Amnesty group blasts Al-Arian prison conditions

Posted on Mon, Aug. 04, 2003

Amnesty group blasts Al-Arian prison conditions
BY PAUL LOMARTIRE
Palm Beach Post

TAMPA - In a high-security federal prison north of Tampa, Sami Al-Arian spends 23 hours of every day locked in a 7-by-13-foot cell. No watch. No clock. No window through which to see daylight.

One hour a day, five days a week, he and his cellmate get to walk around in a steel cage. That is his only recreation.

He cannot leave his cell without being shackled and chained. When his family visits, he cannot touch them. They sit on opposite sides of a plastic window and talk over a phone. When his lawyer visits, the shackled Al-Arian walks bent-over, his hands chained behind him, and balances his legal documents on his back. The guards won't carry them.

After four months in such conditions, including a hunger strike and a month in solitary confinement, he has lost 45 pounds.

He has never been convicted of a crime. But he is charged with a very big one. The former University of South Florida economics professor is accused of being the American boss for Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian terrorist group believed responsible for numerous suicide bombings and the deaths of more than 100 people in Israel and the adjacent occupied territories. (snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/6451790.htm

....but it is sickening to know that even in the United States you can get treated like an animal.