Previously a facility for convicts sentenced to death, the Terre Haute prison in Indiana was remodelled to take in second-rate terror convicts, most of whom are Arab Muslims. Possibilities of contact with the outside world are strictly limited, the newspaper reports, adding that the inmates' phone calls and mail are limited and monitored, their visits are restricted to four hours a month, and they must communicate with each other in English.
The only non-Muslim inmates are an unidentified Colombian militant and Croatian Zvonko Busic.
Busic was transferred to the Terre Haute prison from the Allenwood federal prison in Pennsylvania, where in the summer of 2006 he completed serving his 30th year in prison, thus meeting conditions to seek pardon.
Although at the time his release was announced and preparations were under way to transfer him to Croatia, the pardons board in Washington rejected Busic's request and decided that he could apply for clemency again in July 2008.
The facility for terror convicts in Terre Haute is a less restrictive version of the super-maximum prison facility near Florence, Colorado, where some of the most notorious terrorists in the United States are imprisoned, such as al-Qaida operative Zacarias Mousaoui and Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.
Carmen Hernandez, a Washington attorney representing Busic and president of the US Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers, told the daily that officials in charge of the prison administration did not consider transfer to the Terre Haute facility a penalty, which was why hearings and other related procedures were not obligatory.
They claim that this is not a penalty, but when access is being restricted, it certainly looks like a penalty. If you restrict people's freedoms more than they already are restricted, it has to be for a reason, and it seems not to exist in this case, Hernandez said.
Zvonko Busic and his four accomplices hijacked a TWA plane flying from New York to Chicago on 10 September 1976. During the hijacking, a police officer was killed by a warning bomb planted by the hijackers at a New York airport.
All hijackers were found guilty, Busic was sentenced to life, while his accomplices were sentenced to long-term imprisonment which they have served in full.