Communications management unit
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A communications management unit, or CMU, is a restricted-contact housing unit inside an American federal prison. There are two of them, John Kiriakou says: one at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, the old federal death row, converted after a new death row was built, and one at the supermax prison in Marion, Illinois.

Purpose and drift

The three words matter, in Kiriakou's account: a unit inside the most secure prisons in America where all communication with the outside world can be controlled. They were built, he says, for the worst of the worst, the prisoners the American public had to be protected from. He names Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh; the last surviving Abu Nidal organization hijacker from the 1980s; and John Gotti, the Gambino boss, who died in one.

"But that's not really what they are," he says. "They're used to silence people whose messages are inconvenient for the government." His examples are the drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, in Kiriakou's view a bona fide American hero, the man who told the public the drone program killed civilians at an eighty-percent rate, and who was sentenced to 42 months, and the hacktivist Marty Gottesfeld, who "never hurt anybody." Viktor Bout was held in one as well.

Kiriakou distinguishes the CMU from special administrative measures, or SAMs, which cut a prisoner off entirely, no family calls, no visitors, no contact with the media ever. Discussing Gottesfeld's case, he agreed with the description of a regime so restrictive that the unit would not even issue a list of rules or a handbook, leaving a prisoner unable to point to anything in writing and punishable at any time.

Kiriakou's own confinement

Kiriakou served part of his sentence in what he describes as a modified communications management unit. He did have email access, but every message was delayed five days; everything incoming and outgoing was checked; his letters were slit open, read, reinserted and resealed; and his phone calls were recorded and monitored, sometimes live as he spoke. "There's really no way to get word out when you're in a communications management unit," he says. His response was the blog he smuggled out, which became Doing Time Like a Spy.

Torture, and the Assange case

Speaking about Julian Assange's treatment in 2021, he first invoked the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, "nils melser has said repeatedly nils mills are the the un special rapporteur on torture has said repeatedly that what julian has been uh experiencing is a form of torture", and then turned the same standard on the United States: "we all know that that the way the united states practices solitary confinement is a form of torture we know that these cmus these communications management units that we have in our in our medium and maximum security prisons is a form of of torture."

He had expected the worst for Assange specifically: not a run-of-the-mill prisoner, he would be put in solitary and into a CMU "in some godforsaken place", the ADX at Florence, or Terre Haute, and whatever was decided, it would be a human rights violation, would push the man over the edge mentally, and could lead to his suicide. When the extradition judge grounded her ruling partly in those conditions, Kiriakou said he was "quite excited", after years of writing and talking about CMUs, a court had finally taken them seriously.

Marion, and how Hale got there

Kiriakou's account of Hale's placement makes the unit a punishment applied after sentencing rather than by it. Judge O'Grady had recommended a low-security prison with treatment for depression and addiction; "the US Bureau of Prisons ignored that recommendation, and instead sent him to the communications management unit of the supermax prison at Marion, Illinois."

His ranking of the destination: "this is one of the two most secure and most dreaded prisons in the entire US prison system," holding "some of the most dangerous people in the world, including terrorists and Mafia leaders."

Where Daniel Hale was actually sent

Judge Liam O'Grady ordered Daniel Hale sent to the low-security prison at Butner, North Carolina, the largest prison hospital complex in America, with a maximum-security penitentiary, two medium-security prisons, two low-security prisons and a minimum-security work camp, all attached to hospitals, so that federal prisoners needing cancer treatment, surgery or mental health care go there. Given his PTSD, that was the point of the order.

He did not go there. After the Alexandria jail and the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Virginia, which Kiriakou calls "a God-forsaken maximum security penitentiary", Hale arrived instead at the Supermax at Marion, Illinois, the first Supermax, built to replace Alcatraz in the early 1960s and since converted into a communications management unit.

The conditions

Kiriakou itemises them: two showers a week; exercise three days a week, meaning "you're led into a six by ten foot cage outside where he can walk in circles for an hour like a dog"; no physical access to mail, which is posted on a screen to be read and then disappears; one phone call a month, and only to his attorney, with no calls to family; visits strictly controlled and conducted through thick glass over an intercom, one hour at a time. Kiriakou and Thomas Drake were both put on Hale's visitors list and both rejected.

A CMU is normally reserved for the most dangerous prisoners in America, people convicted of terrorism offences, of conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, hijackers, "the most dangerous neo-Nazi skinheads in America", "and then there's Daniel."

The outcome confounded the fear that he would be in danger there. Kiriakou reports from Hale's attorney that "the terrorists have welcomed him because he's the drone whistleblower, and it's the terrorists who are protecting him from the skinheads." Many of the CMU guards have also been friendly, telling him they are watching out for him "because they don't believe that he did anything wrong, or even if he did, that he doesn't belong in the CMU."

See also

- Solitary confinement
- Julian Assange
- Daniel Hale
- Marty Gottesfeld
- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
