Palm Beach Post
August 3, 2003
By Paul Lomartire

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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. In the post-Sept. 11 climate, that charge isn’t likely to win him much sympathy in security-conscious America.

Champion for his cause

But now Al-Arian has found a champion — at least for improving his prison living conditions.

In a July 17 letter to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Amnesty International, the respected international human rights monitor, denounced Al-Arian’s detention as “gratuitously punitive.”

In a three-page letter to Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the bureau director, Amnesty International cited the 23-hour lockdown, strip searches, use of chains and shackles, severely limited recreation, lack of access to any religious service and denial of a watch or clock in a windowless cell where the artificial light is never turned off.

Al-Arian shares the small cell with co-defendant Sameeh Hammoudeh.

Concludes Amnesty: “The prolonged cellular confinement, lack of exercise, frequent shackling and other deprivations imposed on Dr. Al- Arian are inconsistent with international standards and treaties which require that all persons deprived of their liberty must be treated humanely with respect for their inherent human dignity.”

Amnesty International is better known for drawing attention to torture, rat-hole prison conditions and human rights abuses in Third World countries.

But in this case, “We’re particularly concerned because he’s a pretrial detainee,” says Angela Wright, an Amnesty researcher in London.

“Certainly if he remains in those conditions, we will continue to raise concerns,” Wright says.

The Bureau of Prisons denies any mistreatment.

“We treat all inmates in a fair and consistent manner,” says Traci Billingsley, public information officer for the bureau in Washington. For specifics, she suggested, “you’d have to go to the Justice Department.”

A Justice Department official who has read the Amnesty letter agreed to comment only if allowed to remain unnamed: “Like all people detained by the U.S. Marshal’s Service or the Bureau of Prisons, Mr. Al-Arian is provided with all the protections and services required by law and regulation.”

Magistrate changes little

Complaints from defense lawyers and Tampa-area residents and friends of Al-Arian led U.S. Magistrate Thomas B. McCoun III to travel the 70 miles north from Tampa to inspect the U.S. Prison at Coleman.

He denied almost all defense motions challenging Al-Arian’s treatment but did order guards to cut back on strip searches. He found “no real justification” for such searches before and after all “non-contact” visits.

The magistrate found Al-Arian’s little cell far from intolerable: “While in their cells, defendants are permitted radios as well as reading material, including discovery material. The cells include bunk beds, a sink, toilet, shower, and small metal desk.”

Amnesty International contends that placing two men 23 hours a day in a 70-square-foot cell does not meet American Correctional Association guidelines of “at least 80 square feet of total floor space per occupant” when confinement exceeds 10 hours a day.

But McCoun’s May ruling concluded that the cell, “while not spacious, is more than adequate to meet constitutional minimums.”

The judge was impressed with the prison’s cleanliness but not the recreation available to Al-Arian and Hammoudeh.

He noted that they are allowed to exercise “in a cage adjacent to the cellblock five times a week… the exercise cages are enclosed by a high wall and covered by an opaque weather deflector. While there is open air space above the walls, for all practical purposes the Defendants remain indoors. No equipment is provided and the circumstances of their recreation inside these fairly small cages when compared to that available to convicted inmates on the nearby open-air recreation yards stands in stark contrast.”

Even so, the judge declined to order a change in the recreation regimen.

Unless Al-Arian finds a friendlier judge, his best hope of better living conditions may be when he comes to trial. But that’s a long wait. His trial is scheduled sometime in 2005.

Visits highly restrictive

Al-Arian has tried to portray himself as an innocent victim of anti- Arab, anti-Muslim hysteria in the wake of Sept. 11. After a July 25 hearing, he was allowed to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers and represent himself. But his family and the National Liberty Foundation, a Muslim civil rights group in Virginia, are trying to raise enough money to hire a Washington attorney. Until then, Tampa’s Linda Moreno, who is appealing his denial of bail, is the only attorney visiting him at Coleman.

When they meet, he arrives shackled and chained, bent over with his papers loaded on his back “like a mule,” she says. “It’s completely disgraceful.”

He is unshackled and allowed to sit at a table across from Moreno, who cannot bring a briefcase, laptop or tape recorder to the meeting. She is restricted to a legal pad, pen and documents that can’t exceed a half-inch in height, she says. “That makes it quite difficult to confer with Dr. Al-Arian since the indictment itself is 2.5 inches.”

Moreno, who worked for several years as a criminal public defender, often representing murderers and thugs, says, “In 23 years of practicing, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We’re not asking much, just human rights,” says Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla. On Tuesday, she and her eldest son, Abdullah, 23, and daughter, Laila, 21, gathered at an Ybor City coffee shop with Moreno.

The family is allowed to visit the prison for two to three hours, on Monday, Friday and every other weekend. Nahla is not allowed to carry anything into the prison other than her car keys and change for the vending machines. The usual wait for clearance to go in and meet her husband is two hours.

During a recent visit, she says, she was taking notes for a to-do list from her husband when guards “swooped down on me. They were watching on a camera.”

The guards took her pen and pad and says she isn’t allowed to write during visits. Ignore the rule, she was warned, and her husband would lose family visits for a year.

For a June phone call home — Al-Arian gets one monitored 15-minute call per month — Nahla arranged a three-way conversation to include Abdullah, who at the time was studying at the London School of Economics. Because the prison hadn’t approved the three-way call, Al- Arian has lost phone-home privileges for six months.

Top D.C. lawyer sought

Al-Arian wants to hire attorney William Moffitt, a Washington-based former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Moffitt has visited Al-Arian at Coleman.

“There’s an agreement between us, and if they can complete the agreement, I will be in the case,” Moffitt says.

That agreement comes down to cash, the amount of which, Moffitt says, is “nobody’s business but theirs and mine.”

Moreno says that “the magnitude of this case is startling. When you’ve got renowned attorneys from around the country offering services at discount fees, that’s a sign there’s something important going on.”

Al-Arian was impressed by Moffitt after a Washington speech by the attorney about the Patriot Act and secret evidence.

Moffitt is no stranger to big trials. He represented former United Way President William Aramony, accused of defrauding the charity of more than $1 million in 1995.

But Nahla is finding it hard to raise money to pay Moffitt.

“It is very difficult now,” says Nahla, who has a degree in comparative religion and was working on a master’s when her husband was arrested. “That’s why I want them to find jobs and start helping,” she says of her adult children.

“It’s now time to give back,” agrees Laila, a Georgetown graduate and former USA Today intern who’s looking for a job as a newspaper reporter.

Duke graduate Abdullah is just back from the London School of Economics and needs to complete a thesis for a master’s degree. He is seeking a job with a law firm.

Middle child Leena is a sophomore at the University of South Florida, the school that fired her father. Ali, 12, is ready to attend school in Egypt. The family’s youngest, Lama, 10, starts fifth grade at the Islamic Academy in Tampa, a private school co-founded by her father. The school recently had its state voucher money pulled because of past ties to her father.

Nahla hopes fellow Muslims will help her to hire Moffitt.

“There are two kinds of people in the Muslim community,” she says, “the open and courageous and others that are scared and intimidated by the government. Little by little, the Muslim community is regaining their conscience. Anybody can be targeted. The only way to stop this is by mobilizing.”

With all of the problems, Abdullah says, visits with his father at Coleman aren’t all doom and gloom.

“We talk basketball. I went to Duke. He likes North Carolina State because he went there. He follows the (NFL Tampa Bay) Bucs and soccer,” Abdullah says.

Claim of death threats

Amnesty International’s letter mentioned “several ‘death threats’ from other prisoners.”

Nahla knows about only one written threat, a couple of lines handwritten on a scrap of paper, pushed under her husband’s cell door. It could have come from an inmate or a guard, she says.

Inmates have been good to her husband, she adds, giving him soap and, on one occasion, ice. When a guard brought apple juice, Al-Arian declined and asked for a cup of ice. A diabetic, he doesn’t drink apple juice. The guard refused to bring ice. “After a mini-riot, inmates gave him ice,” Nahla recounts.

“The inmates are very nice,” she says. “They a have a heart and are compassionate. Sami respects them. He doesn’t fear for his life with them.”

Al-Arian can’t have hardcover books but can receive paperbacks if mailed directly from the publisher. He also has a subscription to the Tampa Tribune plus subscriptions to Foreign Policy and Washington Report.

During a recent prison visit, Al-Arian showed he hasn’t stopped being a dad. He wanted to make sure his youngest, Lama, had a birthday party.

“He told me what books to buy her,” Laila says. “The Mouse and the Motorcycle and Ramona and Her Father. And Mom took her to the movies.”

Nahla laughs, rolling her eyes. The inside family joke is that she’s not exactly a multiplex regular.

“Pirates of the Caribbean,” she says, adding with a smile, “they made the guy against the establishment the hero.”