“The Bureau of Prisons answers to no one” is how John Kiriakou states what he calls a tough lesson he learned by living it. The Bureau of Prisons sits inside the Justice Department, and it is accountable, in his account, to nobody: “They don’t care what the judge says. They don’t even care what their own prosecutors say. BOP sends people to whatever facility BOP wants to send people.”[1][2]
His own case
At sentencing his attorneys asked for a minimum security work camp. The prosecution did not object and the judge agreed. On the appointed day he drove up with his cousin, his cousin’s son, two of his eleven attorneys and a documentary film crew, and knocked on the camp door — the ordinary procedure, since camps have no fences and no locked doors.[1]
He was sent across the street to the main prison to be processed, and was told there that his paperwork placed him in the prison itself. The guard’s answer to his objection was that this was not what the paperwork said.[1] It took him five days to reach a telephone. His lead attorney told him a motion could be filed but that the hearing would take about two years, by which time he would be home.[1]
The consequence for others
Kiriakou has applied the same point directly to Julian Assange. He told Assange’s lawyers in Washington and London that assurances given by prosecutors about where he would be held are not the prosecutors’ promise to make, because the Bureau will put him wherever it decides to put him.[3][4]
That is not a claim about bad faith so much as about who holds the pen. In Kiriakou’s description the sentencing court sets the term; the Bureau, unreviewably and at its own convenience, sets everything else.[2]