David Kirkpatrick, the Times' excellent (and departing) Cairo correspondent, profiles Egyptian-American former political prisoner Mohammed Soltan:
Mr. Soltan was initiated into prison life through a standard ritual known as “the welcoming”: Stripped to his underwear, he was forced to run between two rows of guards who beat him and the other new inmates for two hours with batons, belts and whips, he said.
A friend changed the dressing on his arm with a soiled cotton ball. Later, other prisoners held him down as an inmate who was a doctor used a straight razor to remove the metal rods from his arm.
At his final destination within the prison system, at the Tora prison complex in Cairo, he was housed in a dungeonlike cell, about five yards per side, with about 25 other political prisoners — a mix of Brotherhood members, militant jihadists, and left-leaning or secular activists. It was there, he said, that he began to think of a hunger strike as an alternative to the jihadists’ urgings to join them.
The jailers “strip away your freedom. They wipe the floor with your pride. They make sure you have no will left,” he said, “but the hunger strike reverses that process.”
Egyptian jails are an utter disaster – jihadist factories, essentially.