Months after being incarcerated for his role in one of the biggest whistleblowing cases in recent history, Daniel Hale went silent, the Appeal reports. A judge had recommended that he be imprisoned in or near Virginia, but he ended up in a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, where he told a friend that he had been transferred to a Communication Management Unit (CMU) . His calls would be live-recorded and all his communications would be closely monitored; she couldn’t put him on speaker phone. Hale was sentenced to almost four years in prison for leaking classified documents about the U.S. drone program and its civilian casualties.
CMUs, sometimes called “Little Guantánamo” or “Guantánamo North,” were originally built to house people the federal government alleged had connections to international terrorism. The federal government quietly opened two CMUs in 2006 and 2008 under a cloud of secrecy. There was no public hearing beforehand, and no apparent guidelines on the criteria authorities would use for placement in the units. When the CMUs opened, 70 percent of those in them were Muslim men, who made up just six percent of the overall federal prison population at the time. Advocates have raised concerns that the units are often used to punish those who have expressed a strong opposition to U.S. foreign policy—as Hale did so publicly. An investigation by The Nation and The Appeal suggests the federal government is expanding its use of CMUs, including with plans to build a new unit at a facility in Maryland. The number of people incarcerated in CMUs between 2007 and 2022 increased by 140%. Although the share of Muslims incarcerated in the units has decreased over time, that is largely due to the growth in the overall population. As of 2023, Muslims still made up 35% of the total CMU population.
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