President Barack Obama got Osama Bin Laden -- but has he kept his 2008 promise to "address the problem in our prisons, where the most disaffected and disconnected Americans are being explicitly targeted for conversion by al-Qaida and its ideological allies"?
We spoke to a range of experts, and we found that most agreed that the Obama administration has made efforts, but has so far failed to make a quantum leap.
Generally speaking, the experts said, Obama has continued efforts put into place under President George W. Bush, such as restrictions at the Communication Management Units, or CMUs, at the federal penitentiaries at Terre Haute, Ind., and Marion, Ill.
"The CMUs are as close to secret prisons as any offshore facility, including Guantanamo," said Mark Hamm, an Indiana State University criminologist and author of a forthcoming book, The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat (New York University Press, 2013). "Inmates are generally denied access to the outside world. There are strict prohibitions on mail, phone calls, and visitation. In this way, authorities control possible communications with al-Qaida recruiters and, more importantly, they prevent CMU prisoners from radicalizing other inmates in general population."
In a June 15, 2011, hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee on the radicalization of Muslim Americans in U.S. prisons, the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said his staff had been informed by officials of the federal Bureau of Prisons and state prison officials "that they routinely require religious staff, including imams, rabbis and priests, to undergo rigorous vetting, including verification of religious credentials, background checks and personal interviews. They told us that any religious book and recorded message used must be screened and that guards monitor the services. When we asked about radicalization by outside influences, they told us that prisoners do not have Internet access and all non-legal mail is opened, read and sometimes censored."
The committee's chairman, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., acknowledged that the Obama administration "recognizes prison radicalization is a serious threat and that prisons are a fertile ground for recruitment." King praised Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for saying that state and local officials are "collaborating to develop a mitigation strategy for terrorist use of prisons for radicalization and recruitment."
In congressional testimony given on July 25, 2012, Napolitano said the administration was finalizing awareness training for "countering violent extremism" for correctional, probation and parole-officers.
However, experts said that it was too soon to say that the administration had taken anti-recruitment efforts to the next level.
For instance, Hamm said the Obama administration has so far failed to implement a key piece of the equation in the CMUs.
"What is missing are programs to assist with the de-radicalization of CMU prisoners, most of whom are foreign-born Arab Muslims," Hamm said. "Deradicalization programs are common in Europe, the Middle East and parts of the Asian Pacific. On that score, steps have not been taken."
Another problem: "We still don't have meaningful infrastructure in place to monitor Arabic-language communications of prisoners," said Joel Mowbray, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "I don't think it's gotten worse under Obama, but it doesn't seem like they have built up the necessary infrastructure to deal with the issue."
Obama's promise is "not something the administration has been ignoring, but they have been slow to move on it," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the vice president of research at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "It could be one of those things that sounds good on the campaign trail, but when you get down to it and see what the previous administration has done (the next policy steps) might not be obvious."
We rate this promise a Compromise.