"I was just part of the collateral damage."

[I find this troubling. If you put yourself in Mr. Yousry's shoes, would you say that, in all honesty, you know for sure everything that the attorney who hired you asked you to do is legal or illegal? If in the end an unsympathetic judge sentences him to a maximum 20 years in prison, do you feel at least a little disturbed? The ultimate question is, is this War On Terror (previously known as Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (previously known as War On Terror)) all about?]

Convicted of Aiding Terrorist, Translator Prepares for Prison Cell, Still in Disbelief

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/n...70&en=3d9bb7c68ded25f5&ex=1124078400&emc=eta1

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: August 7, 2005

Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic-language translator, has been practicing for life in a prison cell. He closes himself into small spaces to meditate and combs through his library for nonpolitical books he supposes his keepers will allow him to read.

But he still cannot quite believe that prison is where he is going.

After working for nearly a decade as a translator for Lynne F. Stewart, a New York defense lawyer, Mr. Yousry, 49, was convicted along with her on Feb. 10 in Manhattan federal court of providing material aid to terrorism and conspiring to deceive the government. Now free on bail and awaiting sentencing, which is set for Sept. 30, he faces as much as 20 years behind bars.

Although months have passed since the verdict, Mr. Yousry remains shocked and baffled by it. Throughout the grueling nine-month trial, Mr. Yousry and his lawyers were convinced that he had a strong chance of acquittal.

The charges hinged on Ms. Stewart's provocative legal strategy on behalf of a convicted terrorist client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, in which she defied a prison rule that restricted communications by releasing messages from him to the international press and to his militant followers in Egypt.

Mr. Yousry's lawyers, David Ruhnke and David Stern, showed in court that he took no actions on his own to help the sheik politically and did his translation work based on instructions he received from Ms. Stewart and other lawyers for Mr. Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim cleric who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for conspiring to bomb landmarks in New York City.

Mr. Yousry's case seemed particularly solid, because unlike Ms. Stewart, he never signed documents pledging to abide by prison regulations. Mr. Yousry's lawyers specified that it was up to Ms. Stewart, as the lawyer, to see that her staff complied with the rules.

The prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Yousry knew that Ms. Stewart was at least bending the prison rules when she took messages from the sheik, which had been translated by Mr. Yousry, out of jail. They argued that he knew full well of the dangers of any communication between the virulently anti-American sheik and his Egyptian followers.

Andrew Dember, an assistant United States attorney, assailed the defense arguments as "nonsense!" in his closing summation. "He knew the restrictions, what they consisted of, and he was aware of the fact that he was doing wrong because of those restrictions. He knew full well that he was bound by the restrictions himself."

He added later, "Clearly, obviously, Ms. Stewart and Mr. Yousry know what they're doing is improper, illegal, criminal."

The jury agreed with the government, convicting Mr. Yousry on all three counts he was facing. On Friday, the Justice Department gave its highest award to the four prosecutors who tried the case.

"I still don't know what it is that I did that was even wrong, much less illegal," said Mr. Yousry, alternately indignant and mournful, in an interview in the Manhattan office of one of his lawyers, Mr. Stern. "I followed a process that was designed by the lawyers. They said this is what we're going to do, and I followed that. That's what lawyers do: They tell you what's right and what's wrong legally.

"The fact that I now know that these lawyers were following a strategy that the government didn't like, that makes me a criminal?" he asked.

What Mr. Yousry finds most confounding is that he was convicted of aiding Mr. Abdel Rahman's fundamentalist Islamic cause even though the prosecutors acknowledged that he was nonviolent, did not support the sheik's politics and was not a practicing Muslim.

In the courtroom Mr. Yousry was the quiet defendant, the one who attracted the least public attention. Ms. Stewart, who is also out on bail, has remained in the public eye as debate rages about her legal approach and as she travels and speaks to raise support for her appeals.

A third defendant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a Staten Island postal worker and paralegal aide for the sheik, faced the gravest terror charges and the most startling government evidence: wiretaps of his home telephone that showed him talking extensively with known terrorists in Egypt. He remains in prison awaiting sentencing.

Friends and colleagues describe Mr. Yousry, a mild-spoken man with a bushy mustache and quick smile, as easygoing and not inclined to be militant about much of anything. Born in Cairo, he served for five years in the Egyptian armed forces before resigning and coming three decades ago to the United States, where he became a naturalized American citizen.

The only ties he maintained through the years with politics in Egypt were through his graduate research in Middle Eastern Studies at New York University.

Mr. Yousry's wife of 24 years, Sarah, is a churchgoing evangelical Christian, also a naturalized citizen, originally from the Dominican Republic. In the years before his arrest, friends said, Mr. Yousry's primary concern was to cobble together enough translating and teaching jobs to pay for his daughter's tuition at Tennessee Temple University, a Baptist college in Chattanooga.

Friends said that Mr. Yousry's social circle was as ecumenical as his household. Naomi Robbins, a translator who is Jewish and who came to know Mr. Yousry through her work, said he gave her tips for organizing her son's bar mitzvah in May and then cheerfully attended it.

Zachary Lockman, a professor in the N.Y.U. Middle Eastern studies department, called Mr. Yousry "a very sweet, mild-mannered guy" whose political views "are not those of Omar Abdel Rahman by any stretch of the imagination." Prof. Lockman, who testified on Mr. Yousry's behalf at the trial, said he was the one who originally urged Mr. Yousry to write his doctoral dissertation about Mr. Abdel Rahman, taking advantage of his rare access to the sheik.

The dissertation caused Mr. Yousry trouble in the trial, making him seem to act independently, even though the research was authorized by Ms. Stewart. The jury watched government videotapes of prison meetings with Ms. Stewart and the sheik in which Mr. Yousry could be seen debating with Mr. Abdel Rahman in Arabic about the sheik's political views, apart from his translations for Ms. Stewart.

While many of Mr. Yousry's professional colleagues have come to his defense, others had mixed reactions.

Prof. Lockman and other professors in Middle Eastern studies at N.Y.U. rallied to his support. Prof. Lockman called the terror conviction "ludicrous" in a letter he wrote to the department faculty the day of the verdict. Mr. Yousry remains a graduate student and will be allowed to finish his dissertation whenever he is able, Prof. Lockman said.

Professor Charles Coleman of the cultural diversity program at York College of the City University of New York, where Mr. Yousry was an adjunct lecturer, testified on his behalf at the trial. His academic colleagues were alarmed that prosecutors had used excerpts from early drafts of Mr. Yousry's unfinished dissertation, seized by federal agents from his computer, and books on militant Islam found in his library to accuse him in court of radical Islamic sympathies.

The CUNY administration, however, fired Mr. Yousry after he was indicted, citing the gravity of the charges. The American Association of University Professors sharply criticized CUNY in a report contending a lack of due process in the dismissal. At its annual meeting in June, the association formally expressed "grave concern" about CUNY's actions but stopped short of censure.

Legal translators in New York were taken aback by Mr. Yousry's conviction, fearing it left them vulnerable to similar prosecution. But the American Translators Association and the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators took a more skeptical view.

In a joint statement in March, the two groups said Mr. Yousry had failed to follow "many standard recognized protocols," in particular finding that he had a conflict of interest by pursuing his doctoral research while he was translating for the sheik.

Now unemployable, Mr. Yousry has sadly packed up his belongings from the modest brick town house where he lived for years in Elmhurst, Queens, to move to Bridgeport, Connecticut, so his wife can be close to their daughter, Leslie.

Mr. Yousry said he did not blame Ms. Stewart for his troubles. He concludes that his fate is the result of the change in New York after Sept. 11. After the attacks, he says, New York jurors "would rather believe the government" in terrorism cases. "And I was just part of the collateral damage."

 

[A related article.]

Prosecutors Challenge Credibility of Translator

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/nyregion/30stewart.html

by Julia Preston
New York Times
November 30, 2004

In four days of cross-examination, a federal prosecutor chipped away at the credibility of an Arabic translator on trial in a terrorist conspiracy case along with Lynne F. Stewart, a defense lawyer. But the prosecutor did not link the translator, Mohamed Yousry, directly to any terrorist act or even to any threat of violence.

With her questions, the prosecutor, Robin L. Baker, succeeded in revealing inconsistencies in Mr. Yousry's claims about his academic studies and accomplishments on various résumés he wrote in the mid-1990's. She exposed inconsistencies between his testimony at the trial, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and views he expressed in drafts of a doctoral thesis about Islamic militants.

Yesterday, Ms. Baker also showed that Mr. Yousry had been less than forthcoming in an interview with two F.B.I. agents who showed up at his home in Elmhurst, Queens, two days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ms. Baker presented the agents' report on that visit as evidence in the trial.

But she offered no evidence that Mr. Yousry had played a role in any violent action by the Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists whose one-time terror campaign against their government is at the center of the case. She made few arguments to assail Mr. Yousry's main line of defense: that he was following instructions from Ms. Stewart and other lawyers in the case throughout his dealings with Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a client of Ms. Stewart's.

The sheik is serving a life sentence in federal prison for inspiring a thwarted 1993 plot to bomb tunnels and buildings in New York. Ms. Stewart, who represented him at his 1995 trial, is accused of aiding terrorism by helping the sheik to convey a call for war from his prison cell to his followers in the Islamic Group, a militant organization in Egypt. Mr. Yousry is charged with conspiring with Ms. Stewart in what prosecutors have charged was a "jailbreak" of the sheik's message of violence.

Under questioning by Ms. Baker, Mr. Yousry admitted that he had not told the two F.B.I. agents everything that he had told the sheik, in telephone calls and prison meetings, about the bombing in October 2000 of the Cole, an American warship that was attacked in a port in Yemen. Secret government recordings of those encounters have revealed that Mr. Yousry discussed the bombing with the sheik, telling him that a paralegal in the case had received a phone call from someone in the Middle East claiming that the bombing had been carried out in the sheik's name. The paralegal, a Staten Island postal worker, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, is also a defendant in the trial.

Questioned later by one of his defense lawyers, David A. Ruhnke, Mr. Yousry said he "did not trust" the agents when they first appeared at his home. "I was very concerned about the climate in the country" in the days after 9/11, he said. "I'm an Arab-American who works for lawyers who work with a major Islamic figure" who had been linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he said.

Mr. Yousry testified that he called the agents back two days later to tell them about the phone call Mr. Sattar had received and report that he had mentioned it to the sheik. After that, Mr. Yousry had regular conversations with the F.B.I., Mr. Ruhnke said, that ended in February 2002, just a few weeks before his arrest.

The last witness in Mr. Yousry's defense was his daughter Leslie Yousry Davis, who testified that her father was not religious and had never shown any interest in Muslim fundamentalism. As she testified, Mr. Yousry, who has maintained an even manner on the stand, raised both palms to his eyes to stop his tears.

 

Are you really that confident about U.S. legal system, in particular, the jury system? What's your opinion on the outcomes of O.J. and Jackson trials? What about the original trial in the 1960's that led to the acquittal of Edgar Ray Killen?

 

Don't put your words in my mouth. I did not claim the guy was innocent or guilty. All I did was raise some questions, particularly the circumstances of the trial which might easily convince a New York jury to be safe rather than right.