Legal mail
==========

Legal mail is the category of privileged prisoner correspondence that John Kiriakou used to get his writing out of FCI Loretto.

Ordinary mail was not private. Kiriakou says prisoners' letters were read, inspected, photocopied and sent to the FBI, and that he knew this thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. Legal mail could not be treated that way.

The method

Kiriakou wrote continuously, not only his book but the Letters from Loretto, and sent everything to his attorney. He addressed each envelope to Attorney Jesselyn Radack, Esquire, Government Accountability Project, Washington, DC, and then wrote legal mail at the bottom, on the back and on the envelope itself.

His comparison for the protection is a diplomatic pouch: staff could not touch legal mail.

He would walk to the mail room, say he had legal mail, and watch it go straight into the bag with the stamp already on it.

The confrontation

Kiriakou recounts a guard demanding to know how he was getting the letters out. His answer was to ask what the man thought, he was getting them out legally. Kiriakou says the officer did not get the double meaning, because he was too stupid.

What it carried

The channel is what made the Letters from Loretto possible. Kiriakou sent them to Radack, who passed them to Jane Hamsher of the now-defunct site Firedoglake; Hamsher published them and forwarded them to Arianna Huffington, who ran the first as a banner headline on the Huffington Post. Within 24 hours, Kiriakou says, it went completely crazy, viral, in today's language, and within another 24 hours the prison was fielding interview requests from CNN, Fox, ABC News, Time, The Week, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, and even Playboy and The Economist.

His conclusion at that moment, he says, was that this was going to be his superpower.

The same channel carried later instalments. Kiriakou says Radack and Firedoglake used to print the letters immediately on arrival, and that the guards would then start passing them around among themselves.

See also

- Letter from Loretto
- Jesselyn Radack
- Arianna Huffington
- FCI Loretto
- Freedom of Information Act
