It seems that the Guardian has uncovered the scoop of the year; The US Department of Justice and mayor Rahm Emanuel are under increasing pressure to investigate allegations of what one politician called “CIA or Gestapo tactics” at a secretive Chicago police facility, uncovered by Guardian snooping.
At the site at Homan Square, numerous “off-the-books” interrogations had taken place. Several lawyers had even characterised it as a “counter-terrorist black site”.
Several abuses are alleged to have occurred at this black site, including keeping detainees outside of the official databases, beatings being administered by officers that often result in head injuries, prolonged shackling, the denial of attorney access to the facility and holding people without allowing them access to legal counsel for up to 24 hours (this includes minors as young as 15 years old). One person was even found dead in a so-called “interview room”.
Brian Jacob Church was held there in 2012. Known as one of the “NATO Three”, a group that was caught trying to make Molotov cocktails prior to a NATO summit (the three men were entrapped by two police officers, who had goaded them on. Also, strange that one can be arrested in America on Terrorism Charges for making four Molotovs under the instruction of the police, but actually setting police on fire is a sign of democratic reform in Ukraine…. That old axiom about one man’s freedom fighter being another’s terrorist really does ring true it would seem, but I digress.)
Church was restrained for nearly a day, his left wrist cuffed to a bar behind a bench and his ankles cuffed together. He was left in a windowless cell, and had his request to speak with an attorney denied. “Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”
“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.
Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation. Eliza Solowiej, the lawyer of a man who wished to remain anonymous, had detailed that she had been unable to find her client until he turned up with a head injury at a hospital.
“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”
Another case described by another attorney, Julia Bartmes involved a fifteen year old boy, who was detained for nearly 13 hours before being released without charges. She too was denied entry to speak with her client.
“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said the Chicago lawyer.
When one is booked into a black site like Homan, one disappears from the face of the planet; his exact location is unknown to even family members and attorneys, and no record of him being detained is kept in the databases.
Finally, the most disturbing of detentions, 44-year-old John Hubbard was detained at Homan. Found “unresponsive inside an interview room”; he was pronounced dead from apparent heroin intoxication.
The black site seems to be an attempt to import Guantanamo-style tactics to be used against domestic “terrorists”, as well as gangs and drug-traffickers. First these tactics were deemed necessary against the perpetrators of September the 11th, then anybody in the Middle East, then domestic alleged “terrorists”, then drug abusers and gangsters….. Then what?
The site houses military-grade vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage. Its focus is on the poor, as well as black or brown Americans.
As the Guardian continued with its investigation, more victims came forward. One man was detained for a full three days for possessing 3 and half pounds of marijuana, while three others were cuffed in a crucifix-position to a bench where one was allegedly punched in the face, while an officer stepped on another man’s groin .
It is conspiracy no longer that black sites would be eventually used on Americans, particularly when wealth inequality in the country is reaching staggering heights. The militarization of the police would only be complete if they were to adopt similarly distasteful tactics against its own people.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”
“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said.
“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
They don’t just creep, they are practically leaping and bounding into every other aspect of life, from the NSA surveillance that provides the intel to the militarised “Gestapo” that actually “disappears” dissenters. A “Shut Down Homan Square” protest is being organised by activists, though this would only affect known black sites.
Original source http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/26/police-black-site-chicago-washington-politicians-human-rights
Do you have a way to make this more readable? I can’t read the black lettering on the grey background but would really like to read it! Thank you! 🙂