Views > December 10, 2005 > Web Only

Torture in the Homeland

By Salim Muwakkil

Torture is much in the news these days. “We do not torture,” President George Bush declared last month, after the Washington Post revealed that the CIA maintains an international archipelago of covert prisons where it can torture terror suspects.

News of these secret torture chambers has added new ammunition to critics’ charges that the Bush administration condoned torture at Abu Ghraib, still condones it at Guantanamo Bay and outsources prisoners to nations where torture is a routine form of interrogation.

Some Americans are angered that critics dare to connect the Bush administration to torture. Other countries may torture people, they argue, but the United States is a nation that respects laws and human rights.

Well, I’m here to tell you that torture, like terrorism, is as American as apple pie.

The latest domestic example is Chicago, where for nearly two decades (from 1973 to 1991) the police department virtually condoned the torture of more than 100 black criminal suspects. Those illegal techniques led to the wrongful conviction of dozens of black men, and even prompted Amnesty International in 1990 to call for an inquiry into police torture in the city.

To be fair, Chicago cops did not widely practice these torture techniques. Investigators found that police district Area 2 was the focal point, and that police commander Jon Burge was the primary culprit. The city eventually fired Burge for his illegal interrogation techniques, but he has paid no legal price. His former colleagues periodically display continued support for him; some cops attempted to enter a pro-Burge float into the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Community outrage sank that float.

Even after former Illinois governor George Ryan granted four death row inmates pardons once he concluded their confessions were tortured from them by Burge and his men, Chicago officials failed to prosecute. The curious reluctance of elected officials to act on the Burge case prompted a Cook County Court judge to appoint a special prosecutor. But after two years of investigating, special prosecutor Edward Egan has done little but complain about police officers’ refusal to testify against colleagues. In early December, however, Egan granted immunity to three officers connected to Burge, and observers note it may mark a turning point in the probe.

Egan’s renewed attention in the case might well have been provoked by an October 14 hearing in Washington D.C., in which a group of Chicago lawyers and two Illinois Congress members brought the Burge case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is the human rights arm of the Organization of American States. Frustrated with Egan’s slow pace, an aggregation of community and human rights activists petitioned the international group for a hearing on police torture and the failure to prosecute Burge and his men.

“By taking this issue outside the boundaries of the United States, we thought we could bring a broader focus on the issues of police torture within the United States,” says Stan Willis, a Chicago attorney/activist who was among those presenting the case to the international group. Current headlines about far-flung CIA torture chambers, the Bush administration’s opposition to Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture legislation, and the U.S. refusal to allow U.N. human rights monitors one-to-one interviews with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay also offered an optimal opportunity to put Chicago torture in the global spotlight.

“We gave the panel a PowerPoint presentation on the Burge case,” Willis explained in an interview following the Washington hearing. “Our allegations are so well-documented and compelling, I’m sure the presentation was persuasive.”

Willis said his group clarified how prosecutions for torture would damage the careers of currently prominent officials. “Many of these incidents of police torture happened when Chicago mayor Richard Daley was States Attorney, and Dick Devine, the current States Attorney, was his assistant.” What’s more, Willis noted, Devine also worked for the law firm that represented Burge in fighting the torture charges.

The group alleges that these incestuous relationships have stymied the investigation, which so far has documented 139 cases of torture and abuse of African-American suspects. They were hoping the international notoriety might just be the spark that reinvigorates the special prosecutor—and with the expected testimony of three Burge associates, it appears their strategy was successful.

“We also want to use this issue to inform people and mobilize them to fight the increasing damage being done to the African-American community by this nation’s criminal punishment system,” Willis explained. What human rights groups condemn as torturous treatment was long considered routine punishment for black Americans, he said, “just as black Americans have been subjected to racist terrorism for hundreds of years before terrorism became a global issue.”

Willis wants to mobilize a movement, and he believes the racist biases that brutalize African-Americans are revealed more clearly through the prism of global human rights. When we understand that Guantanomo Bay is just a pale reflection of what happens right here on our shores, he is certain a movement will be irresistable.

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• Reader Comments

  Any characterization of any group of people as “other” by one or more other groups of people acts pretty much the same way. Degrees vary. The bars for “acceptable” risks, damages, harm, and insult varies widely across the economic and social classes. 

  The game is pretty much always the same. Divide and conquer is always a strategy for maintaining dominance. Have the slaves enslave and whip themselves.

  How many books and dissertations have been done on Daley’s and the Chicago police?

  I digress.

  I agree that African-Americans have suffered and are currently suffering far more in the Unites States’ penal system by a landslide---for than any other class of U.S. citizens.

  However, I beg to differ with the idea that Guantanomo Bay is “a pale reflection” of the torture of American citizens by American citizens or agencies.

  The Iraqis are ten kinds of “other” to the American military, which has a hell of a lot more ammunition than even the Chicago police force, and they work longer hours for less pay.

  Posted by wileywitch on Dec 7, 2005 at 1:23 PM

  “I agree that African-Americans have suffered and are currently suffering far more in the Unites States’ penal system by a landslide”

  I personally think it is primarily a class thing, not a race issue. OJ being a famous example of a Negro who got away with murder (i suppose M Jackson got away with crimes too, but i don’t think any race wants to claim him!).

  On the other hand, any subculture that denigrates education (say as a “white thing") will tend to keep its own population in the lower classes. . .

  Posted by wolf on Dec 7, 2005 at 2:56 PM

  By it’s very nature, the issue of blacks being overwhelmingly overrepresented in prison populations is a race issue. Race is a class issue. I don’t think the black imprisonment rates can be resolved without specifically addressing racism and how it is manifested in the legal system.

  The point I wanted to make was that the Iraqi people are suffering far more torture, murder, and other ills being done to them right now than any thing even this racist nation would allow for its own citizens as “normal” or “staying the course” or whatever euphemism is to be used for an aggressive attack, followed by a thoroughly corrupt, inept, and brutal occupation.

  Posted by wileywitch on Dec 7, 2005 at 10:00 PM

  Then, yesterday, on Democracy Now, I heard testimony from New Orleans African-Americans talking about concentration camps they were put into where they were separated from family members, that many were still searching for.

  As loosely as I use quotation marks, I’m not going to put quotes around that term because I don’t want the term to be drawn into question. What they described did indeed sound like a concentration camp, and all people responsible for these conditions and for treating people this way should be removed from positions of authority and public trust, and prosecuted in whatever way would work in this system.

  And the survivors need to hear a formal apology from someone representing this nation who was not in an office or limosine while New Orleans drowned.

  Posted by wileywitch on Dec 10, 2005 at 11:13 AM

  Were only colored folk put in “concentration camps”? How many died in the camps? Where were these camps and for how long were the “victims”: put there?

  Posted by wolf on Dec 12, 2005 at 10:22 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 74 posts.

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