Liberalism truly is a mental disorder….

It seems of late CAIR is really struggling as it tries to work the ummah into frenzy. Providing stories from the far reaches of left wing reporting propaganda sources and suspect propagandists contributors. In an earlier post I told you how CAIR used a leftist blogger turned "Washington insider" reporter, wonkette, as a reliable source for a smear-piece on a Chicago politician.

Once again CAIR links to a report on Communication Management Units, aka detention centers, inside America. They’re accused of confining “animal rights activists terrorists”, “environmental activists eco-terrorists” and….. gasp.... a high number of muslims. From what I understand, these detentions centers are for like any other prison placing greater emphasis on controlling inmate communications.

In an effort to enrage inform the ummah, yesterdays whine-o-gram linked to a less-than-reputable, unbiased source, “Green Is the New Red” and its proprietor Will Potter.

As of this posting, CAIR has yet to post it to their website. And since I’m not going to link to his site or article, feel free to google it if you’d like to read it. I will however post the content of his commentary.


Potter, who’s an award wining journalist, sides with the detainees and those fighting civil liberty injustice, which is clear in his unbiased commentary. I’m not linking to his site or article, feel free to google it if you’d like to read it. I will link to a DoJ official PDA describing a transfer, offense and reasons for the increased scrutiny of this inmate.

SECRETIVE U.S. PRISON UNITS USED TO HOUSE MUSLIM, ANIMAL RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS

The government is using secretive prison facilities on U.S. soil,
called Communication Management Units, to house inmates accused of being tied to
“terrorism” groups. They overwhelmingly include Muslim inmates, along with at
least two animal rights and environmental activists.

Little information is available about
the secretive facilities and the prisoners housed there. However, through
interviews with attorneys, family members, and a current prisoner, it is clear
that these units have been created not for violent and dangerous “terrorists,”
but for political cases that the government would like to keep out of the public
spotlight and out of the press.

OPENED QUIETLY AND PERHAPS ILLEGALLY

In April of 2006, the Department of
Justice proposed a new set of rules to restrict the
communication of “terrorist” inmates. The proposal did not make it far, though: during the required
public comment period, the ACLU and other civil rights groups raised
Constitutional concerns. The program was too sweeping, they said, and it could
wrap up non-terrorists and those not even convicted of a crime.

The Bureau of Prisons dropped the proposal. Or
so it seemed. Just a few months later, a similar program (now called the
Communication Management Unit, or CMU), was quietly opened by the Justice
Department at Terre Haute, Ind.

Then, in May of 2008, a handful of inmates
were moved, without warning, to what is believed to be the second CMU in the
country, at Marion, Il.

Both CMUs are “self-contained” housing units,
according to prison documents, for prisoners who “require increased monitoring
of communication” in order to “protect the public.”

WHO IS HOUSED AT CMUs?

The CMUs are less restrictive than, say, ADX
Florence, the notorious supermax prison for the most dangerous inmates. The
supermax holds al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui and Unabomber Theodore J.
Kaczynski. CMU inmates stand in sharp contrast to the Moussaouis and Kaczynskis
of the world, though.

• 
  They include Rafil A. Dhafir, an
  Iraqi-born physician who created a charity called Help the Needy to provide food
  and medicine to the people of Iraq suffering under the U.S.-imposed economic
  sanctions. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison for violating the sanctions.
  
• They include Daniel McGowan, an environmental
  activist sentenced to seven years in prison for a string of property crimes in
  the name of defending the environment. He was previously at FCI-Sandstone, a
  low-security facility, and was transferred without notice to the CMU, and told
  it was not for any disciplinary reason.
  
• And, until recently, they included Andrew
  Stepanian. Stepanian was convicted of conspiring to commit “animal enterprise
  terrorism” and shut down the notorious animal testing laboratory Huntingdon Life
  Sciences, in a landmark First Amendment case pending appeal. The government’s
  case focused on a controversial website run by an activist group that published
  news of both legal and illegal actions against the laboratory. He was sentenced
  to three years in prison, and is currently on house arrest in New York City.
  Stepanian is believed to be the first prisoner ever released from a CMU.

VIOLATION OF DUE PROCESS RIGHTS

Attorneys and prisoners have said that inmates are
transferred to the CMUs without notice and without opportunity to challenge
their new designation, in what seems to be a clear violation of their due
process rights.

“No one got a hearing to determine whether we
should or should not be transferred here,” said Daniel McGowan in a letter from
the CMU in Marion, Ill.

Similarly, Rafil A.
Dhafir said in a letter to his family from the CMU in
Terre Haute, Ind., that he was put in isolation for two days before the move.
“No one seems to know about this top-secret operation until now,” he wrote. “It
is still not fully understood… The staff here is struggling to make sense of the
whole situation.”

“We are told this is an experiment,” Dhafir
says. “So the whole concept is evolving on a daily
basis.”

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

The CMU “experiment” limits prisoner contact with the outside world through a list
of restrictive policies. According to prison documents giving a skeleton of CMU policies, called
institution supplements, they
include:

• 
  Phone calls: Only
  one phone call per week, limited to 15 minutes, live-monitored by staff and law
  enforcement (according to attorneys, this includes the NSA) and scheduled one
  and half weeks in advance. It must be conducted in English. Other prisoners get
  about 300 minutes a month.
  
• Mail: All mail must be
  reviewed by staff prior to delivery to the inmate or processing at the post
  office. This means significant delays in communications (and, in my personal
  experience, letters frequently not being received by inmates).
  
• Visits: Four hours of personal visits per month,
  non-contact, behind glass, and live-monitored by staff and law enforcement. It
  must be conducted in English. By comparison, at FCI Sandstone (where McGowan was
  previously housed) prisoners can receive 56 potential visiting hours per month.
  I have learned from attorneys and prisoners that when a CMU inmate is
  transferred to the visiting room, the entire facility goes on
  lock-down.

For many inmates in federal prisons, phone calls, mail and visits are flecks of light in the darkness. Virtually eliminating all contact with family, friends and the outside world can have a devastating psychological impact on prisoners, and raises serious concerns about basic human rights.

WHY ARE THEY THERE?

It is difficult to discern the rationale behind why some inmates are transferred to the CMU and others are not. For instance, John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” is housed at the CMU in Terre Haute. He pleaded guilty to supporting the Taliban and carrying a rifle and grenades on the battlefield in Afghanistan. However, the government announced last month it is actually easing restrictions on his communication.

In the case of Andy Stepanian, he was one of six codefendants, and by the admission of prosecutors he was one of the minor players in the case. He is not accused of any violent crime or any property destruction, and had no disciplinary problems while
incarcerated. Stepanian received the second-lowest sentence of the group, and
his codefendants are not in CMUs. Daniel McGowan’s notice of transfer to the
CMU gives some indication of the government’s reasoning. It says that he has
been identified “as a member and leader in the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and
Animal Liberation Front (ALF), groups considered domestic terrorist organizations.”

But in a letter from the CMU, McGowan wrote: “It’s funny–I have like 13 codefs [codefendants] + there are 11 other eco prisoners and I end up here.”

Part of the explanation for his transfer to the CMU, it seems, is that he is a vocal, prominent activist with a large group of active supporters. For McGowan, his near celebrity status within the environmental movement, along with his continued activism, has become a liability. When I attended his sentencing hearing in Eugene, Ore., in 2006, the judge made a point of criticizing his media appearances and his website, SupportDaniel.org.

Attorneys, prisoners and their supporters speculate there may be legal calculations involved as well. The CMUs have been overwhelmingly comprised of people of color since their inception, and lawsuits have been filed alleging discrimination and racial
profiling.

“Throwing a few white kids into the mix makes it appear less like an American Guantanamo,” said one attorney who did not want to be identified. “And it also sends the message to the prisoners and to the movements that supporter them. It’s meant to have a chilling effect.”

CONTINUING A TREND
The creation of secret facilities to primarily house Muslim inmates accused of non-violent charges, along with a couple animal rights and environmental activists, marks
both a continuation and a radical expansion of the “War on Terrorism.”

First, it is a continuation of the “terrorism” crackdown that Arab and Muslim
communities have intensely experienced since September 11th. Guantanamo Bay may be closing. But as Jeanne Theoharis beautifully wrote recently: “Guantánamo is not simply an aberration; its closure will not return America to the rule of law or to its former standing among nations. Guantánamo is a particular way of seeing the Constitution, of
constructing the landscape as a murky terrain of lurking enemies where the
courts become part of the bulwark against such dangers, where rights have limits
and where international standards must be weighed against national security.”

Second, it is an expansion of the lesser-known “terrorism” crackdown against animal rights and environmental activists by corporations and the politicians who represent them. This coordination campaign to label activists as “terrorists” and push a political agenda—the “Green Scare”—has involved terrorism enhancement penalties, FBI agents infiltrating vegan potlucks, and new terrorism legislation like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and it all has proceeded unobstructed and unseen. There has been a near-complete media blackout on the Green Scare, and transferring vocal, public Green Scare prisoners to CMUs sends a clear message that the government hopes to keep it that way.

“SECOND-TIER TERRORISTS”
When the CMU at Terre Haute was created, Dan Eggen at The Washington Post described it as a facility for “second-tier terrorism inmates.”

What Eggen was clearly getting at is that the CMU overwhelmingly held Arab Muslim inmates rounded up and smeared by the government as “terrorists,” even though they had not done anything violent or “terrorist.”

But the CMUs are not “second-tier terrorism” prisons. They are political prisons. All of the defendants—Muslim, environmentalist, animal rights activist—are housed there because of their ethnicity, their religion, their ideology, or all of the above.

The mere existence of the CMUs should be yet another warning call to all Americans concerned about the future of this country. If we allow the government to continue widening the net of who is a “terrorist,” and expanding the scope of what punishments are applicable (and what rights are inapplicable) when that word comes into play, it places us all at risk. The reckless expansion of the War on Terrorism didn’t stop with Arabs and Muslims, and it won’t stop with environmentalists or animal rights
activists.

The power to create and maintain secretive prison facilities for political prisoners is antithetical to a healthy democracy. If there is one thing that we should learn from history, from governments that have gone down this path, it is this: If there is a secretive
prison for “second-tier” terrorists, it will only be followed by a secretive prison “third-tier terrorists,” and “fourth-tier terrorists,” until one by one, brick by brick, the legal wall separating “terrorist” from “dissident” or “undesirable” has crumbled.

The naiveté of journalists such as Potter really demonstrate how blurry the lines between right and wrong, good and evil and moral relativity are in the minds of leftist. To condemn the actions of the previous administration, claiming civil rights violations and an executive power grab while remaining silent as Obama nationalizes car companies, banks and appoints more czars than the Russian empire screams hypocrisy.

Liberalism truly is a mental disorder….