28 outubro 2002

ECO-TERRORES
Hady Hassan Omar's Detention: On Sept. 12, 2001, without being charged, he was put behind bars for 73 days. Now he is suing the government, and his case, the first of its kind, raises difficult questions about the costs of homeland security.
Hady Hassan Omar had made up his mind. He was going to kill himself if he wasn't released by New Year's Eve. [...]
Since his arrest on Sept. 12, 2001, Omar had been fighting a losing battle. No one would believe that he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He passed polygraph tests, but the F.B.I. still seemed convinced that he was linked to Al Qaeda. The guards in the isolation wing of Pollock maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana kept telling him that under new antiterror measures, he could sit in jail forever. He wrote the attorney general. He even went on several hunger strikes. But the corrections officers just threatened to strap him to a gurney and force-feed him through a tube up his nose.