Stanley Cohen – Lawyer, Human Rights, Activist

Feb 25, 2015 | Government Agenda, Whistleblowers & Dissidents

Stanley Cohen

Lawyer, Humanist, Activist Stanley Cohen

 

  • Attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights
  • Has represented many radicals, revolutionaries, and Islamic extremists
  • “If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.”
  • Views the United States as an intractably racist nation whose criminal-justice system routinely denies fair treatment to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities
  • Characterizes Israel as a “terrorist state”

BACKGROUND

Born in 1953 to parents whom he has described as “hardworking F.D.R. Democrats,” Stanley Lewis Cohen was raised in Portchester, New York. Though he attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed, he has long considered himself non-religious. Cohen’s current ties to the Jewish faith are based largely on his view that it can serve as a vehicle for redistributive social justice rather than as a conduit to the divine. “I’m proud to be a Jew—very proud of it,” he says. “Not the Judaism of Ariel Sharon. Not the Judaism of the generals of the Israel Defense Forces. But the Judaism that stands with the oppressed, the disadvantaged and the disaffected.”

Cohen became active in the left-wing anti-war movement during his high-school years in the late Sixties and then attended Long Island University. After graduating from LIU, he worked as a volunteer for VISTA, an anti-poverty program initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. Cohen’s VISTA work took place on the Winnebago, Omaha, and Santee Sioux reservations (in Nebraska), where he helped establish a legal-services project.

Following his tenure with VISTA, Cohen worked as a community organizerin New York City, headed a drug program for homeless teens in Westchester County, New York, and administered a federally funded anti-poverty agency. Eventually he enrolled at Pace University Law School, where he earned a J.D. degree in 1983.

COHEN’S EARLY LEGAL CAREER

In the early 1980s, when he was still a law student, Cohen teamed upwith attorney Lynne Stewart to defend a number of far-left radicals against state prosecution in New York. In one of their more high-profile cases, the pair together represented Kathy Boudin—a Weather Underground and May 19 Communist Organization member who had participated in the deadly 1981 Brinks robbery, a heist whose purpose was to acquire the funds needed to finance a war against “Amerikka” and establish a “Republic of Black Afrika” in the United States. Cohen and Stewart would thereafter maintain an enduring, close relationship—both personally and professionally—as evidenced by Stewart’s characterization of Cohen in a 2001 interview as her “dear friend.”

After completing his legal studies, Cohen spent seven years working with the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, where he defended a multitude of robbers, rapists, and killers. “I loved the people I represented,”says Cohen. “Poor people, people of color. People that the system was designed to beat to death.”

Also in the 1980s, Cohen became a protégé of the self-described “radical attorney” William Kunstler, with whom he jointly represented Larry Davis—a longtime violent felon suspected in the killings of several drug dealers—who had recently shot six New York City policemen. Cohen concocted a defense which maintained that Davis, an African American, had shot the officers—who were allegedly part of a rogue-cop drug operation—in self-defense. Though the claim was entirely without substance, a Bronx jury acquitted Davis in 1986.[1]

LONG CLIENT LIST OF RADICALS, REVOLUTIONARIES, & ISLAMISTS

Soon after the Davis trial, Cohen left the Legal Aid Society and went intoprivate practice where he began to compile a client list that included all manner of radicals and revolutionaries. Among these was a group of heavily armed Mohawk Indian separatists who shot a National Guardhelicopter in 1990. Cohen also:

  • represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during a three-month, armed stand-off with law-enforcement authorities in Quebec—and was himself charged by Canadian authorities, as a result of his participation in that standoff, with seditious conspiracy;
  • represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during a lengthy, armed, and ultimately deadly jurisdictional battle against state and federal law enforcement in Akwesasne, a territory that straddles the U.S. and Canadian borders;
  • defended several dozen Mohawk Warrior Society members who were criminally prosecuted for closing down a state highway during a protracted standoff with police; and
  • assisted in the case of Mohawk students who sued the Salmon River School District (in northernmost New York State) for having removed the Thanksgiving Address, a traditional Mohawk blessing, from events held at a school with a significant population of Mohawk youth.

Also in the early 1990s, Cohen defended:

  • approximately 100 members of the War Resisters League, theRevolutionary Communist Party, and other activist groups who were arrested during protests against the first Gulf War;
  • several dozen members of the anarchist resistance group Black Bloc, who were arrested at various anti-corporate/anti-imperialist demonstrations;
  • members of the Irish Republican Army, a revolutionary military organization;
  • Patrick Moloney, a Dublin-born priest and avowed Irish nationalist who conspired to hide some of the $7.4 million that was stolen in the January 5, 1993 Brink’s armored-car robbery;
  • Jose Ortiz, a Puerto Rican street-gang member accused of shooting a New York City police captain as “revenge” for the 1994 police killing of a Puerto Rican youth named Anthony Baez in the South Bronx; and
  • members of the Peru-based Maoist terror group, The Shining Path.

But it is Cohen’s so-called “Islamic practice,” through which he has defended a host of Muslim terrorists and terrorism-affiliated operatives, that has gained him more notoriety than any other aspect of his legal work.

For example, in the 1990s Cohen teamed up with William Kunstler, Lynne Stewart, and Ramsey Clark to defend Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Group leader who was prosecuted for his role in a number of terror plots, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

From 1995-97, Cohen represented Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas political leader who co-founded the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (both terror-related organizations). Specifically, Cohen worked to thwart Israel’s effort to extradite Marzook out of the U.S. and try him for the role that he and Hamas had played in a number of bombings. As the Marzook case dragged on for some 22 months, Cohen visited his incarcerated client in jail almost nightly throughout that entire period. Ultimately, Cohen was successful in helping Marzook win his freedom, evade the Israeli justice system, and resettle in Syria. Articulating his high regard for Marzook, Cohen would later refer to him as “my dear friend” and “the Gerry Adamsof Hamas.”

Other noteworthy Islamists whom Cohen has defended include the following:

The Communist publication Revolutionary Worker has lauded Cohen as “a longtime people’s lawyer beloved by many for his uncompromising willingness to provide legal defense for the unpopular … and those [whom] U.S. imperialism may feel should be ‘tried’ with no defense at all.” Joel Blumenfeld, a New York State Supreme Court Justice who formerly worked with Cohen, once said of the latter: “[I]f this were 1941-42, he would be representing the Japanese people who were being detained.”

Notably, Cohen has explained the rationale underlying his choice of clients. “If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.” “Most of my clients [are] involved with struggle, many of them armed struggle,” he notes, proudly.

Cohen’s sympathy for Islamic terrorists was further reflected in his reaction to the events of 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he told the Village Voice: “If Osama bin Laden arrived in the United States today and asked me to represent him, sure I’d represent him.” In fact, Cohen was reluctant even to believe that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, as he articulted on September 22, 2001: “I don’t think this was an Osama bin Laden job at all. But I think for a lot of reasons the government would prefer it be Osama bin Laden. Because then there’s an identifiable bogeyman.” That same day, Cohen speculated: “I fear the government is going to use this [9/11] as a pretense … to go after those people who have stood up to Israeli interests and the pro-Israel lobby in this country.” Moreover, he said he was “absolutely” certain that “this operation was assisted by ex-CIA, ex-Mossad [Israeli intelligence agency] officers.”

Cohen was also sympathetic to the plight of the so-called “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, who was captured as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan later in 2001. By Cohen’s reckoning, Lindh, who confessed to having taken up arms against the United States, “deserves the presumption of innocence.”

In October 2001, Cohen addressed a Muslim gathering at a Paterson, New Jersey mosque and advised those in attendance not to cooperate with FBI investigators who, in the course of 9/11-related probes, might question them regarding their activities or affiliations. “Just say no,” Cohen stated. “It’s the safest way.” When a Texas resident subsequently called Cohen and told him that it was his [Cohen’s] duty, as an American, to convince his clients to cooperate with law-enforcement, Cohen replied: “First of all, I’m not an American. Right now, I’m a lawyer’ …. The World Trade Centers, they don’t belong to the United States; they don’t belong to George Bush. They belong to New York City. I live in the country of New York City.”

Throughout his adult life, Cohen has regarded the United States as an intractably racist nation whose criminal-justice system routinely denies fair treatment to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Consistent with this perspective, he portrayed the U.S. government’s post-9/11 war-on-terror as little more than a pretext for depriving Muslims of their civil liberties—analogous, he said, to America’s internment of Japanese civilians during World War II: “The Germans weren’t locked up. The Italians weren’t locked up. Only the Japanese were. This tells you that ‘civil liberties’ in this country are a matter of race.”

In 2004 Cohen served as a consultant to the Lebanon-based, Hezbollah-dominated al-Manar television network, helping the latter develop a litigation strategy for challenging the U.S. government’s decision todesignate it as a terrorist entity—and thus to block and criminalize its broadcast signal. Complaining that “the U.S. has now succeeded in completely convincing Americans that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization,” Cohen cited the organization’s broad popularity in Lebanon and declared: “It is another intimidation by the U.S. administration targeting groups that are independent from Washington’s influence.”

In 2007 Cohen provided consultation to the government of Yemen vis à vis United States v. al Moyaad et. al., a case where a Yemeni tribal leader was convicted of fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas.

CONTEMPT FOR ISRAEL

Cohen’s clear affinity for Islamists finds an alternative expression in the attorney’s harsh rebukes of Israel, which he has long characterized as a “terrorist state.” Asserting that “what Israel does is far more morally repugnant than what Hamas does,” Cohen affirms the Palestinians’ “right” and “obligation” to “resist occupation … by any means necessary.” “To much of the world,” he elaborates, “Hamas is not viewed as a terrorist organization but rather a national liberation movement involved in low-intensity, asymmetric warfare.”

In July 2002 Cohen filed a federal lawsuit demanding that the U.S. government stop giving financial support to Israel’s “program of killing, torture, terror and outright theft” targeting the Palestinians. The suit named President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, various Israeli military officials, and a number of U.S. arms manufacturers, accusing them all of “genocide.” Cohen also sought damages on behalf of Palestinian Americans who had been victimized by Israeli “war crimes” (allegedly carried out with U.S.-made weapons) in Gaza and the West Bank. Joining Cohen in a news conference announcing the lawsuit were American Muslim Council founderAbdurahman Alamoudi and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian.

In a related effort, Cohen was a founding member of an international group of lawyers who, on behalf of Palestinians, have filed suits against Israel in such far-flung locations as Morocco, Belgium, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as before the International Criminal Court. These suits have charged the Jewish state with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and Geneva Convention violations.

Characterizing himself as “among the few Jews in the United States capable of bridging the gap between the West and the militant politics of the Middle East,” Cohen boasts that he once “had lunch with the alleged mastermind of the Achille Lauro ship hijacking,” a 1985 incident where Palestinian terrorists stormed a cruise ship and threw an elderly, wheelchair-bound American man overboard to his death; that he once “spent a day with [Yasser] Arafat in Ramallah on the West Bank” and wastreated “like a head of state”; and that he was given a number of audiences with the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas. According to a 2002 news report, Cohen’s office decor at that time featured a picture of himself seated alongside Yassin, as well as aphoto of Lenin and a wall poster stating, “History cannot be written with a pen. It must be written with a gun.”

RECENT CASES

Cohen represented Mercedes Haeffer, one of 14 activists affiliated with the computer-hacker group Anonymous who were prosecuted by the U.S. government for allegedly participating in a December 2010 “digital sit-in” on PayPal’s website.

Cohen also represented an activist who was charged with assaulting a police officer during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in 2011.

In late 2012, Cohen came to the legal defense of the internationally known journalist Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian American who (in September 2012) used a can of pink spray paint to deface a poster in a New York City subway station that she claimed bore a message offensive to Muslims. Produced by Pamela Geller’s and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, that poster read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” While Eltahawy was busy spray painting over those words, freelance journalist Pamela Hall tried unsuccessfully to stop her. During the confrontation, Eltahawy spray-painted Ms. Hall and ruined the latter’s reading glasses, camera, and clothing. She was arrested at the scene, and Hall pressed charges. According to Cohen, Eltahawy’s act of vandalism was an exercise in free speech. For a more complete complete synopsis of this case, click here.

SCANDAL

In June 2012 a federal grand jury in Syracuse, New York indicted Cohen for failing to file individual and corporate income tax returns from 2005 through 2010, and for attempting to evade IRS detection of large cash payments he had received from two of his clients in 2008 and 2010.According to the Syracuse Post-Standard:

“The indictment against Cohen says he failed to file a report with the IRS showing his law practice had received cash from two clients for more than $10,000 each. One payment was from a client with the initials TJF for $20,000 in August 2008, and the other was from client JS for $15,000 in the summer of 2010…. Cohen made regular deposits of cash into his personal bank accounts in amounts less than $10,000 to avoid having to file a report with the IRS for deposits of that amount or higher…. Cohen also received non-money payments in exchange for legal services and failed to maintain records of those payments as income, the indictment said.”

In December 2013 a Manhattan federal court similarly indicted Cohen for wire fraud and five counts of failure to file income-tax returns (on more than $3 million in earnings) for the 2006-2010 tax years. An NBC News report stated:

“The government alleged that Cohen was paid at least $500,000 in fees each of those years but hid the money by having clients pay in cash or telling them to wire payments directly to American Express to pay his card bills.”

If convicted, Cohen could be sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison.

KEY AFFILIATIONS

Cohen has close, longstanding ties to the National Lawyers Guild and theCenter for Constitutional Rights.

NOTE:
[1] In 1991 Davis was convicted of killing a drug dealer and was given a sentence of 30-years-to-life in prison.

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