Leaving 'Guantanamo North'

Avon Twitty was recently released from a halfway house in Washington, D.C., after serving three years in the Communications Management Unit at the Terre Haute, Ind., prison.

He continues: "That means that they're recruiting rats. Snitches. They want to know if they can pressure you enough to where you come out here in free society and you will talk to people in the community and go back and inform on the Muslims. And that's the only kind of job he can give you. ... You're not going to go down there and be a technician, a computer technician."

Ahmed Bilal says two agents visited him in January after he left the CMU and went to a halfway house in the Pacific Northwest. They were the same agents, he says, who built a case against him for supporting terrorist groups as part of the "Portland Seven" in 2002. They told him they wanted to make sure he wasn't up to anything radical. But they also told him they wouldn't be following him around all the time, he says.

Then there's Enaam Arnaout, who pleaded guilty to racketeering for allegedly misleading donors to his charity about where their money was going. After his release from a CMU, Arnaout began selling cars in the Chicago area, according to court documents. He has asked a judge for permission to take a three-month vacation, to attend to what he describes as family business, in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Bosnia. The Justice Department didn't object, but a judge has ordered a hearing to learn more about it.

Eventually many of the men in the CMUs will finish their prison sentences and get released.

In the early years, the special units didn't offer many job opportunities or classes, according to former inmates and their lawyers.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said in a statement Wednesday that "the number of offerings has continued to increase since the inception of the CMUs." Billingsley said inmates now get financial planning advice and help with social services through release preparation programs at the CMU or in halfway houses.

But advocates say those programs, which often involve inmates watching 30-minute television specials created by the prison system, simply don't do enough to help prisoners return to society.

Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, says the CMUs "simply don't have that preparation. So there's no way for individuals, some of whom are serving very long sentences, to begin the process of figuring out how they're going to live once they're released from prison. This is something that's incredibly difficult for the prisoners who experience it, and it really is a public safety issue for the public at large."