John Kiriakou described diesel therapy as one of the most effective instruments of control available to Bureau of Prisons administrators. The mechanics: guards put an inmate in a transport vehicle and keep them moving between facilities indefinitely. The term comes from the diesel fuel burning as the prisoner rides.[1]
For the duration — potentially up to six months — the prisoner has no access to a phone, no access to email, and is not permitted even pen and paper. Family members searching the BOP website find only “in transit” with no origin and no destination: “Nobody has any idea where you are, whether you’re dead or alive.”[2]
Kiriakou described this as the one threat at FCI Loretto that actually concerned him. Solitary did not frighten him — he told the warden directly that he had gone nose-to-nose with al-Qaeda and could stand to lose a few pounds. But diesel therapy meant disappearing from his family’s knowledge entirely, with no ability to communicate or be found.[2]
In a separate telling, Kiriakou describes the practice as moving a prisoner via prison bus or plane — nicknamed “Con Air” — continuously for the length of a sentence, relocating him roughly every six weeks so family cannot locate him and he has no access to mail or writing materials.[3] He also recounts that prison officials at one point actively discussed placing him in diesel therapy specifically to cut him off from press access; the route out of Loretto, Pennsylvania runs to the maximum-security penitentiary at Canaan, Pennsylvania, the transportation hub for the Mid-Atlantic region.[4]