Security at Supermax slammed in fed report

Staffing problems enabled terrorists to keep up contacts

Lou Kilzer, Rocky Mountain News

Thursday, October 5, 2006

Prison officials allowed convicted terrorists in the federal super-maximum lockup in Florence to communicate with outside radicals for years and subsequent steps taken to shut down the links have serious gaps.

That is one of the findings in a highly critical Justice Department report released this week on the handling of terrorists and gang leaders in federal prisons.

The so-called Supermax facility in Florence came in for special scrutiny because it houses the federal prison system's most dangerous inmates, including several involved in the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center.

Three of the bombers sent at least 90 letters to Islamic extremists between 2002 and 2004, some of them aimed at recruiting suicide bombers, according to the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General.

Since then, the three bombers have been carefully monitored, but risks remain, according to the report.

Florence hired three full-time Arabic translators after the communications were uncovered, but translations are slow.

The damning report comes a little more than two weeks after grand jury indictments revealed that a Los Angeles street gang leader was able to continue to direct his drug dealing operations from the prison through coded messages.

It raises fresh questions about funding levels for the prison, where leaders of the union representing correctional officers say staffing has dropped dangerously low and where four funding requests to improve security since 9/11 have failed, even as the facility has become home to more of the country's most notorious terrorist bombers.

Short staffing and lack of funding underlie the gaps that allowed the dangerous mailings to get out, according to the OIG report.

The FBI, which handles letters from the most dangerous prisoners, is supposed to produce translations within 60 days, according to the report. In reality, it sometimes takes as long as six to 18 months, the report says.

And even concentrating on the worst of the inmates may not be enough.

"These delays in translations . . . pose a security risk because plans for terrorist and criminal activities could be communicated to or by inmates through the mail or telephone and implemented by outside contacts before translations are completed and the intelligence gleaned from them shared," the report says.

Further, the three translators hired at Florence did not begin intelligence training until late last year, meaning that letters may have been translated but coded messages not detected.

"We found that the (Bureau of Prisons) lacks sufficient intelligence capability to adequately analyze information from inmate mail to detect terrorist activity," the report says.

The key problem is staffing.

When investigators showed up to review the situation at Florence they were told that on three consecutive days the week before, two or three of seven special investigative supervisors had been pulled for other tasks.

The person responsible for monitoring all communications said she was pulled the previous week on four of her five workdays "to fill a vacant post elsewhere in the institution."

Such assignments, she reported, happened frequently.

The report said that such staffing decisions "can have significant security consequences."

According to the report, the FBI "showed little interest in the 17 international terrorist inmates" in the Florence facility until the letters from the Trade Center bombers were uncovered.

The inspector general recommended several steps to tighten the ship at Florence by sharply increasing and improving communications monitoring.

State Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, says she believes the warden at the Florence facility "has done the best he can with the resources he has," but that those resources are inadequate.

"Florence is still not staffed to the minimum level that is necessary," said McFadyen, who has taken a special interest in safety and funding for the prison in her district.

Felicia Ponce, a Bureau of Prisons public relations specialist, said Wednesday that prison officials "are continually reviewing our procedures" and that they appreciated the inspector general's "very candid report and will ensure that the report's recommendations are acted upon as soon as possible."

But Ponce sounded a cautionary note: "To implement these recommendations systemwide will require significant additional resources, primarily staff."

And to do that, she said, the bureau would turn to "the federal budget process."

The probe was launched after the March 2005 discovery that Florence prisoners Mohammed Salameh, Mahmud Abouhalima and Nidal Ayyad - all convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center plot - had communicated with various outside extremists.

In one instance, a letter from Salameh was found in the possession of Mohamed Achraf, who authorities said was plotting to blow up the National Justice Center in Madrid, Spain.

A member of a Spanish terror cell also was using letters from Florence to recruit other members. Salameh even managed to send a letter praising Osama bin Laden to Arabic newspapers.

The Florence Supermax prison has held a who's who of criminals, including Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 conspirator dubbed "the 20th hijacker."

Conclusions need no translation

The federal Office of the Inspector General released this week a highly critical report on the Supermax prison in Florence, saying that:

• Staff failed to read all of the mail of high-risk prisoners.

• The facility does not employ enough proficient translators.

• It was slow to train translators in intelligence techniques.

• It didn't hire its first staff member dedicated to translation until 2005.

• Less than 50 percent of inmate calls were monitored.

• It randomly monitored only 1.8 percent of inmate mail during a test period.

kilzerl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2644