US jails 'powerless as terror trainees recruited'

The US' prisons are becoming major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists, but states and local authorities are too cash-strapped to prevent or monitor recruiting, a new report says today.

The report found that there were not enough legitimately-trained Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 US prison inmates who wanted Islamic services.

This, it said, allows Islamist extremists to target vulnerable inmates with distorted versions of the Koran and other Muslim readings that urged radicalisation and violence.

“Radicalised prisoners are a potential pool of recruits by terrorist groups,” concludes the joint study by George Washington University and the University of Virginia.

“The US, with its large prison population, is at risk of facing the sort of homegrown terrorism currently plaguing other countries.”

Additionally, state and local prison officials struggle to track radical behaviour changes of inmates or religious counsellors.

Staff and funding shortages limit preventative programmes, the report says, noting that California officials “report that every investigation into radical groups in their prisons uncovers new leads, but they simply do not have enough investigators to follow every case of radicalisation”.

An estimated two million people are imprisoned in the United States. Six per cent of them are Muslim, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Prisons have long been considered recruiting stations for gangs and, more recently, terrorists, but little has been done throughout government to combat them.

The report, which will be released at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, comes as law-enforcement and intelligence officials focus on finding out how and why extremist sympathisers cross the line and become operational terrorists.

The report cited several high-profile cases of terrorists who became radicalised while incarcerated, including British shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

It also noted what authorities call a foiled plot of a potential shooting rampage against California military facilities, synagogues and the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles by followers of Kevin James, who founded the radical group Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS, as an inmate at California State Prison in Sacramento.

Researchers interviewed federal, state and local prison officials, religious counsellors and counter-terror authorities in California, New York, South Carolina, Ohio and the District of Columbia.

They concluded that federal prison authorities had made significant strides in collecting and sharing information to help monitor whether or not inmates are becoming radicalised.

However, state and local prison officials have largely relied on contractors and volunteers to lead Islamic services because of a lack of well-trained Muslim chaplains, the report found. In New York, this led to several cases of “imams espousing violent views”, it said.

The report noted a 2004 study that found that about half of 193 prisons surveyed supervised religious services or monitored them with video or audio recorders.

“In the absence of monitoring by authoritative Islamic chaplains, materials that advocate violence have infiltrated the prison system undetected,” it found.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counter-terrorism consultant, said “chilling” interpretations of the Koran were given to prison inmates when he worked for the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an international charity that served as a major al-Qaida financier.

The readings urged Muslims “to wage war against non-Muslims who have not submitted to Islamic rule”, Gartenstein-Ross said in prepared testimony to the senate panel.

“I know of only a few instances in which prisons rejected the literature we attempted to distribute and it was never because of the literature’s radicalism,” said Gartenstein-Ross, who left the charity and converted to Christianity before the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Al-Haramain also created a database of names, release dates and forwarding addresses of 15,000 inmates considered to be ripe for recruitment, but it was never used, he said.