🚀 go-pugleaf

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, St. Petersburg Times Columnist
Published March 14, 2004

In Bernard Malamud's masterpiece The Fixer, inmate Yakov Bok was 
subjected to psychological torture in a Soviet gulag through the 
humiliations of constant shackling and repeated strip searches. 


The story I read in middle school comes back to me as I learn more 
about the abusive and psychologically damaging treatment of Dr. Sami 
Al-Arian, a former professor of computer engineering at the 
University of South Florida, who is in federal prison on terrorism-
related charges.

Denied bail and his right to a speedy trial, Al-Arian is being held 
in the Special Housing Unit of the Coleman Federal Correctional 
Complex in Sumter County. The SHU is the prison's disciplinary ward, 
typically reserved for uncontrollable prisoners who have attacked 
guards or other inmates.

Al-Arian shares a 7-by-13-foot cell with co-defendant Sameeh 
Hammoudeh. The amount of room they have for both of them violates the 
American Correctional Association guidelines for a single prisoner. 
Here, they are warehoused for 23 hours a day, let out only for an 
hour of recreation five times a week. But even then they are denied 
daylight. Their recreation cell is a cage adjacent to the cellblock 
which is surrounded by a high wall and an opaque weather covering.

All done for their own safety, says the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

In a display of petty cruelty, whenever Al-Arian has a meeting with 
his lawyers, the guards refuse to carry his legal documents. He is 
forced to walk bent over, with his hands shackled behind him, 
balancing the paperwork on his back. "Like an animal," says Linda 
Moreno, one of his lawyers. After the meeting he is strip searched - 
sometimes with other prisoners and guards watching.

But this is actually a step up. He used to be strip searched after 
every non-contact visit from family, too. Finally, a federal 
magistrate put a stop to it.

His privations and indignities have even caught the attention of 
Amnesty International. In July, the group wrote a letter to the 
Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons calling the manner of Al-
Arian's confinement "unnecessarily punitive," charging that 
the "deprivations imposed on Dr. Al-Arian are inconsistent with 
international standards and treaties."

I appreciate that Al-Arian is decidedly unsympathetic. The 50-count 
indictment accuses him of heading the U.S. operations of the 
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group responsible for 
murdering more than 100 people in Israel and its territories. But 
right now Al-Arian is a pretrial detainee, presumed innocent, and he 
is being subjected to conditions of confinement so harsh and 
unjustified that there must be an ulterior motive. All signs point to 
a purposeful strategy by the Justice Department to break him down 
psychologically and make it difficult if not impossible for him to 
assist in his own defense.

This may help the government obtain a conviction, but it will 
inevitably prove counterproductive in advancing our national security 
interests. Al-Arian is a well-known Muslim figure and his treatment 
by our criminal justice system will be watched around the world - and 
the Muslim world in particular. What is being done to him now is 
unworthy of our system; and lays bare a hypocrisy: We preach great 
principles of justice, fair-dealing and respect for human dignity to 
Arab nations yet are willing to make them a pick-and-choose 
proposition over here.

The bulk of the government's case against Al-Arian and his co-
defendants is contained in more than 20,000 hours of audio 
recordings, the result of several years worth of wiretapped phone 
conversations. Al-Arian, like any other defendant, was granted the 
right to listen to this evidence in order to participate in his own 
defense. But the prison has made a mockery of this, persistently 
delaying his efforts by failing to maintain his recording equipment 
in working order.

Earlier this month Al-Arian's cell was raided by guards wearing masks 
covering their faces. His attorney claims that hundreds of pages of 
the notes he prepared on his case were confiscated. The prison failed 
to respond to my inquiries on this episode.

There is bias operating here. This is the same sort of mistreatment 
faced by hundreds of immigrants swept up into detention facilities 
after 9/11. The Bush administration has determined that a different 
set of rules should apply to anyone suspected of aiding terrorism.

When I asked Andrew Patel, one of the attorneys for Jose Padilla, the 
American who is being held without charge as a potential terrorist, 
about the confinement conditions for his client, he said it's a taboo 
subject. Patel said he was told not to discuss anything regarding 
conditions with Padilla. 

The ban reminded me of a passage in The Fixer when Bok is visited by 
his wife. "They forbade me to ask you any questions about your 
conditions in this prison," she lamented.

The thing all these men, Al-Arian, Hammoudeh, Padilla and Bok, have 
in common is that they suffered in confinement without having been 
convicted of any crime. Like the old Soviet system, for certain 
suspects, we punish first and do the trial later.