Unless dramatic reforms are undertaken, prisoners such as Marty Gottesfeld will continue to be abused.
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
I’ve written about whistleblower Marty Gottesfeld a number of times for Consortium News, focusing on his doggedness in pursuing relief from his conviction, his experience suffering through Covid with no assistance from the “health care services” of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and his awful experience in solitary confinement, where he has spent more time than any other prisoner I personally know, solely because he has sought to hold the BOP to account for its treatment of prisoners.
His experience shows everything that is wrong with the bureau.
Marty was sentenced in 2018 to a draconian 10 years in prison for initiating a denial-of-service attack against a hospital’s fundraising website in defense of a young girl whom the hospital’s doctors were later found to have abused.
He has filed, and lost, multiple lawsuits challenging his sentence. Even if unsuccessful, though, his suits raise serious questions of law and have bogged the BOP down in litigation.
He has been threatened repeatedly for his actions challenging the BOP. He is routinely sent to solitary confinement for speaking with journalists (which he is allowed to do), he is denied the “privilege” of using the telephone or email when he angers the BOP for exercising his constitutional rights and he is not allowed visitors when he complains.
A few months ago, Marty’s wife gave an interview to the Russia Today television network about his conditions behind bars. The BOP, acting in its typical fashion, immediately sent him to solitary confinement to punish him for the fact that his wife had spoken out. But this was after they had informed him that they had approved his request for transfer to another prison.
Marty’s Case
Marty Gottesfeld. (Twitter)
Why reward a prisoner who’s been a thorn in the BOP’s side? Because Marty actually has a case.
It doesn’t stem from his sentencing or his appeal. It stems from the Prison Rape Prevention Act. Marty has complained vociferously over the past year that his unit manager, the highest-ranking BOP official in his housing unit, was in violation of the Prison Rape Prevention Act by repeatedly peeping at him in the shower and by forcibly strip-searching him.
Marty made multiple written complaints, but he was ignored, and he continued to suffer from the unit manager’s illegal actions. What is a prisoner to do?
There’s a written process that all BOP prisoners are compelled to use. But it takes at least a year before the process is exhausted and the prisoner can then go to the courts. The BOP routinely transfers prisoners before the year is up so that the prisoner is forced to start the process from the beginning again.
BOP employees very rarely get punished. That’s what happened in Marty’s case. The BOP waited until he’d complained for a year, then they said they’d transfer him so that he no longer had a case.
Prisoners in the federal system are usually not told why they’ve been placed in solitary. Many of us assumed that the stay in solitary would be short-term until Marty could be put in “transportation status” and transferred to a low-security or minimum-security facility, where he should have been sent originally based on the (lack of) severity of his crime.
Remember, he’s incarcerated for being a computer hacker. Literally no one was hurt. Marty has been incarcerated in the Communications Management Unit (CMU) at the medium-security prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, since he was originally sentenced. He’s had a tough time there. The transfer would be a welcome change.
And so last week he was finally transferred — to the maximum-security penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. This is the same Supermax prison where drone whistleblower Daniel Hale is currently incarcerated.
They are joined there by Al-Qaeda terrorist Muhammad Salah, a follower of the late “blind sheikh” Omar Abdul Rahman; Muhammad Rashed al-Owhali, convicted of terrorism in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya; Omar Rezaq, a member of the notorious Abu Nidal Organization and the last surviving hijacker of Egypt Air Flight 648 in which 58 people were killed in 1985; Victor Bout, the Russian arms dealer convicted of selling surface-to-air missiles to terrorist groups; and a slew of Aryan Brotherhood members, among the most violent neo-Nazis in America.
The BOP’s director, Michael Carvajal, resigned two weeks ago in the wake of scandals that have seen 100 BOP employees arrested during his short two-year tenure for everything from smuggling drugs and cell phones to prisoners to the rape of prisoners.
The entire federal prison system is corrupt and broken. Many BOP employees deserve to be in prison as much as the people they are in charge of guarding.
This is certainly not a partisan issue. It spans both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Justice Department must retrain BOP employees, it must hire better qualified and better educated employees, and it must conduct psychological evaluations of employees to weed out the sociopaths and psychopaths who are sometimes drawn to jobs that allow them to control the lives of others.
Unless dramatic reforms are undertaken, prisoners like Marty Gottesfeld will continue to be abused. And perverts like his unit manager will continue to be abusers. Those reforms are long overdue.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Our injustice system marches on while lecturing the world on human rights abuses of oppressive regimes. When one, as Mr. Kiriakou does here and elsewhere, examines “n+1” cases such as Mr. Gottesfeld’s (and one must recall Kiriakou’s own experiences), it takes no imagination to envision how abusive and oppressive our own systems, policies and laws are in actual fact. Couple that with the reality that the wealthy, politicians, and too many corporations can plunder, sanction and kill with impunity and you have “American Exceptionalism” in all its glory.
@ JOHN KIRIAKOU
Thank you John, for continuing to champion this young man, Marty Gottesfeld, by calling attention to the travesty of this young man’s conviction, confinement and unjust treatment for successfully trying to rescue a fourteen year old girl from massive medical malpractice and related criminal abuse. His 2018 conviction by an already proven ideologically craven and incompetent jurist and his treatment by the BOP for the ensuing years in imprisonment, has all been orchestrated by “CIVILIAN” public government employees; the vast majority of which probably portend to be devoted to “…the epicenter of Christian righteousness.”
We the people have become so complacent and willfully uninformed regarding both the actual Constitutional foundation of our society and its decline into shameless greed, avarice, wanton cruelty and corruption; that we too often prefer shallow appeasements and entertainments in place of thoughtful and meaningful solutions.
If enough of us plain ole secular civilian citizens really wanted to, we could extricate Marty Gottesfeld from the grasp of the BOP, demand that Edward Snowden and his family be pardoned and allowed to return home, and also demand that the phony persecution of Julian Assange cease and desist so he and his family can live in peace. The only weapon we need is the TRUTH!
As Usual,
Thom Williams (aka Ethan Allen)
This article must be delivered to every senator and representative in Congress. It’s one of the saddest and most overwhelming articles I’ve read. Thank you, Mr. Kariakou.
Agree completely.
I also completely agree.
I find it shocking to consider that no one in our Congress – since Bill Clinton (I think) pushed for the private prison profiteers to take over incarcerating people for profit – no elected official seems to understand or care that it turns people into commodities used for the purpose of exacting taxes out of the treasury.
Greedy profiteers have one thing on their mind – filling up the cells.
I don’t even want to think about what tricks are played to minimize costs and maximize charges.
We are one corrupt country. who’s in charge here?
Disgusting to think about.
“American prisons use dehumanizing methods and focus more on punishment rather than rehabilitation.” Subramanian & Shames, 2013
This is what happens when prison systems; not just the BOP are not overseen by a panel of civilians. Prisons as well as police departments need to be accountable to the public. For decades, the BOP has been a black hole where abuses are easily ignored or covered up.
AMERCAN Justice ? Where has it gone ? It was once the epicenter of Christian righteousness.
American justice left a long time ago and it will b e difficult to reincarnate it. Will not happen in my lifetime.
Another depressing example of the level of depravity that rules this system. It’s rotten to the core and no one in a position to do anything about it is interested.