• Attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights
• Represents the terrorist organization Hamas
• “If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case.”

Stanley Cohen is an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization that was founded by longtime members of the Communist and radical left, and which defends only clients whose political views it supports. The Communist publication Revolutionary Worker has referred to 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.”

Born in 1954, Cohen was raised in Portchester, New York, the son of parents he has described as “hardworking F.D.R. Democrats.” He attended Long Island University, and by 1970 became involved in radical politics.

Following his schooling, Cohen took a job with the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, where he defended many 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.”

In the early 1980s, Cohen partnered with the self-described “radical attorney” William Kunstler, who had first come to prominence when he defended Tom Hayden and the “Chicago Seven” against charges of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In the first high-profile case which Cohen and Kuntsler handled together, they won the acquittal (in 1986) of Larry Davis, a longtime violent felon who had recently shot six New York City policemen.

Also during the 1980s, Cohen collaborated on cases with Lynne Stewart, another self-proclaimed “radical activist attorney.” In one of their more noteworthy cases, the pair represented Kathy Boudin. A member of two terrorist groups -- the Weather Underground and the May 19 Communist Organization -- Boudin was convicted for the role she had played 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 U.S.

In his office today, Cohen displays a picture of himself alongside the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of the terrorist group Hamas. In Cohen’s view, Hamas is an organization composed of freedom fighters and martyrs who nobly give their lives in the pursuit of liberty and justice.

In 1995 Cohen aided Hamas’ senior political leader, Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook -- who co-founded both the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development -- in his legal battle against extradition from the U.S. to Israel. Cohen visited Marzook almost nightly in his jail cell for nearly two years, and ultimately mounted a successful defense for his client. “If I don't support the politics of political clients,” said Cohen, “I don't take the case.”

Also in the 1990s, Cohen, Kunstler, and Stewart teamed with Ramsey Clark to defend Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and leader of the Islamic Group, an Egypt-based terrorist organization with close links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Cohen also has represented members of the Peruvian terror group Shining Path; the cop-killer and leftist icon Mumia Abu-Jamal; a militant Muslim charged with torching a New York synagogue; Moataz Al-Hallak, an imam from Texas with suspected ties to al-Qaeda; Imam Kariye, a black Muslim suspected of terrorism; Hazem Ragab, who co-founded the Global Relief Foundation and was named as a co-conspirator to the 9/11 attacks; and Abdelhaleem Ashqar and Ismail Elbarasse, both of whom refused to testify before a grand jury investigating allegations of money laundering in support of Hamas. Moreover, Cohen has asserted that the confessed traitor John Walker Lindh, who went to Afghanistan to fight against American troops in 2001, was innocent.

Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cohen 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.”

Eleven days after 9/11, Cohen said: "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 …. If it ever filtered down to the U.S. body politic that these acts are a result of indigenous struggle and uprising, that there are a lot of people pissed off at the United States for a lot of different reasons, Americans would shit. It's a lot easier to think there's six leaders, kill the six, and then life will be fine again and Doris Day will reign supreme."

During a workshop he conducted later that evening (September 22, 2001), Cohen said: "I fear the government is going to use this [9/11] as a pretense, and I'm going to use the I-word … to go after those people who have stood up to Israeli interests and the pro-Israel lobby in this country." He added that "this operation was assisted by ex-C.I.A., ex-Mossad [Israeli intelligence agency] officers."

Cohen deems the United States an intractably racist society, claiming that the American government's current anti-terrorism campaign is but a pretext for depriving Muslims of their civil liberties. To drive this point home, he cites America's internment of the Japanese during World War II. “The Germans weren't locked up,” says Cohen. “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 point of fact, while some 110,000 Japanese residents of the U.S. were interned during WWII, the same was done to nearly 11,000 Germans and 1,600 Italians in America. In addition, the 600,000 legal Italian immigrants who were not U.S. citizens were put under travel restrictions.)

In July 2002, Cohen filed a lawsuit (on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah) against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, charging him and other Israeli leaders with “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, racketeering, acts of murder and torture, bodily harm, arson, kidnapping,” and other offenses. The suit also named U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell as defendants, on grounds that American-made weapons allegedly had been used by Israel to commit human rights abuses. Joining Cohen in a news conference announcing the lawsuit was Abdurahman Alamoudi, founder and Executive Director of the American Muslim Council, and Sami Al-Arian, North American head of Palestinian Islamic.

Cohen continues to represent the purveyors of violent Islamic extremism. Joel L. Blumenfeld, a Supreme Court Justice in New York who formerly worked with Cohen, once said of his colleague: “If this were Pearl Harbor, he would be representing the Japanese.”