Inside “Little Gitmo”: Documents Detail Inmate Surveillance at Federal Prisons

January 24, 2011 By 1 Comment

Public Intelligence, a web-based project that describes itself as ”an international consortium of independent researchers who wish to aggregate and defend public information while maintaining its accessibility around the globe,” has published a series of documents relating to the Communications Management Units at two federal prison. As we’ve written before, these “experimental” units, sometimes referred to as “Little Guantanamos,” were established secretly during the Bush Administration, supposedly designed to hold high-risk inmates, including terrorists, whose crimes warrant heightened monitoring of their external and internal communications. But the reality, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Center for Constitutional Rights, is that many prisoners end up in the CMUs ”for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system.”

According to the analysis provided by Public Intelligence:

Several restricted intelligence reports from the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons obtained by Public Intelligence detail the incredible levels of surveillance conducted on inmates convicted of terrorism offenses.  In particular, the reports detail inmates stored in secretive units known as “Communication Management Units” (CMU) which have been widely criticized by the ACLU and other human rights groups for placing severe restrictions on the activities, as well as visitation and communication rights of inmates housed in the facilities.

There are known to be at least two CMU facilities, one in the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana (THA CMU) and another in the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois (MAR CMU).  All written correspondence to or from the inmates in these facilities is reviewed by staff and may be rejected.  All telephone communications with the inmates must be live-monitored by staff, recorded and analyzed, and must be in English.  Requests for non-English conversations must be made ten days in advance and must be monitored by a translator.  In addition to these restrictions, the number and frequency of calls is greatly reduced from the 300 minutes per month available to general population inmates to one call per week with a maximum length of fifteen minutes.  At the warden’s discretion, the length of this call may be reduced to three minutes.  All visitation with inmates housed in a CMU are conducted in “non contact” facilities, separated by glass and communicating through a telephone.  These visits are also restricted to twice per month for two hours at a time.

Public Intelligence also describes the types of surveillance used on these inmates, including apparently illegal monitoring of privileged attorney-client communications.

The documents obtained by Public Intelligence are raw intelligence reports from Federal Bureau of Prisons analysts detailing the intimate surveillance of each inmates communications during the reporting period.  Each report summarizes a particular detainees communications of interest, describing in great detail the source or destination of the communication with complete phone numbers and addresses, as well as the contents of the communication.  Sometimes, the reports appear to be dealing with communications that are legitimately made to people and organizations connected with an inmate’s criminal history, such as white supremacists contacting other known white supremacists.  However, many of the communications that are monitored are nothing more than mundane conversations to family and extended relatives.  For example, the communications of Ali Sofyan, an inmate of the Terre Haute CMU, are intensely scrutinized as he discusses his desire for a new Qur’an, describing how he would also like to sing passages from Yemeni wedding songs to the other prisoners.  Another inmate, Essam El Shami, is discussed over multiple pages in one of the reports for corresponding with his wife and son.  The analyst even feels the need to quote entire passages from a letter to El Shami’s son:

“Keep on praying and take care of the school and work, and soon, after daddy is released, 6-8 months later, no one of you have to work again and daddy will take good care of you all and give you all the money that you all needed. Who knows? You could have your own business, but first the college. Son, again I don’t need to tell, take care of mama. She is all we get. She is our angel.”

One report simply states that an inmate by the name of John Pankins has changed religions from Protestant to Muslim.  The analyst tries to ascertain the “reasoning or influence” behind such a decision, but ultimately is unsuccessful.  Pankins is listed as being incarcerated at the Marion, Illinois CMU despite having committed offenses with no connection to terrorism…

There are also several instances of what appears to be illegal monitoring of confidential communications conducted under attorney-client privilege.  According to the official U.S. Department of Justice rules for the CMU at Terre Haute, “under no circumstances will privileged attorney-client communication be monitored, as prohibited by national policy.”  However, there are examples of the monitoring of authorized attorney-client communications in the documents. 

You can read the full analysis here, and access the original documents, as published on the Public Intelligence website, here.

Terre Haute Federal Prison, home to the first Communications Management Unit

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Supermax Psych: “Behavior Modification” at Marion Federal Prison

January 22, 2011 By 4 Comments

Eddie Griffin, a former Civil Rights Movement activist and Black Panther, spent 12 years in federal prison for bank robbery, beginning in the early 1970s. After he was injured doing prison labor at Terre Haute Federal Prison, and refused to return to work under unsafe conditions, he was labelled “incorrigible” and transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.

Built to replace Alcatraz in 1963, Marion is widely acknowledged to be  the first modern “supermax,” and was once the highest security and most notorious prison in the federal system. That distinction today belongs to ADX Florence in Colorado, but Marion is now home to one of the ultra-isolated federal Communications Management Units opened during the Bush Administration.

“Breaking Men’s Minds: Behavior Control and Human Experimentation at the Federal Prison in Marion” is a remarkable article authored by Griffin and published in the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons in 1993 (vol. 4, no. 2). (H/T to Alan for alerting us to the piece.) In it, he discusses the realities of the “behavior modification program” instituted at Marion in the 1960s. Griffin begins by describing the control of every moment–and every movement–in the lives of prisoners.

In prisoners’ words, it is ‘part of the program’–part of the systematic process of reinforcing the unconditional fact of a prisoner’s existence: that he has no control over the regulation and orientation of his own being. In behavioral psychology, this condition is called ‘learned helplessness’–a derivative of Skinnerian operant conditioning (commonly called ‘learning techniques’). In essence, a prisoner is taught to be helpless, dependent on his overseer. He is taught to accept without question the overseer’s power to control him. This rebels against human consciousness, so some prisoners seek means of resistance. Others try to circumnavigate the omnipotent force via escape.

But the omnipotent is also omnipresent. Nothing escapes Marion’s elaborate network of ‘eyes’. Between television monitors, prisoner spies, collaborators, and prison officials, every crevice of the prison is overlaid by a constant watch. Front-line officers specially trained in the cold, calculated art of observation, watch prisoners’ movements with a particular meticulousness, scrutinizing little details in behavior patterns, then recording them in the Log Book. This aid provides the staff with a means to manipulate certain individuals’ behavior. It is feasible to calculate a prisoner’s level of sensitivity from the information, so his vulnerability can be tested with a degree of precision. Some behavior modification experts call these tests ‘stress assessment.’ Prisoners call it harassment. In some cases, selected prisoners are singled out for one or several of these ‘differential treatment’ tactics. A prisoner could have his mail turned back or ‘accidentally’ mutilated. He could become the object of regular searches, or even his visitors could be strip searched. These and more tactics are consistent with those propagated by one Dr. Edgar H. Schein.

Griffin goes on to tell the story of what he calls “the history of this behavior modification laboratory,” which its inventors and practicioners did not hesitate to call “brainwashing.”

At a Washington, DC conference in 1962 organized for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) by the National Institutes of Mental Health, Schein presented his ideas on brainwashing. Addressing the topic of ‘Man against Man’: Brainwashing, he stated:

In order to  produce marked changes of behavior and/or attitude, it is necessary to weaken, undermine or remove the supports to the old patterns of behavior and the old attitudes. Because most of these supports are the face to-face confirmation of present behavior and attitudes, which are provided by those with whom close emotional ties exist, it is often necessary to break those emotional ties. This can be done either by removing the individual physically and preventing any communication with those whom he cares about, or by proving to him that those whom he respects aren’t worthy of it and, indeed, should be actively mistrusted. 

Dr. Schein then provided the group with a list of specific examples:

  • Physical removal of prisoners from areas sufficiently isolated to effectively break or seriously weaken close emotional ties.
  • Segregation of all natural leaders.
  • Use of cooperative prisoners as leaders.
  • Prohibition of group activities not in line with brainwashing objectives.
  • Spying on prisoners and reporting back private material.
  • Tricking men into written statements which are thens howed to others.
  • Exploitation of opportunists and informers.
  • Convincing prisoners that they can trust no one.
  • Treating those who are willing to collaborate in far more lenient ways than those who are not.
  • Punishing those who show uncooperative attitudes.
  • Systematic withholding of mail.
  • Preventing contact with anyone non-sympathetic tothe method of treatment and regimen of the captive populace.
  • Disorganization of all group standards among prisoners.
  • Building a group conviction among the prisoners that they have been abandoned by and totally isolated from their social order.
  • Undermining of all emotional supports.
  • Preventing prisoners from writing home or to friends in the community regarding the conditions of their confinement.
  • Making available and permitting access to only those publications and books that contain materials which are neutral to or supportive of the desired new attitudes.
  • Placing individuals into new and ambiguous situations for which the standards are kept deliberately unclear and then putting pressure on him to conform to what is desired in order to win favor and a reprieve from the pressure.
  • Placing individuals whose willpower has been severely weakened or eroded into a living situation with several others who are more advanced in their thought-reform whose job it is to further undermine the individual’s emotional supports.
  • Using techniques of character invalidation, ie., humiliations, revilement, shouting, to induce feelings of guilt, fear, and suggestibility; coupled with sleeplessness, an exacting prison regimen and periodic interrogational interviews.
  • Meeting all insincere attempts to comply with cellmates’ pressures with renewed hostility.
  • Renewed pointing out to the prisoner by cell mates of where he has in the past, or is in the present, not been living up to his own standards or values.
  • Rewarding of submission and subserviency to the attitudes encompassing the brainwashing objective with a lifting of pressure and acceptance as a human being.
  • Providing social and emotional supports which reinforce the new attitudes.

…[F]ollowing Schein’s address, then-director of the BOP, James V. Bennett, encouraged the administrators and wardens throughout the federal prison system to put Schein’s techniques into practice. ‘We can manipulate our environment and culture. We can perhaps undertake some of the techniques Dr. Schein discussed…There’s a lot of research to do. Do it as individuals. Do it as groups and let us know the results’.

That was in 1962. Since then the results have been compiled and evaluated many times over, and all but one of Schein’s suggested techniques have been left intact at Marion–along with the addition of several new features.

There’s much more to this long article, which deserves to be read in full.

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Storming “Little Gitmo”: Lawsuit Challenges Restricted Units in Federal Prisons

April 1, 2010 By 9 Comments

U.S. Penitentiary, Marion, Illinois

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in D.C. on behalf of five prisoners held in solitary confinement in the “Communications Management Units” (CMUs) of two federal prisons. The “experimental” units were supposedly designed to hold high-risk inmates, including terrorists, whose crimes warrant heightened monitoring of their external and internal communications. But the reality, the CCR asserts, is that many prisoners end up in the CMUs ”for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system.”

The two CMUs, at the federal prisons in Marion and Terre Haute, now hold about 70 men. They were secretly created by the federal Bureau of Prisons during the Bush Administration, in 2006 and 2007, and have remained intact since the Obama Administration came to power. 

Inmates in the CMUs are subject to isolation which in some respects exceeds even that of federal supermax prisoners. According to the CCR:

Prisoners in the CMU, alone out of all general population prisoners within the federal system, are categorically banned from any physical contact with visiting friends and family, including babies, infants, and minor children. To further their social isolation, the BOP has placed severe restrictions on their access to phone calls and work and educational opportunities.

What’s more, unlike most supermax prisoners, those assigned to the CMUs are not even accused of any disciplinary violations that might warrant their segregation–for example, attacks on guards or other inmates, or other violations of prison rules. And they receive not even a pretense of due process before being placed–and held permanently–in these extreme conditions. As CCR explains:

All five men confined in the CMU have been classified as low or medium security, but were designated to the CMU despite their relatively, and in two cases perfectly, clean disciplinary history. Not a single one has received discipline for any communications-related infraction within the last decade, nor any significant disciplinary offense.

Like all CMU prisoners, the men received no procedural protections related to their designation, and were not allowed to examine or refute the allegations that led to their transfer. They are also being held indefinitely at the CMU without any meaningful review process. They expect to serve their entire sentences in these isolated and punitive units.

Predictably, the lack of procedural protections has allowed for an unchecked pattern of discriminatory and retaliatory designations to the CMU. Rather than being related to a legitimate penological purpose or based on substantiated information, our clients’ designations were instead based on their religious and/or perceived political beliefs, or in retaliation for other protected First Amendment activity.

Who exactly are these prisoners, deemed so dangerous that they cannot be permitted to communicate with the outside world–or to hold their children? Unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of them are Muslims. (The BOP denies that it is discriminating on racial or religious ground, and one document on the CMU says inmates there “represent multiple ethnic backgrounds, which include an international flavor.”) Many of the others CMU residents have what are considered subversive political views–among them environmental activists convicted as “ecoterrorists.”

As an article in Reuters described it, the CMUs have become known “for holding what critics call members of the ‘al Qaeda B-team,’ accused Islamic militants who are deemed to be less of a security risk than the high-value detainees, but too important to mix with the general prison population.” Higher profile Islamic terrorists like Ramzi Yousef, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Omar Abdel-Rahman are held at ADX Florence, the federal supermax in Colorado. In the CMUs, it seems to be the prisoners’ ideas, rather than the prisoner themselves, who are considered dangerous.

Of the plaintiffs in the CCR suit is Yassin Muhiddin Aref, an Iraqi Kurd who served as imam of a mosque in Albany. In 2006, Aref was convicted of aiding in a plot to buy a shoulder-fired missile to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat. The plot, however, was a fake–invented by an the FBI, and presented to Aref, in a controversial sting operation, by an informant who was working for the Bureau in exchange for a reduced sentence on a separate charge. Aref is serving a sentence of 15 years.

Another plaintiff is Daniel McGowan, who was sentenced to seven years for serving as a lookout when during a 2001 arson at an Oregon lumber company, carried out by members of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). He was arrested in 2005 in another FBI sting, this one using an informant who was an old friend of McGowan’s, and reconnected with him at an animal rights conference in New York.  At the time, the Bush Justice Department was calling militant environmental activists “the number one domestic terrorism threat,” and rounded up more than a dozen of them in what it called “Operation Backfire.”

Another of these “eco-terrorists,” Andrew Stepanian, spent six months in the CMU–and is one of the units’ few former residents to be out of prison. Stepanian told Reuters that guards frequently referred to the CMU as “Little Gitmo” or “CTU”–for the term “Counter Terrorism Unit” as used in the TV show ”24.”

The CCR’s suit calls for the Bureau of prisons to transfer prisoners out of the CMU, or provide justification for continuing to hold them in these conditions. Either way, the suit demands that the plaintiffs be given the same rights to communicate as other prisoners have.

David Fathi, who heads the the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, told Reuters:”You get people sent to a place incommunicado. You expect this from totalitarian regimes, but not from the Obama administration.”

Together with the draconian “Special Administrative Measures” being imposed on terrorism suspects before they have even been tried or convicted, the existence of the CMUs suggests that it may no longer matter all that much whether or not the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is ever closed–because Gitmo has already come home to stay.

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