[Peace-discuss] Chicago Police Torture Linked To Guantanamo Bay Torture

Sat Feb 21 07:53:47 EST 2015

Chicago Police Torture Linked To Guantanamo Bay Torture

Description: The results of a Guardian investigation into Richard Zuleys
detective work, particularly when visited on minority communities, suggest a
continuum between Guantanamo interrogation rooms and Chicago police
precincts Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian

 <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Educate!
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/chicago/> Chicago,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/guantanamo/> Guantanamo,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/police-brutality/> police brutality,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/torture/> Torture,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/> Wars and
Militarism 
By Spencer Ackerman,
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-torture-chicago-p
olice-brutality> www.theguardian.com
February 20th, 2015

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Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession

The results of a Guardian investigation into Richard Zuleys detective work,
particularly when visited on minority communities, suggest a continuum
between Guantanamo interrogation rooms and Chicago police precincts
Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian

A  <http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/chicago> Chicago detective who led
one of the most shocking acts of torture ever conducted at Guantánamo Bay
was responsible for implementing a disturbingly similar, years-long regime
of brutality to elicit murder confessions from minority Americans.

In a dark foreshadowing of the United States post-9/11
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-released>
descent into torture, a Guardian investigation can reveal that Richard
Zuley, a detective on Chicagos north side from 1977 to 2007, repeatedly
engaged in methods of interrogation resulting in at least one wrongful
conviction and subsequent cases more recently thrown into doubt following
allegations of abuse.

Zuleys record suggests a continuum between police abuses in urban America
and the wartime detention scandals that continue to do persistent damage to
the reputation of the United States. Zuleys tactics, which would be
supercharged at Guantánamo when he took over the interrogation of a
high-profile detainee as a US Navy reserve lieutenant, included:

 Shackling suspects to police-precinct walls through eyebolts for hours on
end.

 Accusations of planting evidence when there was pressure for a
high-profile murder conviction.

 Threats of harm to family members of those under interrogation used as
leverage.

 Pressure on suspects to implicate themselves and others.

 Threats of being subject to the death penalty if suspects did not confess.

The Cook County states attorney office now has an examination open into a
second conviction involving Zuley, filings in an Illinois court showed on
Tuesday. (
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-ch
icago-guantanamo> The Guardian is publishing the first part of its
investigation on Wednesday.) While representatives of the states attorneys
office told the Guardian that the examination concerns only a single case,
the office is seeking civilian complaint files regarding Zuley from a local
independent police review authority.

<https://www.popularresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-20
15-02-20-at-10.05.19-AM.png> Description: Screen Shot 2015-02-20 at 10.05.19
AM

The wrongful-conviction examination into Zuley follows an extraordinary 2013
decision by states attorney Anita Alvarez to free an innocent man Zuleys
faulty police work sent to prison for 23 years.

Lathierial Boyd, convicted in 1990 of murder, accuses Zuley in a federal
civil-rights lawsuit of planting evidence and withholding crucial details.

Boyd told the Guardian that Zuley had a racial animus as well. No nigger is
supposed to live like this, he remembered Zuley telling him after the
detective searched his expensive loft.

Other Chicago cases detailed by the Guardian, centering on three people
interrogated by Zuley who are still in state prison, turned up evidence in
police precinct houses of severe and internationally condemned tactics in
Guantánamo Bay interrogation rooms.

Several of those techniques  prolonged shackling, threats about family,
pressure to confess  used by Zuley bear similarities to those he enacted
when he took over the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi at Guantánamo,
described in official government reports and a best-selling memoir
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/guantanamo-diary>  serialised last month
by the Guardian as one of the most brutal in the history of the notorious US
wartime prison.

After Zuley took over in July 2003, Slahi was subjected to even more extreme
interrogation tactics: multiple death threats, extreme temperatures, sleep
deprivation and a terrifying nighttime boat ride in which he was made to
believe that worse was in store.

Most official accounts of Slahis torture have concealed or glossed over
Zuleys name.

A weeks-long Guardian investigation, unraveled from footnotes in Slahis
memoir and involving thousands of police and court documents plus interviews
with two dozen veterans of both Guantánamo Bay and Chicago criminal justice,
complicates that history.

As Slahi did, inmates said they confessed untruthfully to try and stop the
treatment by Zuley.

Basically, they just tortured me, mentally, and somewhat physically, with
the cuffs, Benita Johnson, an inmate serving a 60-year murder sentence,
told the Guardian from prison of the interrogation that led to her
conviction.

Chicago has long had an institutional problem with police torture. An
infamous former police commander, Jon Burge, used to administer electric
shocks to Chicagoans taken into his station, and hit them over the head with
telephone books. On Friday, Burge was released from home monitoring, the
conclusion of a four and a half year federal sentence  not for torture, but
for perjury.

There have been a number of really bad apples in the Chicago police
department who unquestionably have railroaded unknown numbers of innocent
people into prison, said Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern
Universitys Center on Wrongful Convictions. 

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