Discussing the confinement of Marty Gottesfeld in a communications management unit, Kiriakou offered a case he had witnessed himself. At FCI Loretto in Pennsylvania he served time with an Iraqi Kurd who had come to them from the CMU at Terre Haute, and who was placed with Kiriakou in Loretto’s modified CMU.[1]
Kiriakou describes the man’s story as being as sad as Gottesfeld’s — prison was the last place he belonged, but the deck was stacked against him, and he had been put in the CMU because he was taken for an Arab. Kiriakou corrects himself mid-sentence: the man was not really an Arab, he was a Kurd.[2]
The place he came from
Kiriakou has described the Terre Haute unit itself in more detail elsewhere, and the description explains why he told the Kurd nobody got out of it. Communications management units are specialised units inside the US federal prison system, and there are two of them: one in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, the other at the supermax prison in Marion, Illinois.[3] The Terre Haute unit is a converted execution wing: “It used to be Federal Death Row. They built a new death row and then made the old death row into a CMU.”[3] The prison also still holds the federal death row.[4]
The three words in the name are the point. Kiriakou calls them “important. Three important words” — a unit inside the most secure prisons in America where all communication with the outside world can be controlled — and gives the population it was justified by: the blind sheikh, now dead, who was not to be allowed to plan further attacks from inside, and the last surviving hijacker of the Abu Nidal organisation.[5]
His objection is that the population no longer matches the justification. Naming Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower, and Gottesfeld — “a hacktivist and never hurt anybody” — he says the CMUs and the special administrative measures alongside them are supposed to be for “the worst of the worst, the most dangerous, the most horrible, the most deadly prisoners that we have in America, and they’re not. They’re used for political reasons to silence people.”[4][6]
He has also named Terre Haute as the likely destination had Julian Assange been extradited, and identified what the SAM units there are actually for: “the focus is to keep the prisoner away from the media. It’s all about communication.”[7]
Learning the ropes
Kiriakou asked him how he had got out of Terre Haute, since nobody got out of Terre Haute. The answer was that it took him a little while to learn the ropes, and that the only way out was to keep your mouth shut for years. After four years without causing the staff any problems, they decided to downgrade him to a low-security institution and send him out.[8]
By then he had already been in prison for twelve years, having started in a maximum-security penitentiary; four of those years were spent in the CMU before the downgrade came.[9]
Why the story was told
Kiriakou used the case to make a point about how little the classification depends on conduct. His interlocutor observed that staff can invent charges for anything, and Kiriakou agreed by contrast with Loretto, where jailhouse lawyering — a thing that happens in every jail in America — was usually ignored, and on the two occasions he saw it written up produced a disciplinary shot and two or three weeks in solitary before the matter was closed.[9]