It is the other Guantanamo, an archipelago of US federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.
An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people who federal investigators saw as a threat. The inmates serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.
Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the US, Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky.
“That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal supermax — short for super maximum security — 160km south of Denver.
There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
In recent weeks, the US Congress has reignited an old debate, with some saying that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. However, military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantanamo hugely costly — US$800,000 per inmate a year, compared with US$25,000 in federal prison.
Meanwhile, the criminal justice system has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity and without the international criticism that Guantanamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial.
By contrast with the record at Guantanamo, where the US Department of Defense says that about 25 percent of those released are known or suspected of subsequently joining militant groups, it appears extraordinarily rare for the federal prison inmates with past terrorist ties to plot violence after their release. Both the administration of US President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress often cite the threat of homegrown terrorism.
However, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons has proved remarkably resistant to outside scrutiny of the inmates it houses, who might offer a unique window on the problem.
“There’s a huge national debate about how dangerous these people are,” said Gary LaFree, director of a national terrorism study center at the University of Maryland, who was lead author of the proposal. “I just think, as a citizen, somebody ought to be studying this.”
The bureau would not make any officials available for an interview with the New York Times, and wardens at three prisons refused to permit a reporter to visit inmates. However, e-mails and letters from inmates give a rare, if narrow, look at their hidden world.
Consider the case of Randall Todd Royer, 38, a Missouri-born Muslim convert who goes by Ismail. Before Sept. 11, 2001, he was a young Islamic activist with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, meeting with members of Congress and visiting the White House while former US president Bill Clinton was in office.
Today he is nearly eight years into a 20-year prison sentence. He pleaded guilty in 2004 to helping several American friends go to a training camp for Lashkar-e-Taiba, an extremist group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. The organization was later designated a terrorist group by the US — and is blamed for the Mumbai massacre in 2008 — but prosecutors maintained in 2004 that the friends intended to go on to Afghanistan and fight US troops alongside the Taliban.
Royer had fought briefly with the Bosnian Muslims against their Serbian neighbors in the mid-1990s, when NATO, too, backed the Bosnians. He trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp himself. And in 2001, he was stopped by Virginia police with an AK-47 and ammunition in his car.
However, he adamantly denies that he would ever scheme to kill Americans and there is no evidence that he did so.
Before his sentencing, he wrote the judge a 30-page letter saying: “I crossed the line and, in my ignorance and phenomenally poor judgment, broke the law.”
In grand jury testimony, he expressed regret about not objecting during a meeting, just after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which his friends discussed joining the Taliban.
Whatever the facts, he is paying the price. His 20-year sentence was the statutory minimum under a 2004 plea deal he reluctantly took, fearing that a trial might end in a life term. His wife divorced him and remarried; he has seen his four young children only through glass since 2006 when the bureau moved him to a restrictive new unit in Indiana for inmates with the terrorism label. After an altercation with another inmate who he said was bullying others, he was moved last year to the supermax in Colorado.
He is banned from e-mail and permitted only three 15-minute telephone calls a month — recently increased from two, a move that Royer hopes might portend his being moved to a prison closer to his children. His letters are reflective, sometimes self-critical, frequently dropping allusions to his omnivorous reading. His flirtation with violent Islam and his incarceration, he says, have not poisoned him against his own country.
“You asked what I think of the US; that is an extraordinarily complex question,” Royer wrote in one letter consisting of 27 pages of neat handwriting. “I can say I was born in Missouri, I love that land and its people, I love the Mississippi, I love my family and my cousins, I love my Germanic ethnic heritage and people, I love the English language, I love the American people — my people.”
He said he believed some US foreign policy positions had been “needlessly antagonistic,” but added: “Nothing the US did justified the 9/11 attacks.”
Federal officials say the government’s zero-tolerance approach to any conduct touching on terrorism is an important reason there has been no repeat of Sept. 11. Lengthy sentences for marginal offenders have been criticized by some rights advocates as deeply unfair — but they have sent an unmistakable message to young men drawn to the rhetoric of violent jihad.
The strategy has also sent scores of Muslim men to federal prisons.
After news reports in 2006 that three men imprisoned in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had sent letters to a Spanish terrorist cell, the bureau created two special wards, called Communication Management Units, or CMUs. The units, which opened at federal prisons in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2006 and Marion, Illinois, in 2008, have set off litigation and controversy, chiefly because critics say they impose especially restrictive rules on Muslim inmates, who are in the majority.
“The CMUs? You mean the Muslim Management Units?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The units currently hold about 80 inmates. The rules for visitors — who are allowed no physical contact with inmates — and the strict monitoring of mail, e-mail and telephone calls are intended both to prevent inmates from radicalizing others and to rule out plotting from behind bars.
Bureau spokesperson Traci Billingsley said in an e-mail that the units were not created for any religious group, but were “necessary to ensure the safety, security and orderly operation of correctional facilities, and protection of the public.”
An unintended consequence of creating the CMUs is a continuing conflict between Muslim inmates and guards, mainly over the inmates’ demand for collective prayer beyond the authorized hour-long group prayer on Fridays. The clash is described in hundreds of pages of court filings in a lawsuit.
In one affidavit, a prison official in Terre Haute describes “signs of radicalization” in the unit, saying one inmate’s language showed “defiance to authority and a sense of being incarcerated because of Islam.”
There is some evidence that the bureau has assigned Muslims with no clear terrorist connection to the CMUs.
A former inmate at the Marion CMU, Andy Stepanian, an animal rights activist, said a guard once told him he was “a balancer” — a non-Muslim placed in the unit to rebut claims of religious bias.
Stepanian said the creation of the predominantly Muslim units could backfire, adding to the feeling that Islam is under attack.
It might be too early to judge recidivism for those imprisoned in terrorism cases after Sept. 11, 2001; those who are already out are mostly defendants whose crimes were less serious or who cooperated with the authorities. US Department of Justice officials and outside experts could identify only a handful of cases in which released inmates had been rearrested, a rate of relapse far below that for most federal inmates or for Guantanamo releases.
As for Royer, he is approaching only the midpoint of his 20-year sentence.
Did he get what he deserved? Chris Heffelfinger, a terrorism analyst and author of Radical Islam in America, did a detailed study of the Virginia jihad case and concluded that Royer’s sentence was perhaps double what his crime merited. However, he said the prosecution was warranted and probably prevented at least some of the men Royer assisted from joining the Taliban.
“I think a strong law enforcement response to cases like this is appropriate nine times out of 10,” Heffelfinger said.
Royer himself, in his long pre-sentencing letter to Judge Leonie Brinkema, said he understood why he had been arrested.
“I realize that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from terrorism and that in this post-9/11 environment, it must take all reasonable precautions,” he wrote.
The gutting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) by US President Donald Trump’s administration poses a serious threat to the global voice of freedom, particularly for those living under authoritarian regimes such as China. The US — hailed as the model of liberal democracy — has the moral responsibility to uphold the values it champions. In undermining these institutions, the US risks diminishing its “soft power,” a pivotal pillar of its global influence. VOA Tibetan and RFA Tibetan played an enormous role in promoting the strong image of the US in and outside Tibet. On VOA Tibetan,
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
By now, most of Taiwan has heard Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) threats to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Cabinet. His rationale is that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government’s investigation into alleged signature forgery in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) recall campaign constitutes “political persecution.” I sincerely hope he goes through with it. The opposition currently holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan, so the initiation of a no-confidence motion and its passage should be entirely within reach. If Chiang truly believes that the government is overreaching, abusing its power and targeting political opponents — then
RSS