Bush Admin denies funding for Supermax prison 3 times

Man, Bush is on a ROLL! [/i]

Supermax 'security risk'[/b]

Rep. McFadyen seeks more funds to beef up prison
By Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News
July 1, 2006

Four times since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal Bureau of Prisons has been denied money to tighten security around the nation's worst terrorists at its Supermax prison in Colorado.

Supermax holds 400 of the most dangerous inmates in the federal prison system and operates under the highest level of security. Inmates are released from their individual cells only one hour a day.

Inmates at Supermax in Florence, formally known as Administrative Maximum Facility or ADX, include 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef; Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski; and Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.

Union guards have been complaining that the lockup full of extremely dangerous inmates is understaffed.

Prison officials deny that.

But when union leaders and state Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, went to see Bureau of Prisons chief Harley Lappin about the understaffing complaint recently, he told them he'd been denied three times for homeland security/counterterrorism grants to beef up security around the convicted terrorists.

Bureau spokesman Michael Truman later clarified to the Rocky Mountain News that the funds actually were requested through the regular budget process. He said they had been denied four times, not three.

For McFadyen, whose district includes 12 prisons in the Florence-Cañon City area, security at Supermax is a prime concern.

"What if the friends of the World Trade tower terrorists come to get their friends?" she asked. The facility contains "virtually every guilty, adjudicated terrorist bomber," McFadyen said.

"I think it's imperative that the federal government consider the security risk at ADX and start recognizing that as a homeland security issue," she said.

The bureau's repeated request for more perimeter security and patrols "tells me I'm not alone. The bureau has thought of it as well," McFadyen said.

Mike Schnobrich, a guard at Supermax and union representative, who attended McFadyen's meeting at the Bureau of Prisons, said the bureau wanted a centralized tower and perimeter fencing for its entire Florence complex, which holds Supermax and three other prisons.

The idea "was to increase security of the entire complex, directed toward outsiders coming in, instead of the insiders coming out," said Schnobrich, whose branch of the American Federation of Government Employees represents the prison guards.

"We were surprised" at the funding rejections, he said. "You can't separate homeland security from the ADX."

McFadyen said she is seeking help from members of Congress to get more money for Supermax.

The rejected funding requests started just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with a request for $113 million to upgrade and harden perimeter security and cells, Truman said. That failed, and another try was made in 2002.

The extent of the requested security upgrade was slashed by 80 percent in 2004, but even at $23 million, it still wasn't approved. It was slashed again in 2006 to $13 million simply to add cells for terrorists, yet was rejected again.

Three times, in 2002, 2003 and 2006, it was the Bush administration denying the funding. Once, in 2004, the smaller request made it into the president's budget proposal but was rejected by Congress, Truman said.

Neither Truman nor prison boss Lappin criticized the White House or Congress for the decisions.

"The administration does not need to explain to agencies the reasons for its decisions regarding funding but looks at overall government-wide priorities when establishing budget request levels," Truman said. "Although these requests were not approved, the ability to continue operating safe and secure facilities was not affected."

But McFadyen says 12 percent of the jobs at the prison went unfilled in the period from September to May. The union says federal budget cuts are to blame and that inmates are becoming more violent as their one hour a day of exercise is cut back.



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