On Videotapes of Jailed Sheik, Hatred and Candy Bars

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. 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.Ms. Stewart is accused of abetting terrorism by violating strict prison restrictions imposed on her client to relay a message of violence from him to militant followers in Egypt. The videotapes, of meetings with Ms. Stewart and the sheik in the federal penitentiary in Rochester, Minn., on May 19 and 20, 2000, are the most dramatic evidence prosecutors have presented so far in the trial, which began in June. But the sheik whom the jury saw on the videos was not the raging prophet of jihad that prosecutors have portrayed. While his anti-American views have not mellowed since he was first arrested for terrorism in 1993, the elderly cleric is clearly ailing and disoriented after eight years of solitary confinement in United States prisons. He is serving a life sentence for conspiring to plan terrorist attacks in New York. [more ]