Washington – The federal government wants to do more wiretapping to catch terrorists, but according to a new Justice Department watchdog report, it’s still not listening in on some of the terrorists it’s already captured. Sometimes it doesn’t even read their mail.
At “Supermax,” the federal government’s top-security prison in Florence, officials monitored less than half of the phone calls of prisoners on its “alert list,” including those convicted of terrorism whose calls are supposed to be monitored “live.”
The report by the Justice Department’s inspector general warned that because of gaps like that, important information could be missed.
“The threat remains that terrorist and other high-risk inmates can use mail and verbal communications to conduct terrorist or criminal activities while incarcerated,” said the report, issued this week.
Supermax – officially known as the Administrative Maximum United States Penitentiary, or USP Florence ADMAX – came under scrutiny in 2005 when NBC reported that three men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing sent letters from the prison that were suspected of being used to recruit suicide bombers.
Since then, those prisoners have been locked up even tighter, and the prison has hired three Arabic translators with top-security clearances to monitor inmate letters and phone calls. But even then, prison officials didn’t provide counterterrorism intelligence training to the translators in their first year on the job, the new report says.
The inspector general looked at 10 federal prisons including Supermax and found that the federal prison system does not read all the mail of its terrorist and other at-risk inmates; doesn’t have enough good translators; doesn’t do enough to flag the most dangerous international terrorists; and doesn’t effectively monitor terrorists’ phone calls and other conversations.
Federal prison officials said they’ve been trying to upgrade their monitoring of terrorists. But they told investigators they’ve been unable to do everything they want because they don’t have enough money and the number of prisoners in their custody keeps going up.
The report recommended that:
Prisons should provide more foreign-language and counterterrorism intelligence training.
The federal Bureau of Prisons should improve its access to intelligence information.
Prisons should consider monitoring the cellblock conversations of all high-risk inmates.
Supermax, built to hold the nation’s most dangerous criminals, houses more terrorists than any other federal prison.
Prison staffers told investigators they didn’t feel as if they had the proper training to adequately analyze intelligence from terrorist inmates.
The report also says that investigative supervisors specially trained to monitor terrorists are often pulled for other duties because of staffing and funding shortages at the prison.
Supermax’s two mailroom staffers randomly monitored less than 2 percent of the nearly 400 prisoners’ mail, the report said.
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
