Bismillah, was-Salama ‘alayki wa Rahmatullah wa Barakatuh;
I will try to answer your questions as well as I can.
I was arrested at my house in the morning, on October 21st. I had just
finished making wudu’ for Fajr prayer and was going into my room to pray
sunnah when the doorbell rang, followed by a series of loud knocks. My
father, who had just gotten dressed for work, was startled at first, but
knew who it was. He opened the door, and my house was suddenly filled
with about a dozen FBI agents coming up to my room. They were extremely
disrespectful to my father as they addressed him. As my mother emerged
from the bedroom, I motioned for them to join me in Fajr prayer despite
the presence of the FBI agents. So, we stood there and prayed in my room
with the agents looking on (maybe they learned a thing or two). I then
hugged my parents before I was handcuffed and led down the stairs and
out into a waiting police cruiser. I was told that after I was gone, my
cat ran down to the door and sat there waiting for me to come back.
Loyal animals, ma sha’Allah (awww….).
I was then taken to the local police station and booked, had a mugshot
and fingerprints taken, and called home for a few minutes. It was still
barely 7:00AM. It was easier to calm my mother down this time because we
had been through all of this before around the same time last year.
I was then driven from the local police station to the federal court in
the city. The FBI agent who sat next to me in the back was taking a
particular interest in how I learned Arabic, as he was in the process of
trying to do the same. One should learn to not fall for the “friendly
FBI agent” trick—they want only to pull as many statements out of you
that they can later put to some legal document to be used against you.
The driver wasn’t an FBI agent, but was rather a state trooper. See, the
cowboys who go around making these cases and arrests are not solely
FBI. They are part of what is called the Joint Terrorism Task Force
(JTTF), which is a compendium of FBI, customs, state and local police,
and other law enforcement agencies that combine their efforts in a
focused group whose sole task is to fight Islam, (Oh sorry, I meant
‘terrorism’). They are all over the country.
Once I got to court, I was booked, mugshot, and fingerprinted again,
then I was placed in a holding cell for a few hours until my afternoon
hearing, where my charge was read out to me vaguely, and I was remanded
to the custody of the US Marshalls. Now, the funny thing is that until
now, I had no idea what exactly I was being accused of. It was only on
my way from court to prison that night that I first heard on the radio
the nonsense about malls and whatnot. No comment, really…no comment.
Once I arrived at the prison, I was booked yet a third time,
strip-searched (they do that a lot here), and then given my
complimentary orange jumpsuit, signaling my entry into the isolation
unit. When I was in here last year, I was in population, which is
relatively laid back. There were TVs, you could socialize, had plenty of
time out of your cell, and so forth. Isolation is where the put you if
you are uncontrollable in population, or you’re accused of something
big. In isolation, you are on 23-hour lockdown, which means you can only
be outside of your cell for one hour each day. You are alone in your
cell for those 23-hours, you don’t have the privileges available to
other prisoners, such as haircuts, taking classes, access to the library
cart, etc. The cells here have one way intercoms, meaning the guard can
radio in, but you can’t call out if you need something, while
population cells have two-way intercoms. You aren’t visited by a
chaplain, and so on. Basically, isolation is a place where you just
exist, out of sight, out of mind.
Each cell is basically the size of a small bathroom. In fact imagine
your bathroom with a metal toilet, the sink shrunk down and connected to
the toilet as a single unit, a metal desk sticking out of the wall, a
metal door, a small metal bed sticking out of the opposite wall, and the
walls all painted a pale cream color. That is what the cell looks like.
There is a narrow window in here, although it doesn’t let in sunlight
due to the fact that it faces a gray wall. I do most of everything
inside the cell: pray, read, sleep, etc. It is indeed a lovely little
abode.
My daily activities here are quite limited. I alternate between praying
(this is a great place to get used to more sunnah prayers), adkhar,
reading the newspaper, reading a novel someone might slip under my door,
writing in my journal, responding to letters, sitting back and
thinking, and enjoying my hour of rec-time. You can also travel with
your mind (smile).
As I said before, rec time is for exactly an hour a day. Your
entertainment options include walking around the perimeter of the tiny
unit, calling home, taking a shower, or using the rec-deck. The rec-deck
is the closest thing we have in isolation to being able to go outside.
It’s essentially a room-sized cage, with one side of cage facing the
prison yard, allowing you to see trees, grass, smell fresh air, etc.
Through the metal wiring. (hey, it could be worse). Two down-sides to
rec-time are that your hour is at different, randomly selected time
slots each day, so its hard to coordinate a phone call if someone’s at
work, asleep, etc. Also, they don’t tell you ahead of time what time you
will be out that day. SO, if you want to do some exercises in your cell
in hopes of being able to shower right after, that doesn’t happen down
here. They just radio into your cell and say “Rec-time, rec-time,” take
it or leave it. The good part of rec (besides the obvious) is that they
give you a 15-min warning when your time is almost up, so if you’ve been
on the phone and want to shower before having to go back into your
cell, that helps you to time yourself.
So, rec-time is the #1 highlight of the day here, mainly because it
breaks the routine of being locked in the same cell 23 hours of the day.
The second highlight of the day is mealtime. Mealtimes are useful for
me in a way they aren’t for anyone else. See, in isolation, there is no
way to know what time it is. They forbid watches or clocks of any kind
here. However, I do know that officially, breakfast is served around
5:30AM, lunch around noontime, and dinner around 4:30PM. That way, I can
know when to pray Fajr, Dhuhr, and Maghrib. I just estimate when ‘Asr
and ‘Isha’ come in.
Meals are slid in through a slot in our doors. The food isn’t what you’d
eat at home or out with friends, but its food and I’m grateful for it.
Breakfast is usually some cereal or oatmeal, along with a small apple
and milk. Lunch is usually steamed vegetables, two slices of white
toast, a slice of “meat” and some potatoes or macaroni. Dinner is the
same, except for what we call Fish Fridays, where we actually get
something recognizable: a real fish sandwich similar to something you’d
get at McDonald’s or something (see, they like to spoil us every so
often). Judging by the portions we get for each meal, it seems the
nutritionists at this fine institution are trying to strictly stick to
the minimum 2,200 calorie daily requirement.
When I complete my daily dining experience, I pull out my ‘Maximum
Security Toothpaste” (I’m not joking—that’s what it really says on the
tube), and brush to my heart’s content with the eerie 2-inch long object
that they tell me is supposed to be a toothbrush, although it really
doesn’t reach many of my teeth without major effort.
Each wing of the each unit has what’s referred to as a runner. A runner
is an inmate who’s already been sentenced, and volunteers to do the
cleaning duties for the whole wing in return from more rec-time. The
runner on my wing is cool, a Bosnian Croat. The nice thing about having a
runner is that since they have to sweep the whole wing, they stop by
every cell. That means I can chat with him every day, and we often get
into some good conversations about Yugoslav politics and history. He is
also instrumental in providing me with a daily copy of the newspaper. Of
course my conversations with him take place from behind my cell door,
but its one of the rare forms of interaction with others that are
possible down here. So, al-hamdulillah.
Sometimes, some guards will stop while doing their rounds and have a
couple of words with me, trying to have their own assessment of the Big
Bad Terrorist, after what they’ve come across in the media. It was
interesting to see their reactions when they discovered that I had no
accent, that I was educated, polite, that I ate food, slept at night,
and did all of the things that normal humans do. One of them, an
ex-Marine, is pretty cool with me now and admits that after his few
conversations with me, he’s finding it harder and harder to buy what
he’s read in the news, and jokingly remarked that he’s now playing the
part of my defense lawyer to the other guards in the unit. It is very
easy to cause a stereotype, but it is also very easy to break one. Even
in this unit, there are varying levels to how many restrictions are
placed on a segregation inmate. For a while, I was on the highest level
of restriction, which included full restraints. Full restraints means
that whenever I was out of my cell, even for rec-time, I had my hands
and feet shackled, then tied together—while I was on the phone, walking
to the shower, walking around the unit—everything. Obviously, the
impression the prison administration had from the media was the cause,
as well as whatever they were told by the FBI. After awhile, I had a
meeting with the captain of the unit, and the same thing occurred: once
he had a personal encounter and conversation, observed my behavior, and
got a more accurate assessment of who I was and why I was really here,
they decided to take me off the full restraints, wal-hamdulillah.
There are obvious inconveniences associated with being in a place like
this, but I’ll just mention two. The first is the total lack of a
pleasant scent. Obviously, we have no cologne, musk, or anything like
that. You are in a place that is meant to be dull, unpleasant,
unstimulating, bland. The color of the walls, the color of your food,
your clothes, accessories—everything is devoid of attraction. The smell
in the air is always the same. Nothing to refresh you or enliven your
senses. May Allah reward some of the brothers who wrote to me and were
kind enough to rub some musk on the pages of their letters so that I
could indulge from time to time.
The second annoyance is that I am surrounded by vulgarity and obscenity.
Hearing other inmates yell out to each other from cell to cell, the
majority of their conversations revolve around filthy topics, and it
seems that the majority of their vocabularies consist of curses. It is
to the point that the inmates here who are allowed to have rec-time
together and play chess will refer to the Queen as “the b*@ch.” That
gets to you after a while, especially when you’re used to being around
pure, well-mannered brothers on a daily basis.
There was one inmate who I must credit with doing something to counter
this. We will call him Nelson. Nelson had a very soft voice, and he thus
saw it fit to constantly permeate the air with his renditions of his
favorite Whitney Houston and Celine Dion classics. He would basically
sing the unit to sleep every night, and wake us up in the morning with
his singing. Most of the other guys in the unit were having none of that
and would constantly scream at him to shut up. The more they would
scream, the louder he would sing, which made them scream louder, and so
on. Finally, they wrote a complaint to the unit captain, who came in and
said: “Nelson, you have to stop singing.” Nelson said nothing. As soon
as the captain was out the door, Nelson launched into another song.
Eventually, the guards came in and transferred him to another unit. Poor
Nelson. He was just trying to deal with the stress of isolation in the
way he knew best…
Anyway, I thought I’d close with a poem I wrote recently, called:
“A Race Against Fate”
In a race against fate, they struggle to contain
The light of truth from making gain after gain
Sitting in this cell, I can never complain
While countless other victims are sharing my pain
Victims of a regime that stands confused
Of what will befall it after all it has abused
Despite its claimed virtues over those it has accused
It nullifies its claim with the tactics it has used
They tortured one brother into a painful mess
Until his torture forced him to falsely confess
Life in Supermax for what he said under duress
Seems to be acceptable in the present-day U.S.
And our sister, our pearl, a cover-up gone wrong
Imprisoned by her captors for six years too long
Shot twice in the stomach and still remaining strong
Sleeps in a prison cell where pearls don’t belong
And the scientist, the doctor, the scholar with a plight
They claimed they got him because he urged others to fight
The truth is that he never spoke out of fright
And his persecutors wanted to extinguish his light
The examples are many, but this is just a taste
Of those whose suffering should not go to waste
To helping the oppressed, let us run in haste
It is towards this goal that true men have raced
And remove from yourself the shackles of fear
And make their agenda abundantly clear
With honor, let us defend what we hold dear
Our beliefs, and our brethren—we must start from here
Until when will our sons be dragged from their beds
To be handcuffed and kidnapped by invading Feds
Before our mothers can even cover their heads
It’s the new McCarthyism, and we are the Reds
If you speak out against this, you’re a ‘terrorist’
The black label reserved for those who resist
It doesn’t really matter how much you insist
That you’re no monster, they will always persist
In the deception they have managed to master so well
That only the fair-minded are able to tell
That this plan that could’ve only been hatched in Hell
Is for all who speak up to be thrown in a cell
They think they are ‘free,’ but they are truly constrained
The thirst for oppression leaves their humanity restrained
In the end, they will see that all they have gained
Is the attention of He who defense those they have chained…
… was-salamu ‘alaykum wa Rahmatullah wa Barakatuh
Your brother,
Tariq Mehanna
