From The New York Times
The scene was captured on secretly filmed videotape shown last week in Federal District Court in Manhattan: Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Islamic cleric and convicted terrorist, devouring Baby Ruth bars even though his prison doctors had forbidden chocolate because he is diabetic.
| I think I'll take up a collection to buy him more... |
The tapes, displayed at the trial of the sheik's lawyer, Lynne F. Stewart, show him pining to see a geisha girl, and railing about foul-smelling gases that he believed prison authorities had sprayed into his cell to drive him mad. ...
| That might have been the chili, though... |
The elderly cleric is clearly ailing and disoriented after eight years of solitary confinement in United States prisons. ...
| His turban was perhaps a bit overwrapped when he went in... |
In a discussion that suggested the toll his confinement had taken, the sheik tells how he battled the odors invading his cell. "They used to get to my brain. I couldn't read, pray or do anything," he says. "Oh my Lord, they messed me up." He went around his cell covering any openings with paper, and then he prayed, he says, for tape to secure it. "Lord, I need adhesive tape," he said, and soon his prayers were answered. "I found adhesive tape," he says, without explanation, and Mr. Yousry exclaims: "Praise God."
| "So then I prayed for a pony and went for a ride!" |
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