being stripped away back to a barbarism and you get very, very depressed and sad about it. I read last week Lynne Stewart was indicted and I just couldn't believe it. Then the next day I hear Lynne on Democracy Now and I said where would I have been? I would have been in some hole trying to get out of here. She is on the front line fighting and fighting and fighting and making this the struggle, and I'm sure worried about her, but talking about it as if it's the struggle that's really going on in this country now about John Ashcroft and civil liberties and the struggle for all of us.

And I just think that kind of courage and that kind of militancy, despite what we've heard, is something we have to all be very proud of and take a really good example from. Thank you Lynne. Really.

I want to go back to Lynne for one second because Lenny talked about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and what had happened to the warrant requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

Lynne is, I don't like to use the word poster child because she's an adult, but FISA was the wiretapping act that they used to wiretap her for two or three years when she was visiting in prison. And now of course they're using that act to try and justify Ashcroft's next step which is to wiretap even without going to the secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Court. So they're saying, Ashcroft is saying, "You see, an attorney was doing this, and therefore I don't even want to go to the secret court, I want to just be able to wiretap attorneys and clients on my own." If you have to look at one reason why I think they indicted Lynne along these lines-it was to try to justify Ashcroft's new regulation basically, which says that he can wiretap attorneys and their clients whenever he chooses.

Now why shouldn't he have to go to a court? Not the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court, but a regular Fourth Amendment court? It's completely unclear to me. Now you have Ashcroft's signature saying I can wiretap when I want. So that's really Lynne's case and how it's being used for that.

But in the end the courts aren't going to give you what you need here. You're obviously going to have to organize among people as well, but as long as what's going on outside of the United States is going on, as long as the United States is continuing to do what it's doing overseas, whether in Palestine and Israel or in the rest of the Middle East or in the rest of the world, there are going to be conditions in the world in which the United States is going to be a target and in which U.S. people are going to be a target. How are you going to convince people in the United States and the courts to somehow lift the draconian measures that are against people right now as long as they're feeling and living in terror and in fear, in fear of terror. And I think he's right. So I think that there's a clear link between talking about civil liberties here and how we can protect them here, and what the United States is doing overseas. There's an old expression that I use occasionally, it's he who plunders others always lives in terror. I think that's the case and as long as we are plundering others we will live in terror and we will continue to have governments that respond to that in a very, very draconian way.

The original attacks, until the indictment of Lynne, have all been almost entirely against non-citizens, whether it's the detentions here, whether it's the detentions in Guantanamo, whether it's the way the USA PATRIOT Act is phrased. That's done for a number of reasons. It's done, one, it's easier to get U.S. people to go along with them because they'll say it's the other, it's not me, it's not me as a citizen, it's the other and therefore I'll get through these laws.

[T]he U.S. [is] moving toward a police state-some people would say arriving there. I see a police state as meaning that we have lost what we call the checks and balances on government that somehow reign in unfettered executive discretion to do things. And in that sense I think we are moving strongly in that direction. The detainees now in prison are in there without any charges and are being held basically in arbitrary and indefinite detention. The detainees in Guantanamo are being held arbitrarily and under indefinite detention, no court review, basically nothing you can do about it.

But I will say I agree with Clark that at this point, in this particular political moment in the United States, you have to start by defending the first victims of what's going on in this country right now. Those people in Guantanamo, the people here in the detention facilities all around this city and in the adjacent states, those people are the first victims and they must, must be defended. There's a lot of fight left in us, as you can see by having our wonderful friend Lynne here, so let's go on and hear from Lynne and thank you very much.

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