JOHN KIRIAKOU: Perverted Prison Justice
June 17, 2021
Here's an example of how the prison rape-elimination law gets violated; and
not by other prisoners.
U.S. Penitentiary, Terre Haute. (Federal Bureau of Prisons, Wikimedia
Commons)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
Many of you know that I've written about whistleblower Marty Gottesfeld in
the past. Marty was sentenced to a draconian 10 years in prison for
initiating a denial-of-service attack against a hospital in defense of a
young girl whom the hospital's doctors were later found to have abused.
Even worse than the duration of his sentence, Marty was placed in the
Communications Management Unit (CMU) of the notorious federal penitentiary
at Terre Haute, Indiana, the site of federal death row.
The CMU was created after the Sept. 11 attacks to house terrorists and to
ensure that they could not communicate with the outside world. This is
where the Justice Department put Marty for taking down a website over the
course of a weekend.
One of the reasons that I admire Marty is that, no matter how tough things
get for him, he continues to push forward. Being gutsy is one thing. Being
gutsy in the face of abuse and violence is something altogether different.
Marty Gottesfeld. (Twitter)
Marty Gottesfeld. (Twitter)
Marty and I are in irregular touch, not because he's not a faithful
correspondent, but because his communications are routinely interrupted by
prison officials. For example, Marty is currently appealing his sentence,
and he has a fighting chance at having it overturned. As a result, the
prison administrators have reacted by cutting off his email access to the
outside world, including to his attorneys, cutting off his phone privileges
for more than six months at a time, and illegally reading his incoming and
outgoing legal mail. But still Marty pushes ahead.
Imagine how difficult - and frustrating - it would be to be mounting a
legitimate appeal to a conviction and to be constantly harassed by people
with complete control and authority over you, people who don't care at all
that you have legal rights. After all, what are you going to do about it?
Sue them? Good luck.
The New Unit Manager
I received a rare email from Marty earlier this week. He wrote to tell me
about his new "unit manager." The unit manager is the person responsible
for the day-to-day running of the housing unit, in this case the
Communications Management Unit. To give you an idea of the kind of
environment Marty lives in, his unit manager is also responsible for nearby
death row. Want to schedule a time to talk to your attorney? Need some
help reaching out to a pastor or priest? Tough luck. You're on death row.
You won't need any of that stuff soon.
The problem with the new unit manager is more sinister than just not being
responsive, though.
First, he only recently became the unit manager. He was a Bureau of Prisons
guard and administrative functionary before that. In his email, Marty said
prisoners have filed multiple complaints against him over the past few years
alleging sexual abuse.
Many of the prisoners filing the complaints were being held in the CMU. So
instead of conducting an investigation of the allegations, what did the
warden do? He put the same man in charge of the very prisoners who had
complained about him. And what did this man do when he became the unit
manager? He ordered prisoners to be strip searched for no other reason than
for him to stand there and stare at their naked bodies.
Last week, the unit manager inexplicably stuck his hands in the shower when
Marty was bathing, naked, of course. Was it meant to intimidate? Was it to
cop a feel? It was a violation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)
regardless of the reason.
Prison Legal News (PLN) magazine has published extensively on violations of
the PREA. The consensus of universities and organizations that follow the
issue is that the act is doing little-to-nothing to protect prisoners - not
from other prisoners - but from guards. As I've written previously, the
complaint procedure in the federal prison system is designed to protect the
wrongdoer. Here's how it works.
Filing Forms
Let's say a perverted prison administrator orders you to strip so that he
can ogle you. You know this is a violation of the PREA. You must then file
a form called a BP-8.5, which goes to the person you are accusing, saying,
"Hey, you violated the PREA." His response, of course, will be "No I
didn't." You then have 14 days to file a Form BP-9, which goes to the
warden. The warden, not surprisingly, almost always supports his staff
member. You then have 60 days to file a form BP-10, which goes to the
Bureau of Prisons regional office. Once the prisoner loses there, which is
almost guaranteed, he can file a Form BP-11, which goes to the Bureau of
Prisons headquarters in Washington. No prisoner ever wins at BOP
headquarters.
There are common ways in which the prisoner is stymied in his attempt to
file a complaint. The filing of every form is time sensitive. So the
warden and others will withhold their responses, backdate them, and then
send the responses to you so that you only have a day or two to respond.
You can't possibly get it done in time, so it's dismissed as "not responsive
in a timely fashion." You have no recourse because the federal courts have
ruled that a prisoner must exhaust the "administrative complaint process"
before going to the courts. But if the complaint is dismissed by the BOP as
"not responsive" because of time, you're out of luck. And those people who
violate the Prison Rape Elimination Act get off scot free.
That's what is happening here. Marty's hands are tied. He tried to go
through the process, but the process is stacked against him. He won't find
justice in the "Justice" Department. So it's up to the rest of us to call
out illegality. Marty's appeal hearing took place on June 10. I listened
to it and it seemed to go well. Hope isn't a strategy, but his attorney
seems to truly know what he's doing.
In the meantime, I want the world to know what goes on in these sickening
prison units. I want people to know how Americans are treated. Remember,
as Martin Luther King said, "The arc of a moral universe is long, but it
bends toward justice."
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act-a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.