Hang onto your heartstrings, people. This story will tear them out by the roots.
Ramzi Yousef, inmate No. 03911 at a federal “supermax” penitentiary, is serving life with no parole plus 240 years in a 7-by-11-foot cell with no bars and one small high window, far from other inmates, prison staff and the world beyond the fortress deep in the Colorado Rockies.
He has been there for 15 years, in nearly 24-hour solitary confinement at the prison they call the “Fortress in the Rockies…”
Yousef, now 44, knows he will never go free. An avowed terrorist convicted in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he killed six people and injured more than 1,000. But in a lawsuit, he is trying to persuade a federal judge to at least release him from solitary confinement…
Despite his good behavior, Yousef says, he is being kept isolated because he is a convicted terrorist, something he can never change — and that, he argues, is a violation of his due process of law.
“I request an immediate end to my solitary confinement and ask to be in a unit in an open prison environment where inmates are allowed outside their cells for no less than 14 hours a day,” he wrote the warden…
The suit says that long-term solitary confinement leaves him “no hope or prospect of any remedial condition” and that it has led to “severe psychological trauma.”
Poor baby. Hey, guess what else causes severe psychological trauma? Getting attacked by terrorists.
First, waterboarding was redefined as “torture,” and now they’re trying to cheapen the term even further. Life in solitary, on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime, is now torture. Maybe they’ll call it room-and-boarding.
Just as a reminder, here’s what Yousef said when he was convicted:
“Yes, I am a terrorist, and proud of it as long as it is against the U.S. government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.”
Well then, he’s better off not talking to us. He can keep standing in the corner in his dunce cap and STFU.