10/20/15 – Will Potter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's libertarian foreign policy, mostly.
We talk about the police state, too.
Our first guest today is Will Potter from Green is the New Red.
And I know there's a double meaning there, but still.
Here he is doing a TED Talk at TED.com.
In fact, it's his second one, I guess.
At TED.com, Will Potter, the secret U.S. prisons you've never heard of before.
Of course, the title was written assuming that people aren't listeners to this show, which is a fair assumption, I guess.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me back, Scott.
Good to have you here, man.
I sure appreciate your focus on this, especially still after all this time.
And you have a lot more to say now than back before when you had a lot to say.
Very interesting, very little covered, very important subject here.
The communications management units, or CMUs, within two different U.S. prisons.
I guess let's start with that.
Where are they, these CMUs?
And, well, and then what are they?
So the CMUs are prisons within prisons.
They are experimental prison units that were open within two larger federal prisons.
One is in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the other is in Marion, Illinois.
And neither of them underwent any of the formal review process that's required by law.
And now, you know, they were open under the Bush administration, but under the Obama administration they're going to make these facilities permanent.
And what they do is radically restrict prisoner communication with the outside world to levels that meet or exceed some of the most extreme prisons in the United States.
But the reason I came across these units in my reporting and have been focusing so much on them is that they single people out because of their race or their political beliefs.
Some of the environmentalists and animal rights activists and others that have been placed in these CMUs have been there because of their, quote, anti-government and anti-corporate views, according to counterterrorism unit documents.
So I think just the simple existence of these units within larger federal prisons raises a lot of human rights and civil rights concerns.
Well, you know, there's also the question of the origin of that.
I mean, did Congress ever say that that's a good enough reason to do this or these are just rules and regulations adopted by the Bureau of Prisons?
Exactly.
And it's the latter.
And I think this is something we're seeing as a trend.
I mean, you certainly talked a lot about on your show, both with foreign policy and domestic, of setting up kind of a parallel legal system for anything that involves the war on terrorism or this rhetoric of national security, a separate system that isn't subjected to the same oversight, the same rules and procedures that other parts of the government have to go through.
So in this case, they weren't run through Congress.
They weren't subjected to the Administrative Procedures Act and shuttled through all the processes that new prison units have to go through.
And it took nine years before the government finally issued something into the congressional record and starting to make these facilities permanent and codify what they are and how people get there.
Yeah, it's amazing.
You know what, here's the question.
Do you have a single congressman or senator who's interested in this, who'd like to hold some hearings about it, who cares at all?
Have you heard?
I haven't, but to be fair, that's also not where I'm focusing my work.
I'm not doing lobbying work or anything like that.
I'm plugged into that kind of discussion in D.C., but there might be discussions of that going on.
I'm not sure.
Well, I mean, you would know if there was a reaction to your work, right?
I would hope I would know, but yeah, the short answer is no.
I haven't heard anything about that.
I mean, you know, it's just Congress, but there are 535 of them, so it's possible that one of them somewhere might think they could get some mileage out of this or something.
Well, and especially because I think there is a shift going on right now in how people are talking about a lot of the issues that are wrapped up in this story, talking about prison, about surveillance, about national security and labeling people as terrorists.
All of those things are really wrapped up in this discussion of CMUs, and so I hope that discussion at the federal level and congressional level happens.
Even just having a congressional hearing on this could shine substantially more light on what's actually taking place and get some better answers of how these prison units are operating, what they're really intended to be, and whether or not they're going to be expanded as well.
So, listen, I think it's really important that you're doing a TED Talk, that you did a TED Talk about this.
I'm kind of surprised and pleased that you found interest there, and I'd like to think that this will do a lot of good for the subject matter becoming more prominent and discussed by, let's say, anyone but you in this country.
Right.
Maybe make a little bit of progress here.
So that's really good news in and of itself, because, of course, there are all kinds of experts in all kinds of fields, most of which are not controversial at all, who will have access to this now, who will be able to see this and hopefully will take some interest in it.
So at least that's good.
Absolutely.
My goal and what's been guiding my work is slowly but surely trying to make inroads into that broader discussion, and I think it's incredible that TED is not only giving me a platform to do this several times now, but also putting it out on all their social media and emails.
I mean, these are millions and millions of people, so I hope it gets that discussion going.
I mean, like you said, this isn't a conversation that I think a lot of the typical TED Talk followers might be exposed to normally.
So I think this is a huge progress in that regards.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, this is sort of a side issue because it's all state power anyway, but I'm curious in the chat rooms asking whether these two prisons in Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion, Illinois, where these CMUs are located, are they privately run prisons or I guess they're run by the federal government itself, right?
They are.
They're part of federal prisons, so the prison in Terre Haute and the prison in Marion.
That's a good question, though, and that's one that's come up.
I've been kind of surprised how much that's come up in online comments and emails and things I've gotten from people because I think it shows there's a lot more awareness of private prisons and how they're growing.
Well, people can see.
You just say the word private prison and everybody can see the perverse incentive in having lobbyists who have an interest, a private profit interest in criminalizing the existence of all the rest of their fellow citizens.
Government-run prisons are bad enough, but you mix that kind of profit motive with the thing and you could see the obvious, the huge conflict of interest between the people behind them and the rest of us who want to live in a free society there, you know?
Absolutely, and I think it's really inspiring to me to see how much that message is starting to get out to people and how much people are starting to understand it.
And frankly, even though it's a very different issue, I think there's a lot of overlap between that and the issues we're talking about with the CMUs, and a lot of overlap with this general change in the national discussion about prisons.
Obama, to his credit, was the first president to visit a federal prison.
Now these CMUs are still operating under his watch, of course, but I think there's some changes that are taking place in how we're thinking about prisons.
Yeah, it is.
It's the general concept of so-called criminal justice on the state, local, and federal levels and everything.
The prisons, the police abuse, the NSA spying, all of it finally being brought up to question by the American people.
Hang on, it's Will Potter from Green is the New Red and from TED.com.
We'll be right back about the communications management units.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Will Potter about these communication management units, the CMUs.
There are two of them in America at federal prisons, one in Terre Haute, Indiana, the other one in Marion, Illinois.
The guards and the prisoners call them Little Guantanamo.
And, yeah, let's go back to that, Will.
If you could elaborate a little bit more about the differences and sames between, say, Ted Kaczynski, locked in the SuperMacs there at Terre Haute versus the guys who are locked in the communications management units.
Yeah, that's a really great question.
I mean, when you hear about, you know, the description of CMUs and these secretive prisons and the rhetoric of the government, you want to imagine people like that being in there, but in my research, it's actually not the case at all.
I mean, the people that have been there, for instance, Yasin Arif, who is an imam.
He was asked to bear witness to a loan, which is a tradition in Islamic culture.
It turned out the guy who asked him to bear witness to a loan was an FBI informant who was trying to enlist someone else in a fake attack, and Arif didn't know anything about it.
But he was convicted of conspiracy to be part of a terrorism plot and sent ultimately to the CMU.
It's those types of cases that, you know, these people have been convicted of crimes.
It's not like Guantanamo in that regard.
They've had their day in the court, but their day in court has been questionable at best.
Some of the other people I've talked about that are in these CMUs or have been in CMUs include an environmentalist named Daniel McGowan, an animal rights activist named Andy Stepanian.
Neither have been charged with actually harming anyone or anything like that.
They had no disciplinary violations when they were in prison.
They had no communications violations when they were in prison, and according to documents from the counterterrorism unit, they were sent there because of their words, because of their so-called anti-government beliefs and anti-corporate views.
And for that, they were singled out for harsher punishment and sent to a restricted facility.
Yeah, now, so let's go back because, you know, this is another TED talk that I was happy to see.
They had Trevor Aronson up there to talk about these FBI entrapment shots.
So I just want to make sure that I understand you right, what you're saying about this guy.
There was a plot by the FBI to entrap some idiot, and as part of that plot to entrap some idiot, they needed this imam to oversee someone's promise to pay back a loan.
The guy that they brought in had no idea about any of the rest of this stuff, and yet he was convicted for being part of a criminal conspiracy, even though there were no actual terrorists at all, unless you count the FBI.
That's exactly right.
I mean, that's it, 100%.
And now, wait a minute.
So, wait a minute, though.
Is it possible that he actually was guilty as hell, and he woulda, coulda, shoulda known, and he probably did know, but he was playing dumb and, you know, this kind of thing, something like that?
Or, no, they totally screwed him.
I don't see even the slightest evidence of that.
This is a case that got a lot of attention, and there's been a lot of great reporting about it.
I think New York Magazine did a big cover story, and a lot of great reporters have covered the story, and I haven't seen any indication of that at all.
Now, you know, I also want to be clear.
When I'm talking about some of the prisoners who are there, there are lots of ins and outs of everyone's different cases that, at the end of the day, I mean, people make mistakes, and so I'm not here to, you know, defend any one prisoner or any one case or anything like that.
Some of them, though, I think are so clearly, you know, in my view, just a miscarriage of justice and an entrapment that I wanted to highlight those in my talk, and I think Araf's case is one of those.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's huge.
That's so important, and because, you know, I think it's the same thing with all the torture, which you can throw this in if you ask me, is it's always justified, at least in the back of our minds, with, yeah, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed really deserves it, so screw him.
But that's not who we're talking about here.
We're talking about a bunch of nobodies, a bunch of people who actually, even if they deserve prison, they don't deserve this.
This is crazy what's going on here.
And that's really my challenge to people who watch this TED talk that I gave, the people who are listening to this.
You know, my challenge to you all is to try to step back from your own preconceived ideas of who you think prisoners are, whether you think, you know, that because someone has been convicted of a crime, they just deserve everything that's thrown at them, and think about what this all means in a bigger picture sense, not just for the individual prisoners, which is really important, but what it means about our democracy, what it means about our own commitment to human rights to allow things like this to happen, and also what it means about our own safety and security.
You know, all of this is framed in that rhetoric, but the people that are being thrown in CMUs aren't posing that kind of a national security threat, and if anything, I think their cases should make a lot of us outraged about how national security resources are being spent.
Yeah, I mean, and especially going back to the beginning here, where these are just pure prison rules.
This isn't even an unconstitutional law that was passed.
This is just some bureaucrats decided.
You know, the national security state decided by itself, and, you know, that's the big deal here, and then, of course, again, just like with the rest of the terror war, all the blowback on people who, you know, really are in the wrong category anyway.
You know, like you're saying, the Earth Liberation Front guys who maybe do some property damage but never killed anybody.
Right.
You know, that kind of thing.
And this is all really a continuation of that trend in my mind.
I mean, as you know, most of my work is focused on those issues in particular, how nonviolent activists have been labeled as the number one domestic terrorism threat by the FBI, and I look at how these social movements have been affected since September 11th, but I think with this talk, I hope to expose to people also is how institutionalized all of this has become, that it's not, you know, the fringe activities of a few random bureaucrats without oversight or, you know, some misguided policy that got on the books that's going to be corrected.
These are standard practices now.
This is how this war on terrorism rhetoric has taken on a life of its own to the point that these new units are opened, and no one really even knows how or why this all came about.
I mean, that's been something that's been really difficult to answer, even as new court documents and open records documents come out.
Yeah, it's also, you know, it's really something, maybe I'm being repetitive here, but it's kind of its own news story that it's left to you to do this.
No offense, you're a great journalist.
You do great work.
I don't mean it like that, but I just mean, how well are all of our journalistic institutions on this question?
They're completely AWOL.
And that's something that's unsettling to me on a lot of levels.
One other one is that, you know, one thing I talk about in this talk is how, in the course of my investigation and discussion of CMUs, I found more evidence about how my own work has been monitored by the counterterrorism unit and by the FBI in relation to speeches I've given about CMUs, media interviews like this one, articles I've written, things like that.
And I think that's connected to the point you raised, because as more and more of our media has to shift to this kind of a freelance model or citizen journalist or whatever you want to call it, in addition to people like me that kind of came out of the mainstream media outlets and now work on my own, we don't have the institutional protections of someone at, you know, The Washington Post or New York Times.
And that raises a lot of really troubling concerns, too.
I mean, if major media outlets aren't devoting resources to investigative journalism anymore or they're cutting it back, the people who are going out there and trying to do this don't have a lot of those same protections.
Right.
All right, now, so can you talk about when you went there?
And I guess they let you go not as a journalist, but just as a quote-unquote friend of this guy McGowan from the Earth Liberation Front.
Anything notable there you want to tell people about?
Yeah, and they made very clear from the start that journalists are not allowed here.
I've been reporting on McGowan's case since, you know, the first day of his arrest and then following it throughout through all the court processes, the trial, you know, the agreements, conviction.
And so I was able to visit because of that relationship that I had developed with him.
But they don't allow reporters there.
And, in fact, when I was approved to visit, which I was really surprised about, McGowan was told by prison officials that if I wrote anything about the visit, that he would be punished for my reporting.
And that kind of a twist is really disturbing and should be disturbing to everybody that's listening.
Just to emphasize again, that's threatening prisoners with even harsher treatment if a completely separate entity, a separate journalist writes about their case.
Which I guess we can assume has happened, right, since your TED Talk.
Now you're doing this show again.
Well, so McGowan's been released.
Oh, he's out now.
But he came under fire through his own efforts to expose what happened as well.
After he was released, he wrote an article that went up on the Huffington Post that was headlined, Court Documents Prove I Was Sent to a CMU for My Political Speech.
The very next day he was thrown back in jail for his political speech.
And his attorneys got his release very quickly, but I think the message was quite clear that you're not allowed to talk about this place.
Now is that actually part of the conditions of his release or just in effect it is?
No, it was not.
And that's what his attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights argued very quickly and forcefully that the government was trying to enforce.
Was he still talking and writing since then or they've advised him that he better go ahead and cool it?
He still is.
He's active on social media, and I think he's done some other articles since then about environmental issues in general.
He's involved in environmental organizing in New York.
But that's a very clear message, and that's a lot to put on people who are coming out of a very traumatic situation as well.
That additional fear of just if they speak out, could they be targeted further?
Yeah.
Well, that's where we are, y'all.
2015 here.
Oh, it's been like this for a little while.
And yet, you know, I guess I have to go back to the journalism thing, Will.
I think that that is the biggest part of this story is that we have these communications management units and that you are virtually alone in reporting on them.
There's a complete blackout where there ought to be a massive controversy right now about the way this is happening.
I sure do.
I don't know.
I'm going to do my best to tweet it out some more and pass it around.
I'll encourage all the listeners.
Go ahead and harass a journalist you know with this link, man, and see what you can do to get them to report on this.
This deserves to be a huge deal.
And just think about if it was you or me, audience, locked in a prison.
We're not even allowed to talk on the phone.
We've just got to hope that somebody out there is paying attention enough that they'll pick up the ball and run with it on their own accord because we can't even encourage them to do it because that's how deep in the hole they got us locked.
Imagine being in that position.
And for sending medicine to dying Iraqi children or for being part of the entrapment of somebody else in some FBI sting.
You know, I don't know.
I'm not very good with the call to action thing, Will, but I'm trying to because I'm pissed off about this.
It seems like something ought to happen.
And I appreciate everybody who's listening, if you could take the time to share that around as well, because that's been a challenge with this work, too, is that I'm approaching this as a journalist, but as you can tell from my talk, it's something I'm passionate about.
There is an advocacy element because I think that's been absent from the discussion.
I think there needs to be a more forceful dialogue about these issues that's not just swallowing government soundbites about this stuff that have been completely misleading and deceptive.
And so in doing that, I think it's important to do journalism that's a bit more adversarial and try to get this message out there.
Right on.
Well, great work, as always.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Scott.
That's Will Potter.
He's at GreenIsTheNewRed.
That's his website, GreenIsTheNewRed.com.
And then here he is at Ted.com.
Will Potter, the secret U.S. prisons you've never heard of before.
Great speech that he gave.
So check out my Twitter feed, and you'll have the link to the speech and help pass it around.
Would you?
Thanks.
Be right back after this.
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