Louis Pepe was a federal prison guard at MCC Manhattan in 2000 when he was brutally attacked, stabbed in the eye, and more by two of the defendants in the case involving the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. One of the attackers, Mamdouh Mahmud Salimm, was reputed to be an associate of Osama bin Laden.

Salimn gets sentenced Monday and Pepe plans to be there. He is outraged that Salimn will only get 17 to 21 years for the assault, even though he is facing trial and a possible life sentence on conspiracy charges for the 1998 attack. We can't say we blame him, if you read the account of the attack, it sounds horrific.

But what's up with Pepe's claim that the U.S. Government has downplayed the attack and cast him in a role that suggests he was careless in allowing the attack to happen? This is one sad story, here's some of it.

In the interview Sunday with The Associated Press, Pepe sat in his wheelchair in a small room in the Queens house where he lives with his parents. Pepe said the government and Salim have combined to sanitize what happened on Nov. 1, 2000, portraying the assault as quick and almost entirely Salim's doing after the guard failed to handcuff the inmates.

Pepe said he will tell the judge how he properly handcuffed the inmates before they slipped free, blinded him with hot sauce, beat him repeatedly and even tried to rape him before stabbing him to get his keys in a bid to free other suspected terrorists. "Both of them did it, not just one," Pepe said excitedly, his right eye wide open and a piece of gauze resting in the socket where the left eye used to be....Pepe said the attack lasted an hour, rather than the 20 minutes that prison authorities maintain it took for help to arrive from less-isolated parts of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center.