The modified CMU is the term John Kiriakou uses for the communications regime imposed on him at FCI Loretto after his Letter from Loretto reached a national audience.
The trigger
His lawyer had set up a mailing list of about six hundred people and asked him to write when he had settled in, so they would know he was all right. Kiriakou waited roughly six weeks and then wrote what he called a letter from Loretto, in deliberate homage to Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail — a day in the life, as he describes it.[1][2]
He had not known that his lawyer was a close friend of Arianna Huffington. The piece ran as a banner headline on the Huffington Post and took more than two million hits over the following days, after which he gave interviews to Jake Tapper, who drove to the prison, and to NPR, Playboy, The Economist and The Atlantic Monthly among others.[2]
The restrictions
The institution clamped down immediately on his access to the outside world. He was not sent to a genuine communications management unit — he considers himself fortunate in that — but to what staff called a modified one.[1][3]
Incoming and outgoing email carried a five-day delay. His telephone calls were monitored live rather than taped for later review at the monitors’ discretion.[3] Kiriakou speaks Greek and Arabic, and had been using Greek with his children and his aunt; that was stopped. Asked why, the answer he was given was that the monitors were too stupid to follow it.[3][4]
The monitoring had teeth. He was summoned to the lieutenant’s office over a private call with his wife in which he had called a guard a Nimrod — a summons that in his description normally means solitary and then transfer to a higher-security prison.[5]