Chicago will be Chicago. Al Capone is looking like one of the good guys. Add Rahm's name to the list that should be in a dock at The Hague along with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama. So far, Joe Biden seems to be just a war-profiteer.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Department is operating a CIA-style black site on the city’s West Side, according to an explosive new report fromThe Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman. The facility, an otherwise plain warehouse known as Homan Square, also houses military-style vehicles, according to Ackerman.
The Guardian reports that the CPD detains mostly poor, black and brown people at Homan. Once at the site, detainees are allegedly beaten by police, shackled for hours and denied access to counsel. There is no booking at Homan Square, so details about who has been detained at the facility are scarce. “Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are,” Ackerman wrote. “Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts.”The Intercept
Report: Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Operating Domestic Black Site
Juan Thompson
12 comments:
Tom,
I invite you to spend a week in the West Side of Chicago--if you last with your life that long. Oh, and those doing the complaining about the alleged abuses are reliable, upstanding citizens? LOL. I know enough West Side cops to know that this is trumped up bullshit, and I'm no apologist for Chicago corruption. But I'll grant you this much--If true in what the article contends then I'm all for heads rolling at CPD.
Not like this something new. Part of the police culture there?
The Atlantic » When Chicago Tortured —The Second City is still grappling with a long history of police brutality by Noah Berlatsky
The Guardian » Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession
Exclusive: Longtime detective’s tactics exported from Chicago to Guantánamo by Spencer Ackerman
Amnesty International USA Urges Obama to Address Torture by Chicago Police
CBSChicago » New Director Named To Illinois Torture Commission
Tom, CPD has certainly had cops on it's force who tortured. So has virtually every large metropolis on the planet. Point being, Chicago is no outlier here. I don't dispute parts of the Guardian article either--thugs got ruffed up. I just dispute that this is somehow native to Chicago and not the rest of the world.
While it is true that police brutality and torture is widespread in the US and has been for a long time, do a search on police torture US cities and the list of top hits that mention Chicago is long and leads the list. Chicago made the mistake of getting caught, I guess.
It's all relative, Tom. Right?
Chicago's South and West Sides are notoriously violent, no? You can put two and two together from there if you're honest.
Yes, it is relative — to what your profile is.
AlterNet | Civil Liberties
For Decades, Chicago Police Used City Jails as Torture Chambers — Victims who were tortured into giving false confessions are now asking the city for reparations
Terrell Jermaine Starr / AlterNet
Meet American torture victim Darrell Cannon. On the morning of Nov. 2, 1983, Cannon, then 32 years old, was tortured while in the custody of the Chicago Police Department. Officers escorted him from his Southside home at 7:30am and took him to a local precinct where they shocked him in the testicles and the mouth with an electric cattle prod and struck his knees with a baton, trying to force him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. Cannon gave a false confession around 2pm that afternoon.
He spent the next 24 years in prison until he was exonerated and released in 2007. While serving his sentence, Cannon sued for damages in connection with the torture; he was awarded the paltry sum of $3,000 and left with $1,247 after costs and legal fees were deducted.
Here's another victim:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-alstory-simon-lawsuit-northwestern-20150217-story.html#page=1
OK, that's one. Any more like that? I got lots more.
I call false equivalence.
Has the Middle Class ever operated a Black Site, where they coerce Banksters into going straight?
:(
Guess we have the moral upper ground.
"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery."
- Horace Greeley
Tom,
It might be one example Tom, but the Innocence Project's people were used to buttress the Guardian article, and those folks over there at Northwestern have a few axe's to grind with cops in general, and will lie through their teeth, along with their compatriot agenda driven lawyers mentioned in the article, to further their agenda. An agenda that skirts the law when it serves their aims, and cops get in the way of their agenda, so their minions will discredit cops at will, even if only unprovable allegations. Point being they aren't an impartial source in the least for a journalistic to hang their hat on.
Like I said earlier, if there's hard evidence to support the Guardian's claim, along with non dubious folks making these allegations, which this article is surely lacking, then heads should roll. But this article is simply horseshit, and wouldn't hold up in a court of law for one minute in a judicial proceeding.
If you unpack this piece of journalistic sensationalism you have the already mentioned and discredited Innocence Project, a convicted anarchist, agenda driven lawyers who thrive on hyperbole and half truths, if not whole cloth untruths, and a newspaper that is hyperbole personified, especially with this weak bit of journalistic spilled digital ink.
The article makes it appear it's a black ops site, when in fact it's nothing of the sort. The gangbangers and thugs in the neighborhood know it's there and why it's fenced in. Christ, it's in one the worst and most violent areas in Chicago and on the planet itself.
I know you want this to be true, as it confirms what you already think you know about Chicago policing, otherwise I doubt you'd start a thread on the subject. I know some believe also that Chicago cops are just out to get black and brown people, who, incidentally, commit 90% of the city's crime. Have you spent any time in Chicago's violent neighborhoods? You think Andy Griffith could pull a shift there? You think cops working those beats wake up every day salivating at the prospect of encountering gangbangers who through heir plants in the police force itself not to mention the courts could have a bounty on them or their families heads? Doesn't work that way, Tom. Cops gotta walk a narrow line on the streets. Arm chair QB's only have to pontificate.
Bottom line, this article was no Serpico moment
The Atlantic » Behind 'the Disappeared' of Chicago’s Homan Square — A criminologist dissects the so-called black site, where military interrogation techniques are allegedly substituted for questioning by Tanya Basu
In Hitler's Germany when people began disappearing no one asked any question, and probably few Germans knew of the concentration camps at the time.
The allegations are out there, There needs to be a real investigation in the facts, but is the US able to conduct such an investigation?
So the result be some people believing the allegations, some not, and some quite happy if they are true because the people involved are "the scum of the earth" and "deserve" what they get.
I like the headline, "Dissappeared!" So frightening.
Of course no one literally disappeared, just a little yellow journalism to capture eyeballs.
Siska, of course is living in the dark ages, but his bread and butter depends on hte agenda he fronts.
CPD is a very diverse PD. It's an educated PD too, but you'd never guess that with all the trumped up cop hating screeds that only thugs, libertarians and detached liberals far removed from the inner city buy into.
The CJP's and their apologists of the world, however, don't get a lot of support from law abiding folks in the crossfire at these crime ridden neighborhoods. They get it that Barney Fife tactics won't keep their babies from dying at the hands of the thugs who rule the hoods. The only line of defense is those awful coppers that the left despises so much. Wake me when law abiding folks start complaining about the so called nefarious "tactics" employed by said coppers instead of the thugs and their duped supporters moaning.
Oh, and the whole militarized police force meme isn't remotely true in the ghetto, whatever one means by militarized in the first place. Tear gas and Hummers and special forces aren't the same as tanks, howitzers, bombs.
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