Spencer Ackerman — Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo

Torture report

Exclusive: At the notorious wartime prison, Richard Zuley oversaw a shocking military interrogation that has become a permanent stain on his country. Part one of a Guardian investigation reveals he used disturbingly similar tactics to extract confessions from minorities for years – as a police officer in urban America.

When the Chicago detective Richard Zuley arrived at Guantánamo Bay late in 2002, US military commanders touted him as the hero they had been looking for.

Here was a Navy reserve lieutenant who had spent the last 25 years as a distinguished detective on the mean streets of Chicago, closing case after case – often due to his knack for getting confessions.

But while Zuley’s brutal interrogation techniques – prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others – would get supercharged at Guantánamo for the war on terrorism, a Guardian investigation has uncovered that Zuley used similar tactics for years, behind closed police-station doors, on Chicago’s poor and non-white citizens. Multiple people in prison in Illinois insist they have been wrongly convicted on the basis of coerced confessions extracted by Zuley and his colleagues.

The Guardian examined thousands of court documents from Chicago and interviewed two dozen people with experience at Guantánamo and in the Chicago criminal-justice system. The results of its investigation suggests a continuum between Guantánamo interrogation rooms and Chicago police precincts. Zuley’s detective work, particularly when visited on Chicago’s minority communities, contains a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture.

Add another name to the list that will forever live in infamy.

Disintegrating American soft power.

Dick Zuley’s history as a military interrogator at Guantánamo and a police interrogator in Chicago scrambles that narrative. It suggests a continuum between police abuses in urban America and the wartime detention scandals that continue to do persistent damage to the international reputation of the United States. 

Chicago, in particular, has its own deep and infamous history with police torture, with black Chicagoans its primary victims. 

The city’s police violence “was institutionalized,” said Tracy Siska, the executive director of the Chicago Justice Project – and continues, in different forms, to this day.
“Today’s interrogation rooms … the techniques are more sophisticated,” Siska told the Guardian. “It’s around sleep deprivation, around food deprivation, isolation, what you’d consider touchless torture, which is more effective and doesn’t leave any marks.”

Disgusting.

The Guardian
Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo

Spencer Ackerman
ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism