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]
Kiriakou’s answer to the threat
Kiriakou reports that staff at FCI Loretto were actively discussing subjecting him to diesel therapy for the remainder of his sentence — moving him between prisons by van, bus or aircraft, never staying anywhere long enough to receive telephone, email, mail or visitation privileges, so that his family and attorneys would not know what time zone he was in. He observes that he could have moved to a different prison every week for the rest of his sentence and still not visited them all.[5]
He expected the Bureau of Prisons to justify any such transfer as a bed-space issue or as being for his own safety, while the real motive would be retaliation for the letters from Loretto and his press interviews. His stated protection was that his attorneys were willing to sue individual Bureau employees as well as the Bureau itself.[6]
Rather than rely on that alone, he published the case law. Citing Frazier v. DuBois (1990), he noted that although prisoners enjoy no constitutional right to remain in a particular institution, prison officials have no discretion to punish an inmate for exercising his First Amendment rights by transferring him elsewhere.[7] He added authorities on retaliation, holding that plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to criticise a public official’s performance of his duties, and that the right exists to be free of official action taken in retaliation even where probable cause for that action exists.[8] He closed with Largent v. Texas on censorship — that any regulation making the dissemination of ideas depend on official approval of the distributor constitutes administrative censorship in an extreme form.[9]
All of these cases, he pointed out, are freely available in the prison law library, and suggested prison officials acquaint themselves with them.[9]