By now, everyone in America is familiar with the ideas of and the execution of torture. Abu Ghraib and now Guantanamo have both made the practice of torture by the hands of Americans pretty obvious, unless of course, you ask President Barack Obama. According to POTUS "We do not torture" seems to deny the reality of its practice by people that claim to be charged with our national security as a reason for its practice. And by denying our involvement with torture, regardless of rationale, are we not inviting an increase in such barbaric behaviors and exactly why are we any better than any other nation that closes its eyes to the wrongs that they have perpetrated? American "Exceptionalism" is not going to buy us a pass from the terrorists or other nations.
Okay? The president, at least out loud and to the public, does not endorse torture. It appears that one of his Chicago peers, Rahm Emanuel, mayor, denies the existence of a black ops site where Chicago Police torture people in a warehouse called Homan Square. Homan Square is a facility where every day poor, brown and black Chicagoans can disappear for days. There are no arrest records. No attorneys can speak with the individual and some have been placed in, what has been described as, metal dog cages, placed in painful stress positions for hours as well as suffer physical abuse by police officers. The existence of the warehouse, as a secret police facility, has been denied by police brass and the mayor. And yet there are individuals and their attorneys who can attest to its existence.
In my twisted way of viewing reality, it's kind of amazing to me that long-time Chicago residents, especially Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, could be completely unaware of Chicago's long-standing affiliation with police brutality and torture of citizens.
The Guardian described Homan Square, located in Chicago's west side, as a place where people simply "vanish into inherently coercive police custody". (The Guardian, "Police Black State" by Spenser Ackerman).
The Chicago Police Department has been accused of unscrupulous prosecutions, falsification of evidence, manipulation of "jail-house snitches" and unreasonable and tortuous questioning of defendants for decades. One of the primary individuals known to have openly tortured individuals, many of whom were released without charges, is a man named Jon Burge, a once commander of the storied Area 2 Police Command where untold horrors occurred.
But an even more infamous Chicago Policeman, Richard Zuley, rose to the heights of being a Guantanamo terrorist interrogator. Just as accusations and municipal payouts to defendants have dogged his career in Chicago, attorneys and Guantanamo detainees have recorded and testified about his abusive and inhumane treatment of the detainees. How could it be any surprise that a man known to have little regard for the lives of black/brown men and the poor would stoop to torture men he assumed were terrorists? Or maybe Zuley never needed that burst of patriotism to perpetrate horror upon other human beings. One man wrongly convicted of murder, Lathierial Boyd, recalls Zuley stating after searching Boyd's loft, "No nigger should live that well." So, why would anyone question the man's judgement or his methods for procuring information?
The point is, we, as a nation, have very little knowledge about individuals that are tasked to protect us from terrorist attacks or even the common cop on the beat. The Chicago Police department has been renowned for decades as being corrupt and yet we have people in high places today that deny that such behaviors have never and do not occur. And therein lies the problem.
Until we are able to address the ills in our country like police brutality, or the common acceptance of torture by private citizens as necessary for our national safety, the recorded growing national payouts (somewhere greater than $241,000,000 in the last 15 years) of local municipalities to families and/or illegally convicted and/or wrongfully imprisoned defendants, will continue to increase exponentially while the marginalized will turn towards something other than embracing our laws and being productive citizens.
We stand on a precipice as a nation. Other nations and generations have stood exactly where we stand now and many chose to ignore their glaring realities. We either begin to hold our policemen, prosecutors and judges to a higher standard to protect our collective well-being, or we will surely perish.