He Defended Accused Terrorists for 35 Years. Now He’s Back
After imprisonment on tax charges, Stanley Cohen, a freewheeling radical lawyer, has Hamas on the phone and is on the job again.
JEFFERSONVILLE, N.Y. — On the day his law license was reinstated this past summer, Stanley L. Cohen got a call from an old friend and client, Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior political leader of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.
“He said, ‘You’re up to trouble again already?’” recalled Mr. Cohen, 67.
In certain circles in the Middle East, he said, “Word had gotten around very quickly that I was back.”
That Mr. Cohen is back — after a prison sentence on federal tax charges that resulted in the suspension of his law license — is certain to infuriate many people.
He has spent much of his 35-year law career raising legal hell, defending controversial clients with an audacity that has antagonized his enemies, including United States intelligence figures and many Jewish groups.
He calls his clients “the despaired, the despised and the disenfranchised.” Others call them terrorists and irredeemable criminals.
They include members of Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, all of which the United States considers terrorist groups, as well as Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who was convicted in 2014 of conspiring to kill Americans.
JEFFERSONVILLE, N.Y. — On the day his law license was reinstated this past summer, Stanley L. Cohen got a call from an old friend and client, Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior political leader of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.
“He said, ‘You’re up to trouble again already?’” recalled Mr. Cohen, 67.
In certain circles in the Middle East, he said, “Word had gotten around very quickly that I was back.”
That Mr. Cohen is back — after a prison sentence on federal tax charges that resulted in the suspension of his law license — is certain to infuriate many people.
He has spent much of his 35-year law career raising legal hell, defending controversial clients with an audacity that has antagonized his enemies, including United States intelligence figures and many Jewish groups.
He calls his clients “the despaired, the despised and the disenfranchised.” Others call them terrorists and irredeemable criminals.
They include members of Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, all of which the United States considers terrorist groups, as well as Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who was convicted in 2014 of conspiring to kill Americans.
He helped represent Kathy Boudin, the member of the Weather Underground involved in a 1981 Brink’s robbery outside New York City that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Another client, Larry Davis, shot six police officers in a shootout in 1986 in the Bronx.
The lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz — no stranger to controversy himself, having represented O.J. Simpson and Claus von Bülow, among others — said of Mr. Cohen: “I think he’s a horrible human being with horrible values, but I’ve defended worse.”
Mr. Cohen has also handled cases involving a variety of causes, including Native American rights, East Village squatters and Occupy Wall Street protesters.
The criticism and the labels — terrorist supporter, traitor to his country, Jewish anti-Semite — all “come with the turf,” said Mr. Cohen, who relishes the spotlight his provocative style attracts.
In 2015, he suddenly dropped out of public view when he entered a federal prison in Pennsylvania after pleading guilty to having failed to file proper tax returns or maintain necessary financial records for his law practice.
True to form, Mr. Cohen denounced the case as politically motivated and retribution for his history of defending radicals and terrorists.
He served nearly 11 months of an 18-month sentence, in conditions he likened to a “Boy Scouts barracks.” Inside, he started a blog called “Caged But Undaunted” and ran the law library. He taught inmates civil and human rights law and held classes on Middle Eastern issues, he said.
His first call from prison after his release, he said, was also from Mr. Abu Marzook, who told him, “O.K. Vacation’s over.”
Before he entered prison, financial pressures led Mr. Cohen to give up a funky loft on the Lower East Side where he had kept a bohemian home office. Now, with his law license reinstated after its suspension because of his conviction, he is looking for a new base in New York City.
For years, the legal fees from defendants in murder, drug, robbery and other criminal cases helped sustain his pro bono work for terrorist and political activist cases, he said. But that will have to change.
“I have to make a living now,” he said. “The days of 500 street arrests or 1,000 pro bono cases from Tompkins Square, I can’t do that anymore.”
Mr. Cohen, with his distinctive beard and ponytail, was dressed in a rugged tan outfit and leather boots. His three-legged chocolate lab, Emma, rested at his feet in the chalet-style home in the Catskills that now serves as his office, a two-hour drive northwest of New York City.
“This is all I have, after 35 years of practicing law, a house in the mountains,” he said.
Mr. Cohen said he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household but in his teens became interested in social justice issues and turned from religion toward the political activism that has fueled his law career.
He attended law school at Pace University in Westchester County and then worked in the 1980s as a Legal Aid lawyer in the Bronx. As a lawyer in private practice in the 1990s, he took on Albanian and Bosnian clients and started to become known among Muslim civil rights groups. This led to his defense of Mr. Abu Marzook against efforts to extradite him to Israel in 1995 on suspicion of terror. Mr. Abu Marzook was able to avoid the charges and was flown instead to Jordan.
For now, Mr. Cohen works on an aging laptop surrounded by paintings by his longtime companion, Joni Sarah White, an artist and a member of the Mohawk Nation.
The walls are also covered with newspaper articles and photos chronicling his career, showing him with other radical lawyers like William Kunstler and Lynne F. Stewart, or with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader regarded by many Palestinians as a hero and by many Israelis as a terrorist.
In one photo, he is smiling broadly and sitting between two Hamas leaders who were later assassinated in rocket attacks by the Israeli military. The same image is the profile photo on his Twitter feed.
Mr. Cohen has long been a fierce supporter of Hamas, touting his friendships with its leaders and supporting their right to armed resistance against Israel.
“Occupied people, under international law, have a right to armed struggle, period,” he said.
But his views on Hamas, among other things, have led to fierce criticism from Jewish groups, and he said one militant group labeled him “the world’s No. 1 self-hating Jew.”
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israeli lawyer who represents victims of terrorist violence, criticized Mr. Cohen for taking a tradition of representing marginalized clients “to a very extreme and dangerous place,” and compared his representation of some terror groups to representing Nazi war criminals.
“Islamic terrorists are not the underdog or downtrodden deserving a zealous defense,” she said. “They are aggressive perpetrators who maliciously try to murder innocent Jews.”
Mr. Cohen countered that he has “always opposed attacks on civilians by anyone for any reason.”
“But to draw any comparisons of that suffered by Palestinians with the rare injury to Israelis, is simply disingenuous or dishonest,” he said.
Mr. Cohen has incensed critics by saying that, to take a case, he must feel a kinship with his clients or their cause. Mr. Cohen made headlines after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by saying publicly that he would not rule out representing Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Dershowitz said he has represented clients he does not necessarily like or agree with, but whom he believes deserve a rigorous defense. Mr. Cohen, he said, goes a step too far.
“I pick my clients by their need for representation,” he said. “If you represent people because you like them, then you can be judged by the clients you keep.”
As for his tax conviction, which included failing to file tax returns for six years, Mr. Cohen said he pleaded guilty only after growing tired of fighting the charges, accumulating legal fees and having relatives, friends and clients “harassed” by the authorities.
“I’m a target till the day I die, because of what I say, who I represent and what I write,” Mr. Cohen said.
But prosecutors have dismissed his claim of selective prosecution. In pleading guilty, Mr. Cohen did not “downplay his guilt, or his conduct,” said Grant C. Jaquith, the United States attorney for the Northern District of New York, the office that won a conviction against Mr. Cohen.
“In this case, as in all cases, our decision to bring charges was based on careful consideration of long-established principles of federal prosecution and our commitment to equal justice under the law,” Mr. Jaquith said.
In any case, Mr. Cohen said he recently hired a scrupulous accountant and still plans on handling pro bono political work in the Middle East, albeit on a more limited basis.
“I just spent 80 hours researching a Palestinian case,” he said. “I still take them — that ain’t going to change.”
Corey Kilgannon is a Metro reporter covering news and human interest stories. His writes the Character Study column in the Sunday Metropolitan section. He was also part of the team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. @coreykilgannon • Facebook
Stanley Cohen: US government will target me until the day I die
Controversial US lawyer Stanley Cohen has found himself in the international headlines on a number of occasions this year. He defended Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sheikh Suleiman Abu Ghaith; he defended himself in another courtroom on tax charges, ultimately pleading guilty and accepting a prison sentence; and he led the doomed efforts to secure the release of Abdul Rahman Kassig from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Cohen, who is expected to start an 18-month prison sentence next month, spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat about his judicial career in general, and his defense of Islamists and Muslims in particular. He also discussed the efforts to secure Kassig’s release, which ended with the aid worker’s execution earlier this month.
Cohen had brought together a group of non-ISIS jihadist clerics to negotiate with the ISIS leadership, not just to secure Kassig’s release, but also to open a dialogue over the group’s policy of capturing and executing journalists, aid workers and civilians with the ultimate aim of ending this. The talks ultimately broke down after Jordan’s intelligence services arrested a prominent jihadist figure, Abu Mohamed Al-Maqdisi, who was leading the talks with the ISIS leadership, contravening—according to Cohen—a negotiations protocol that had been agreed by both the FBI and Amman.
Read the full story:
http://www.aawsat.net/2014/12/article5533984
Stanley Cohen led talks with Isis leaders to secure release of Abdul-Rahman (Peter) Kassig
Talks to save Peter Abdul-Rahman Kassig went on for weeks, backed by U.S. The American aid worker was killed by his Isis captors on 16 November. Here, for the first time, is the story of an extraordinary effort to secure his release, which involved a radical New York lawyer, the US government, and the world’s most revered jihadi scholar.
Read the full story from the GUARDIAN, December 18, 2014
Revealed: the secret talks to save Isis hostage Peter Kassig. Video by Laurence Topham, Phoebe Greenwood, Alex Purcell, Shiv Malik and Mustafa Khalili
BDS is a war Israel can't win
Israeli think-tank fellow Yossi Klein Halevi, writing recently in the Los Angeles Times would have American readers believe that the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement is "immoral" and threatens the peace of "the region's only intact society", while simultaneously boasting it can't touch Israel's health and global economic integration.
Yet his reasoning from "morals" rings hollow, and amounts to little more than the shilling of the professional apologist industry deployed on Israel's behalf throughout the Western media, in the never-ending defence of the oppressive status quo in Palestine.
Halevi excoriates BDS, disingenuously, for making the Jewish state "the world's most pressing problem" today, while extolling Israel's freedoms and national righteousness. Of course, his complaint manages to engage in both self-pitying and craven boosterism at the same time - a kind of perverse humble-brag.
People & Power: Boycott Israel
No, Mr Halevi, Israel is not the world's greatest problem - rather, Israel is Palestine's great, existential, enduring problem for a people who have lived their whole lives under the constant, brutal and de-humanising occupation of this enlightened state.
Palestine's ordeal
Most of the world has been content to overlook Palestine's ordeal - fatigued by 68 years of this conflict, and understandably inured to the epic suffering of its people, who understand that their tragic condition can only hold its attention briefly.
The endless failed international "peace" efforts, the vicissitudes of negotiations, and periodic spasms of violence have become like the weather - always there.
This is precisely why the BDS movement has come to figure so prominently in Palestinian hopes - it side-steps the moribund "peace process" and banks on people-power as leverage against state and institutional power, applied against a responsive economy, such as Israel's.
Read the full story at Aljazeera.com
How a Radical Lawyer Set for Prison Joined Longtime U.S. Gov’t Foe in Failed Bid to Free a Hostage
Democracy Now interviews Stanley Cohen, a lawyer directly involved in secret talks to win the freedom of U.S. aid worker Peter Kassig, who argues that the U.S. government missed a chance to prevent Kassig’s beheading last month by the Islamic State in Syria. Cohen is a controversial attorney whose past clients include Hamas, Hezbollah and the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden. He also responds to the charges against him that led to an 18-month prison term over tax offenses, and he says was politically motivated based on his years of taking on controversial clients.
How Stanley Cohen Went From Orthodox to Defending bin Laden's Son-In-Law
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But Even Firebrand Lawyer Is Uncomfortable With This Client
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Stanley Cohen: Zurich, 15 May 2014. [Address to the "Nakba 2014" Conference]
Is the Two-State Solution now the zombie of Western political-thought--an idea long dead, yet still walking the landscape, with bits of it rotting and falling off, while reason and history shoot holes in it, but it keeps staggering on, infecting the political discourse? Who can sincerely believe in it anymore? Least of all, Israel and the Zionists, since the idea's basic post-Madrid concept has been so thoroughly abused and violated, perforated with holes so big you can plant a settlement in them. The idea has been rendered no longer materially feasible, to put it politely--well and truly screwed to pieces, not so politely-- while any lingering confidence by the Palestinians in the good-faith intentions of Israel and the United States has been replaced with mistrust and despair, and the cold realization that US policy does not have any interest in a just or fair outcome for the Palestinians. It never really has had any interest in helping the Palestinians. What killed the Two State Solution, we might ask? The settlements killed the Two-State Solution--but NOT as an accidental by-product of Israeli "security" issues, as if the settlements were a casual, reversible mistake. But rather they killed the Two-State Solution as part of a calculated agenda from the very start of the Zionist project to capture, de-populate and settle Jews on ALL the land of Palestine. Zionism's early generation of founders always envisioned the large-scale removal of the Arab population, and the settlement of their own descendants in land belonging to others--you can read it in their diaries and letters, in their unguarded moments when they are talking among themselves. Herschel, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Meir--they all spoke privately of what they understood: that all of Palestine would be theirs, and that it would be a state for the Jews alone. This has not changed. The Israeli political establishment is today far more racist and authoritarian than the original Zionists ever dreamed of being. We see today how the orthodox right wing has taken over the official agenda entirely, with predictable results: more walls, fences, checkpoints, prisons, military forces, deadly raids by helicopters and fighter planes, and dehumanization for the occupied people. When the Israeli Occupation Forces start getting their first shipment of drones from the US arsenal, it will only get worse. The settlements--whose population has roughly quadrupled since Madrid--were ALWAYS part of the plan historically, even though the agenda of settlement has always been directly at odds with international law, and counter to the creation of a Palestinian state, or any "peace process." This contradiction has stymied forty years of negotiations--and any continued talk with settlement-building part of the equation is simply contrary to common sense.
Speaking as an American, I must note for you here today that it is fundamentally difficult to understand why Americans ever believed in the Two-State Solution at all--I don't mean the deep political establishment in my country, which is essentially pro-Zionist, strategically and sentimentally, and has used the Two State Solution as a stalling ruse to buy more time for Zionism's plan. But rather, I mean the thinking, commenting, "chattering class" of intellectuals, television hosts, and so on, tasked with the job of "selling" the idea over the last forty years or so, and those average Americans targeted for this deception. Because for Americans, a fundamental cognitive dissonance has always surrounded the very idea of Israel as an exclusive "state for the Jews": and that is the fact that American political culture and civil polity are founded on the sacrosanct, bedrock value of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, which essentially says that a democracy does not establish ANY religion as the religion of the state, and may not favor any faith over another. We can't claim credit for this idea--we got it from the French revolution, and from English philosophers before them. It was a radical idea in the 18th century, but today it's a mainstream, default concept in the West. It's how we do government in the West. So how did the United States become the proponent and guarantor of the zombie idea of Israel--an exclusive state which bases citizenship on membership in one religion, while reserving a degraded, second-class citizenship for those who are not Jews? Everything about this is antithetical to the American political tradition. It has been one of the great, triumphant acts of cynical political salesmanship in my lifetime: that the exclusive "state for the Jews" has been rendered as acceptable in polite quarters-- even just and fair!--to Americans, within the context of our political discourse, even though every ten year old in American Civics class learns in school that we are a nation where all people are equal, and no religion controls, but you are free to worship as you please. Selling this idea to Americans has taken decades and lots of money and influence, operating sometimes quietly, sometimes openly. US President Harry Truman in 1947 was extremely skeptical of any "state for the Jews," and generally objected to the Zionist plan on purely fundamental American values--that the establishment of a religious state was counter to what America stands for, and he didn't want any part of it. He thought he had worked out with his British counterparts a solution for partitioning Palestine that would allow 100,000 Holocaust survivors from Europe to move there, but would create a federal, democratic government with the existing majority Arab population controlling the majority of the land, in a secular state, among which the European Jews would be permitted to live. Truman even went so far as to remind advisors that "religious wars" had ravaged Europe for centuries, and had been the very thing the American Revolution had got us all away from in 1776, and that a "Jewish State" was not an American idea. Eventually, Truman went along with partition, but only if it awarded Palestine mostly to the Palestinians, with a small enclave for the Jews. He expressed his doubts that any creation of a Jewish state could ever be fair to the Arabs.
But then something happened--and this is the salesmanship of Zionism--in the circle of liberal, "progressive" Democrats surrounding the Truman White House: famous men like Judge Brandeis, or the former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Liberals! They pushed on behalf of the Zionists for a Jewish state, and against the fairness doctrine that Truman wanted. The Liberal movement in the United States helped create Israel, and in doing so, robbed the Palestinians of their homes, their villages, their farms, their cities and towns. Always beware of the smiling, do-gooder liberals, is the lesson there. So much for the American ideal of the Establishment Clause. Next, the US Constitution enshrines the basic idea of "equality" before the law, and due process for all citizens. As a lawyer, I can tell you that "due process" is the mechanical operating feature of the US Constitution which triggers so many of our rights as citizens--that everyone has the same access to, relationship to, and enfranchisement under the law. The United States has fought bitterly over these issues--including its own civil war, and many rounds of social and political rights movements--but this fundamental western Enlightenment idea has held up as the core value of all our laws in the United States. The foundation of the Zionist state, of course, was a monstrous crime against the notion of "due process." Who among the 800,000 Palestinians stripped of their land and homes in 1948 ever received "due process" of the law? Who among the millions of refugees today refused the right to return to where their families come from has ever received any "due process" of the law? Speaking as a lawyer, this is the most troubling aspect of any "Two State Solution"--the constant threat by the Zionists that any Palestinian assertion of the Right of Return justifies a cancellation of all other rights Palestinians possess--it is a miserable, deceitful and coercive cruelty played out over decades by the Zionists against those displaced Palestinians and their descendants who have suffered. It is the original crime at the foundation of the Zionist state--and the Zionists continually cry for the Palestinians to renounce their human right before any other rights can be discussed. As if the human right did not precede all other rights. This is why the Two State Solution is dead--because the Zionists cannot admit that their state is founded on a crime, and the moral contradiction of their position does not permit a way forward. There is only blind advancement of conquest, subjugation and Apartheid. Speaking as a lawyer, I am most troubled by the failure of the Israeli people to understand the Right of Return in purely legalistic terms: it is a property right, and the body of law dealing with property is long and deep, and originates in many cultures and languages, including, famously, the law-giving culture of the Jews. Much of the ancient Jewish Torah and religious teachings, after all, are concerned explicitly with property, righteousness and what is fair. The foundation of their faith is, in essence, the story of a contract between a people and God, and what happens when contracts are not honored. Even this past year, we have witnessed the vindication of property claims by Jews against banks, insurance companies, and art collections, concerning the plunder of the Nazis--where property is concerned, many Jews have vindicated their rights across many decades of troubling history, recovering bank accounts, businesses, houses and art. Yet where are the Israelis who stand up and say, "the Right of Return is an issue of equity and property--the land belongs to someone else." Again, the moral failure of the Israeli state, under the corruption of Zionism, blinds all who stand on stolen ground.
Yet, the "due process" concept is even more troubling for the future that is upon us now: the Apartheid state that the Zionists have built over the years since the Madrid talks can never permit even the faintest whisper of "due process" for those who must live under it. Why do Americans support this? Do they even know what they support? The One State of Zionist Apartheid is upon us, and that needs to be spelled out in every way to folks in the United States. Because now, as the Two-State Solution is dead, the choice for even liberal, peace-seeking Israelis (and for the Americans who would support them) is a choice between a single state from the river to the sea, in which every single person has total and equal enfranchisement before the law, with a resulting Arab majority; or it is a single state ruled by an iron fist, with two classes of citizens--the official, enfranchised class, and the subjugated, serving class, with walls and fences and Bantustan villages to keep them in their place. Does this sound familiar?
But still, proponents push the zombie corpse of the Two State Solution forward. I am amazed at how hollowed out this concept has become from all the abuse it has suffered--according to the Occupiers and the United States' right wing, the future Palestinian "state" will not have control of its own borders, or ports; exclusive highways for Jews only will criss-cross its land, connecting settlements; it will not have any army or national military force; it will not be permitted armor or airplanes; it will have fences and walls, and the Israeli army and navy, surrounding all of it. That doesn't sound much like a state I'd like to live in! I wouldn't live in that state if you made me the President. Zionist phobia of a dignified Palestinian neighbor runs deep and broad--just like racism--and would provoke laughter if it were not such a sickness. This phobia is so powerful that the Israelis and the Americans won't even allow the Palestinians to take their place among the organizations of nations, and have access to international cultural and political resources--as witness the temper-tantrum Israel and the US State Department threw last year when the Palestinian Authority joined various United Nations organizations. It is time for the Zionists to grow up, and stop poisoning the phony discourse--either admit your agenda is conquest, or get out. If it's conquest, then the apartheid system shall prevail, which--as South Africa demonstrated--will lead to a protracted battle for rights by the majority population, leading to their eventual triumphant--in A ONE STATE FRAMEWORK. This is what Palestinians have to look forward to, I'm afraid! But I have been visiting South Africa quite a lot in the past few years as a lawyer--and I can tell you, I know of no more other society so determined to find a just and equitable future together, really struggling with the legacy of injustice and working creatively to make a real nation, than I find in South Africa. It holds out the promise that one day Palestine will be the state we are talking about, from the river to the sea. Yet the zombie of the Two State Solution still strides the land, spawning its infected army of zombie believers--most recently the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, who staggered through the region, ineffective and clueless, then made an observation back home that Israel was flirting with Apartheid. The result? He has paid politically in Washington, where he had to go down on bended knee and apologize publicly to the Zionist lobby, and it's unlikely his political career has anywhere left to go now, because he dared to use the "A-word" in referring to Israel. Of course, popular cinema has taught us that to kill a zombie, you must hit it in the head, and destroy its brain. This tells me that we must struggle now to defeat the intellectual justifications for the Two State Solution--defeat the far-flung network of bogus think-tanks and apologists who hold up Israel as a shining beacon of polite, lawful statehood, while keeping the Palestinians disenfranchised. We must win the intellectual battle, at the same time as the fight on the ground continues--the world must learn that the American and Zionist agenda is intended to subjugate the Palestinians further, and will continue to do so until world opinion & the Palestinians themselves change that--just as happened in South Africa.
- Stanley L. Cohen
Zurich, 15 May 2014. [Address to the "Nakba 2014" Conference]
Stanley Cohen speaking at The Meeting for Justice in Egypt, Istanbul 2013
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A message to the Military Government of Egypt: You are ILLEGAL...
Watch the video of Stanley Cohen's full speech at the IHH Meeting for Justice in Egypt, Istanbul 2013
The World's Most Criminal Defense Attorney
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Stanley Cohen -- The World's Most Criminal Defense Attorney
Chronicled in World War 3 Illustrated -- in tribute to the 25th anniversary of the 1988 Tompkins Square Police Riot. By Seth Tobocman.
Stanley Cohen Speaks at a Benefit for Hammond and Brown
Stanley Cohen defended Anonymous in the PayPal 14 case
"I've spent a lot of time speaking around the world and typically what I do when I speak to groups whether it's in New York City, or in Palestine or in Egypt before I got banned, or Israel before I got banned, or in Syria before I'm not sure which side is winning, I give my Salam Aleikums to everyone in the audience. Especially, I give my greetings to the snitchers, the FBI, the CIA, the LSD, and everyone else here."
Listen to the audio here:
{allmusicplayer file=/audio/stanley-cohen-speaks-at-brown-hammonds-benefit.mp3}
"I don't really give a fuck what you report. I really don't, because I'm closer to the end than the beginning, and you know, you eat shit and die. Please make sure to tell the truth. Because the truth will set you fucking free, FBI. And I won't call the president by his name. For those of you who follow me or know me, I call him "I have a drone." So, just tell the fucking truth and life will be okay."
"Now. Over the last month, I've been thinking about, 'What can I possibly say in front of such a wonderful collective of renowned activists, and lawyers, and speakers, and folks that have put their ass on the line?' And I really had no idea, until about three weeks ago. And it really began to take shape, and it has taken shape the last few days, that ultimately, what Jeremy, what Barrett, what Bradley, what Snowden, what Assange, and what PayPal 14 is about, (whispers) it's Egypt."
"It's about Egypt. Think about it. Right now, in Egypt, whether you are Muslim, Jewish, Coptic Christian, French, an atheist, or a son-of-a-bitch, there is a government that is slaughtering people, by the thousands. And it began because people elected to say, 'No.'"
"They elected to speak out, they elected to fight back, they elected to take barracades, they elected to stand up to guns, and the fucking cops, and to spying. And they stood up and they're being slaughtered in the streets. And, 'What the fuck,' do people say, 'does that have to do with our clients, and our friends, and our community?' Well, it's because it's one world. It's because we all stand up and fight our fight in different ways, in different places, in different times.
"And it is about freedom, it is about truth, it is about honesty, it is about integrity, it is about telling 'I have a drone,' and every other fucking petty-desperate in the world, 'Fuck you! You don't own our lives, you don't own our thoughts, you don't own what we say, you don't own where we go. We put you in and we can take your fuckin' asses out. Everyone of you!'"
"And that's why they're so afraid of the so-called 'hackers,' or the whistle blowers, or the truth speakers. That's why they are so all fucked up over those people who say, 'Yeah, I'll go to prison. Okay, but I'm gonna out you fuckers. I'm not going to let you keep the pearly wisdom to yourselves, because we don't trust you. We do not believe you. We do not listen to you, we do not follow you.' There's an old saying I learned in law school, 137 years ago: 'In the marketplace of discourse the truth will always rise.'"
"There is no such thing as protected speech, there is no such thing as hate speech, there is no such thing as suppressed speech. Speech is speech. You let it come out, you let people make their decisions, if they don't fuckin' like it, they can turn off Fox, they can turn off CBS, they can shut down and stop listening to Cohen, and walk out the door; it's speech. Now it's easy for me to say here tonight, that 'it's just speech.' I'm not facing ten years, it's only five years or whatever the hell it is."
"But there are women, there are men, there are people among us that have crossed the line and said, 'We will make a stand, we will fight back, we will take the risks because it is all about truth.' And that's what tonight's event is about. It's about Jeremy, it's about Barrett, it's about Bradley Manning, it's about Mr. Assange, it's about Mr. Snowden. It's about the PayPal 14."
"Women and men who came—there was a point, there was a time, where there's that little voice in the back of your mind, the back of your head that says, 'Do I really want to do this? Do I really want to be reckless? Because I know they're going to catch me. They're gonna catch me. They're gonna catch me, they're gonna grab me. It may take a week, it may take a month, it could take a year, because their industry is snitches and cooperators, and brutality, and persecution, and Eric Holder, who all the rest can kiss my ass, any politicians in this country, they will come for us. Every person."
"You gotta know it goin' in. You gotta know it goin' out. And when you stand in front of a federal judge, or a traffic court judge, it's the same tired shit. But in the back of everyone's mind, there's that little voice that says, 'Hmmm.' And we're here to honor those people here tonight, who when they heard the voice said, 'Good talkin' to you, I gotta go to work.' And that's what it's about."
"It is about refusing to go silently unto the night. It is about refusing to bow down to the industry of silence. It is about refusing to nod your head as others tell you, not just how to live your life, but how an entire society and world should function. And on behalf of Barrett, on behalf of Jeremy, on behalf of Mercedes, Mr. Assange, Mr. Snowden, and Bradley Manning, we have a very simple, two word answer, 'Fuck you.'"
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