After visits, shackles tightened on Al-Najjar

By SUSAN ASCHOFF

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 10, 2000

A Tampa man jailed three years for alleged ties to terrorists was moved to maximum-security this week after visits from the American Civil Liberties Union and a U.S. congressman.

Mazen Al-Najjar, who has been held in a Bradenton jail since 1997, was moved to a high-security area for criminal immigrants, with tighter restrictions on movement and privileges.

"He is a high-profile inmate, and we decided we need him in a more secure area," said David Bristow of the Manatee County Sheriff's Office, which operates the facility for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Al-Najjar has been held at the INS facility in Bradenton since his arrest on May 19, 1997. No criminal charges have been filed.

He is ordered deported on an expired visa and has been denied bail while he appeals based on secret government evidence that he is a threat to national security.

Al-Najjar has been moved several times in the past because of overcrowding, but in those cases the conditions of his detention did not change.

One of Al-Najjar's high-profile visitors said he found the news disturbing.

"We're very concerned about the timing. It comes two days after he met with the president of the ACLU," said Greg Nojeim, ACLU's legislative counsel in Washington, D.C. "We will be looking into the matter to determine whether the move could have been an effort to retaliate against him."

Al-Najjar's legal status has not changed in the three years he has been detained.

What has changed is the national attention he attracts.

On Saturday, Al-Najjar was visited in jail by Nojeim, ACLU president Nadine Strossen and Michigan ACLU legal director Wendy Wagenheim. A week earlier, U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell of California came to see him.

House Minority Whip David Bonior of Michigan has visited twice. Last week, Bonior learned that his request for monthly contact visits for Al-Najjar had been approved by Attorney General Janet Reno. It was more than a year ago that Al-Najjar last saw his daughters without a glass window between them.

Inspired by Al-Najjar's case, Bonior and Campbell introduced legislation to ban the use of secret evidence. The bill has since signed on more than 85 sponsors and is scheduled for a full hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on May 23.

Al-Najjar said he does not know why the jail would punish him now.

"It's a real shock. I didn't do anything," Al-Najjar said by phone Monday night. "The change makes me very much alarmed."

Jail administrators have called him a model prisoner. He mended jail uniforms and assisted at the medical clinic.

Al-Najjar said the profile of those fighting to free him may have prompted someone in the government to try and tip the scales the other way.

"Maybe they thought, "If you think you have some supporters, we can settle this account in a way you don't like,' " he said.

His new quarters consist of four single cells above and four below, opening onto a small communal area with tables and a television, he said. Inmates are permitted to leave the area twice a day to make phone calls and get coffee or sodas. Previously, Al-Najjar could place calls throughout the day. He could leave the communal area for a quieter hallway in which to spread his prayer rug.

A Palestinian refugee and Muslim who has lived in the United States almost 20 years, Al-Najjar worked at a think tank in Tampa in the early 1990s.

The government says it was a front for fundraising for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization that has admitted to bombing attacks to derail the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.

Neither Al-Najjar nor his attorneys have seen the government's classified proof.

"The whole situation, to be deprived of due process, is so outrageous from its inception," said the ACLU's Strossen after her visit. "The more people who know about it, the more Americans' basic sense of fairness will come forward."

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