Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

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Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Thanas »

I am keeping this out of the general Police abuse thread because this is way above the usual stuff about single cops making mistakes. This is institutionalized.

The Guardian
The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'

Exclusive: Secret interrogation facility reveals aspects of war on terror in US
‘They disappeared us’: protester details 17-hour shackling without basic rights
Accounts describe police brutality, missing 15-year-old and one man’s death


The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

- Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
- Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
- Shackling for prolonged periods.
- Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
- Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “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.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. 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, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“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 Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

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.”

Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department has not responded to any of the Guardian’s recent questions – neither about any aspect of operations at Homan Square, nor about the Guardian’s investigation of Richard Zuley, the retired Chicago detective turned Guantánamo Bay torturer. (On Monday evening, it instead provided a statement to MSNBC regarding the Guardian’s Zuley investigation: “The vast majority of our officers serve the public with honor and integrity,” said the statement, adding that the department “has zero tolerance for misconduct, and has instituted a series of internal initiatives and reforms, to ensure past incidents of police misconduct are not repeated”. Without providing any specifics, it claimed “the allegations in this instance are not supported by the facts.”)

When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.

A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.

But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.

“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”

‘Never going to see the light of day’: the search for the Nato Three, the head wound, the worried mom and the dead man


Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.


In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.

“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.

Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.

“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.

Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.

They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.

After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.

The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.

Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. 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.

One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.

“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.”


Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.

An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.

On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. The Cook County medical examiner’s office could not locate any record for the Guardian indicating a cause of Hubbard’s death. It remains unclear why Hubbard was ever in police custody.

Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.


A former Chicago detective and current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)

Transferring detainees through police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,” Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,” he told the Guardian.

Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny access to attorneys.

“Homan Square should be on the same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say: ‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.

“If you’re going to be doing this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”

Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.

A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”

Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.

The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.

On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.


“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.”

Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.

“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.


Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.

Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”

Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.

Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska 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.”
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by AMT »

I was reading that myself and was thinking of posting it...
This kinda shit is just beyond the pale, and one reason we need to have more visibility in departments like this.

When either one subset of a department goes rogue and everyone looks the other way, or worse, it's organized from the top, it needs to be reined in. It's sad that in this day and age we allow such things to still occur, both domestically and on foreign soil under our management.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Simon_Jester »

I'd say this was evidence of the 'Guantanamo attitude' infiltrating US domestic policing (which I've been expecting to become a problem for about ten or twelve years)... but it looks from the article like it's been going on longer than that.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Pelranius »

The hell?!

Makes you wonder what other PDs, metro or state, also have such black sites.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Simon_Jester »

Chicago is legendarily corrupt; I could easily believe that only Chicago has such a place.

But this is a reasonable question you ask.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by loomer »

Yeah, the Chicago PD has a long history of pretty open and outright torture - e.g. Jon Burge. This strikes me as just a resurgence in that history rather than a transfer over from the greater War on Terror.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Lord Revan »

isn't Chigago PD one of the worst if not the worst when it comes to corruption?

If I remembered that correctly it doesn't surprice me that their morals are lacking in other ways too.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by AniThyng »

I get the impression from the right wing that a lot of blame for the corruption is directed at Chicago's democratic machine. Are Chicago republicans just as bad?
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by The Romulan Republic »

I don't know, but isn't Chicago pretty solid Democrat territory? If they're the ones who always win, they're probably going to be responsible for more shit even if they're not any worse in theory simply because they'll be in a position to do more.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by aerius »

Look on the bright side, at least the suspects aren't getting shipped to Gitmo yet. That we know of. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing it. There's a reason that Chicago is on my "don't go there list" along with Florida and Georgia.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Alyrium Denryle »

AniThyng wrote:I get the impression from the right wing that a lot of blame for the corruption is directed at Chicago's democratic machine. Are Chicago republicans just as bad?

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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Grumman »

The Romulan Republic wrote:I don't know, but isn't Chicago pretty solid Democrat territory?
Yes, and not just because Obama's from Chicago. 68% voted for Gore and 70% for Kerry.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Broomstick »

Lord Revan wrote:isn't Chigago PD one of the worst if not the worst when it comes to corruption
Chicago is legendarily corrupt.

Anyone who who remembers the whole Jon Burge thing (Burge was the tip of the iceberg and not the only one involved or prosecuted) would not be surprised by this revelation about "Homan Square". If you want to go back further the city and police actually carried out an assassination or two during the late '60's. Chicago fancies itself an independent city-state. It both defies and emulates the Federal government. You think Americans fly a crapload of flags? In Chicago, there are just as many America flags as usual and then even more city flags.
AniThyng wrote:I get the impression from the right wing that a lot of blame for the corruption is directed at Chicago's democratic machine. Are Chicago republicans just as bad?
Hard to say, given how long it's been since the Republicans have held any real power in the city. The most recent Republican mayor of Chicago was William Hale Thompson, whose second term ended in 1931. Evidence seems to indicate an even greater level of corruption than today, but whether that was due to the times or the politics is hard to say.
The Romulan Republic wrote:I don't know, but isn't Chicago pretty solid Democrat territory? If they're the ones who always win, they're probably going to be responsible for more shit even if they're not any worse in theory simply because they'll be in a position to do more.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Irbis »

You know, I tried to look up when People's Security (quasi-secret police with vast powers) here behaved like this police force and I had to go all the way to post-war Stalinist period. Ironically, once Stalin died, it was disbanded for excess heavy-handedness in 1956 and its small remains were rolled back into People's Police as organized and political crime department.

One case where they were accused of getting rid of suspect led to widespread country-wide public anger, despite all signs pointing out to his death being an accident (and indeed, when rabidly anti-communist IPN institute managed to exhume his body in 2011 to 'prove' secret police 'crimes' it turned out he was far more drunk than stated and had no wounds unrelated to fall).

Had secret police here tried to operate this way, there would have been riots soon and anyone accused of terrorism for criticizing our overlords would have been martyred (and would have good shot on ministerial position in post 1989 Poland). Not that criticizing Warsaw Pact was exactly legal, but you'd get an advocate, trial, and would need to try really hard to get anything more than 'disrupting public order' charges. The land of the free, indeed.
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Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.

[...]

Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”

Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.

[...]

“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.”
Huh, I remember some people here claimed USA has 'no problem' with guns. I wonder how then much poorer countries manage to curb their gang equivalents problem without APCs and assault rifles, to the point you rarely hear of them in media. And how USA is about the only country in the world upsetting trend of rich countries having much less big time criminal offences. Maybe, just maybe police force that doesn't feel outgunned without 12.7 mm HMG can actually focus on doing its job :roll:
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by TheHammer »

Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Ohhhh a humvee! I'm not particularly impressed or concerned by that aspect if that's the biggest of the 1700 pieces of "military equipment" they received. Of course that's not to say they didn't already have heavier equipment purchased by the dept itself.

The allegations about the site certainly are troubling and merit investigation. It would seem counter productive for police to use those tactics considering the constitutional violations would make prosecution for crimes extremely difficult. So it leads one to believe its a tool for intimidation rather than criminal prosecution...

Chicago PD is of course denying the validity of the allegations, the Chicago Sun-times has a response to some of the assertions in the Guardian article:

http://chicago.suntimes.com/news-chicag ... n-compound
Chicago Sun-Times wrote:

The Guardian newspaper published a story Tuesday saying the Chicago Police Department operates an “off-the-books interrogation compound” that some local defense lawyers called the domestic version of a secret CIA “black site,” but police officials responded that the facility isn’t used to violate suspects’ rights — and isn’t even secret.

The massive Homan Square facility is a former Sears, Roebuck & Co. warehouse on the West Side. The building now houses the police department’s Organized Crime Bureau, the Evidence and Recovered Property Section, its ballistics lab and the SWAT unit.

“The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago Police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the U.S. war on terrorism,” the Guardian reported.

But the existence of the building isn’t being kept under wraps by the police: The public is able to recover inventoried property from the evidence unit and news conferences are regularly held at Homan Square when the department shows off seized drugs.

And unlike other Chicago Police facilities over the years, no allegations of torture have been reported in the media in connection with Homan Square.

Marty Maloney, a spokesman for the police department, said interviews are handled no differently at Homan Square than at other police facilities, such as the department’s 22 districts or its three detective headquarters.

“If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” Maloney said. “There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square.”

Arrest reports are completed at Homan Square, and suspects are taken to other facilities for booking, Maloney said.

The Guardian quoted Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “NATO 3,” saying he was handcuffed for about 17 hours and was denied access to an attorney while police interrogated him. Church said he was later taken to the nearby Harrison police district, where he was booked.

“It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East,” Church was quoted as saying.

The Guardian story didn’t allege that Church suffered from physical abuse at Homan Square other than his complaint that his left wrist was handcuffed to a bar behind a bench and his ankles were cuffed together.

In April 2014, Church and his two co-defendants were convicted of felony counts of possessing an incendiary device and misdemeanor mob action, but they were acquitted of more serious terrorism charges tied to the NATO summit in May 2012.

The Guardian story indicated that one suspect suffered a head injury while in custody at the Homan Square facility.

“The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever,” Maloney responded.

The Guardian spoke to several Chicago defense attorneys who said they’d never heard of Homan Square before their clients were taken there. Attorneys have attempted to gain access to the facility, but were “most often turned away even as their clients remain in custody inside,” the newspaper reported.

The Guardian also ominously noted that John Hubbard, 44, was found unresponsive in an interview room at Homan Square and pronounced dead on Feb. 2, 2013. The Guardian said the Cook County medical examiner’s office couldn’t locate a record indicating his cause of death.

But on Tuesday, the office told the Sun-Times that Hubbard died of an accidental heroin overdose. He was taken into custody after he allegedly bought drugs from an undercover officer, arrest records show.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Kamakazie Sith »

The federal government needs to launch a full investigation into this to determine it's validity. Normally, I don't subscribe to the idea of "fire everyone" but in this case, if these allegations are true, then they should do exactly that.

Shameful.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by TheFeniX »

Why only fired? If true, civil rights violations this severe, combined with literally disappearing people: I would think charges of kidnapping and murder should be on the table.

Won't happen, but it should.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Kamakazie Sith »

TheFeniX wrote:Why only fired? If true, civil rights violations this severe, combined with literally disappearing people: I would think charges of kidnapping and murder should be on the table.

Won't happen, but it should.
Of course they should be charged. However, "beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't required for terminating someone.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

aerius wrote:There's a reason that Chicago is on my "don't go there list" along with Florida and Georgia.
Why? I mean, the political corruption in Chicago is bad, but it's not like that's something that would have any impact on a visiting tourist. It seems odd to categorically rule out the possibility of ever visiting one of America's largest and most important cities (both economically and culturally). And, hell, why rule out all of Florida and Georgia, for that matter? Atlanta and Miami are both large and cosmopolitan cities, and sporadic news stories about dumb rednecks in the swamps don't at all reflect what it is like to visit these cities.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Gandalf »

Ziggy Stardust wrote:Why? I mean, the political corruption in Chicago is bad, but it's not like that's something that would have any impact on a visiting tourist. It seems odd to categorically rule out the possibility of ever visiting one of America's largest and most important cities (both economically and culturally). And, hell, why rule out all of Florida and Georgia, for that matter? Atlanta and Miami are both large and cosmopolitan cities, and sporadic news stories about dumb rednecks in the swamps don't at all reflect what it is like to visit these cities.
Another concern is that if you visit a place where you know that such a thing occurs, you are effectively supporting it through your willingly putting money into the local economy.

It's not on the same scale, but it's why a lot of people I know refuse to visit the DPRK.
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That we dying younger hiding from the police man over there
Just for breathing in the air they wanna leave me in the chair
Electric shocking body rocking beat streeting me to death"

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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Broomstick »

TheFeniX wrote:Why only fired? If true, civil rights violations this severe, combined with literally disappearing people: I would think charges of kidnapping and murder should be on the table.

Won't happen, but it should.
It could happen - remember, 5 of the last 6 Illinois governors have served jail time, Police Commander Jon Burge only recently got out of jail, and quite a few others have wound up behind bars. Not enough of the guilty, granted, but it is possible to prosecute some of these assholes.

The problem with Chicago is that jailing the corrupt and criminal is like a game of whack-a-mole - more just keep popping up.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Ralin »

It's not on the same scale, but it's why a lot of people I know refuse to visit the DPRK.
What the hell circles are you in that you know a lot of people for whom visiting North Korea is feasible enough for that to come up?
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Gandalf »

Ralin wrote:What the hell circles are you in that you know a lot of people for whom visiting North Korea is feasible enough for that to come up?
The DPRK is open for tourism. The main issue is one of getting a specialist tour guide to get you in. Some WikiInfo.

Frankly, I'm surprised that more people aren't trying to go.
"Oh no, oh yeah, tell me how can it be so fair
That we dying younger hiding from the police man over there
Just for breathing in the air they wanna leave me in the chair
Electric shocking body rocking beat streeting me to death"

- A.B. Original, Report to the Mist

"I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."
- George Carlin
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by Ralin »

Gandalf wrote:
Ralin wrote:What the hell circles are you in that you know a lot of people for whom visiting North Korea is feasible enough for that to come up?
The DPRK is open for tourism. The main issue is one of getting a specialist tour guide to get you in. Some WikiInfo.

Frankly, I'm surprised that more people aren't trying to go.
I've actually read that article and I know it's possible (Lusyanka actually went there once, I believe), but I'd always heard it was expensive and a hassle and generally doesn't seem like something most people would consider in the first place.
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Re: Chicago police keep black site in Chicago, torture

Post by salm »

Ralin wrote:
Gandalf wrote:
Ralin wrote:What the hell circles are you in that you know a lot of people for whom visiting North Korea is feasible enough for that to come up?
The DPRK is open for tourism. The main issue is one of getting a specialist tour guide to get you in. Some WikiInfo.

Frankly, I'm surprised that more people aren't trying to go.
I've actually read that article and I know it's possible (Lusyanka actually went there once, I believe), but I'd always heard it was expensive and a hassle and generally doesn't seem like something most people would consider in the first place.
It might be a bit complicated but that is a different reason to skip NK (or Chicago) than skipping it because it is percieved as dangerous or not worthy of supporting it with tourist money.
If you´d rather go somewhere else than Chicago or NK because you don´t want to support their economies for idealistic reasons, fine, but if you avoid them because of crime and corruption you´re a pathological pussy or a moron.
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