In 1999, [Clinton] 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.

More details about Stewart's crime:

One of the most incendiary communications was a message Stewart herself gave to the Reuters news service in June 2000 in which the sheikh announced his withdrawal of support for a cease-fire between the Egyptian Islamic Group and the Egyptian government.The truce had been in place since 1997, just after his followers in Egypt had opened fire on tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, killing 58 foreigners and 4 Egyptians. Subsequently, high-casualty Islamist terrorism resumed in Egypt on October 7, 2004, with a series of bombings that killed 34 in and around the Egyptian Sinai resort of Taba. On July 23, 2005, three bombs exploded in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing at least 64.

Government investigators searching Stewart's law offices found a draft of the sheikh's fatwa that bin Laden later said inspired him. In it, Abdel Rahman enjoined his fellow Muslims everywhere to kill Americans, even children, "to treat them with brutality," and to "drown their ships, shoot down their airplanes, kill them on earth, in the sea or in the sky, kill them everywhere you find them" in order to obtain his release from U.S. prison.

That's called being an accomplice.

Did you know that Ramsey Clarke brought Stewart onto the defense team? In fact, the partnership of Lynne Stewart with Sheik Rahman is a textbook example of the unholy alliace of the international nihilist Left with the Jihadi fundamentalist Right. Both desire radical change as a good unto itself, no matter what the cost to real live human beings.

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal," a Venezuelan Marxist who had dedicated himself to pro-Palestinian terrorism, followed a similar path. In 2003, he published a book entitled Revolutionary Islam from his prison cell in France in which he encouraged "all revolutionaries, including those of the Left, even atheists," to embrace radical Islam in order to destroy the United States, which he sees as the citadel of imperialism. His terrorism began as a secular struggle. Terrorism is a preferred tactic, he writes, because it is "the cleanest and most efficient form of warfare," able to demoralize the enemy. In later years, though, he justified his actions in terms of Islamism. In March 2004, he claimed responsibility on French television for the terrorism-related deaths of between 1,500 to 2,000 people. Arguing that "not even 10 percent of these people were innocent," he refused to ask for forgiveness.

Just as the sheikh did with Stewart, Sanchez established a special relationship with his attorney, Isabelle Coutant Peyre, whom he married in an Islamic ceremony in 2001. Like Stewart, Coutant Peyre gravitated from radicalism to Islam. In 2002, she told The New York Times that she shared most of Sanchez's politics, is "genuinely convinced that Western ‘militarism' is evil and that capitalism is oppressive," and does not think terrorists such as Sanchez have any "more blood on their hands than many army generals." She subsequently represented the family of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to have been indicted in the United States in connection with the 9-11 attacks. Coutant Peyre also defended Slimane Khalfaoui, one of ten Islamic militants convicted of plotting to blow up a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, on New Year's Eve 2000. Upon the conviction of her client, she said the judgment was "evidence that French institutions, and justice in particular, were racist, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic."

I think McCarthy is right - Stewart should be made an example of.