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An explosive new report in The Guardian claims the Chicago police are operating a secret compound for detentions and interrogations, often with abusive methods. According to The Guardian, detainees as young as 15 years old have been taken to a nondescript warehouse known as Homan Square. Some are calling it the domestic equivalent of a CIA "black site" overseas. Prisoners were denied access to their attorneys, beaten and held for up to 24 hours without any official record of their detention. Two former senior officials in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice are calling on their colleagues to launch a probe into allegations of excessive use of force, denial of right to counsel and coercive interrogations. We speak to Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian. We are also joined by Victoria Suter, who was held at Homan Square after being arrested at the NATO protests in Chicago in 2012.
Image Credit: The Guardian
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today with an explosive new report that Chicago police continue to operate a secret compound for detentions and interrogations, often with abusive methods. According to The Guardian, detainees as young as 15 years old have been taken to a nondescript warehouse known as Homan Square. Some are calling it the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site overseas. Prisoners were denied access to their attorneys, beaten, and held for up to 24 hours without any official record of their detention. Brian Jacob Church, who was arrested during Chicago’s 2012 anti-NATO protests, said he was shackled to a bench for 17 hours without being read his Miranda rights.
BRIAN JACOB CHURCH: When they first arrested us, they took us to this building. We were never booked. We were never processed. I was in Homan Square for about 17 hours, handcuffed to a bench, before I was actually finally allowed to see an attorney. So, essentially, the bench was about this wide, and at the back it had a bar that came across like this. They wouldn’t unhandcuff to sleep, so when I slept, I slept with like my hand cuffed to the bar, and I kind of slept like this. All of our ankles were handcuffed together, as well. I asked them to make a phone call. I asked, you know, to talk to my lawyers. And again, they pointed at the phone number and was like, "Oh, you’re not getting any phone calls from here." And they were like, "Just tell us what we want to know, and you can go home."
NERMEEN SHAIKH: At least one victim was found unresponsive in an interrogation room and later pronounced dead. The Guardian says the detainees brought to the Homan site, quote, "are most often poor, black and brown."
AMY GOODMAN: Now, two former senior officials in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are calling on their colleagues to launch a probe into allegations of excessive use of force, denial of right to counsel, and coercive interrogations.
For more, we’re joined right now by Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian, where he’s published a two-part series on police abuse in Chicago. This latest story is headlined "The Disappeared: Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site.'" In his first installment last week, Spencer Ackerman reported on a Guantánamo Bay interrogator involved in torture who was also a longtime Chicago police officer known for abusing people of color. We’re going to go through all of this.
Spencer, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more about this, about Homan.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Homan Square is a place where a number of undercover Chicago police task forces operate—the anti-gang force, the anti-drug task force—and it operates out of a warehouse on Chicago’s West Side that just sort of fades into the background view of the neighborhood. If you look out on the façade, as we’ve done, it doesn’t appear to have any normal police insignia signifying that it’s a precinct, like you would at your local police precinct. If you look a little closer, the signs are there. There’s a checkpoint out front with a yellow barrier to block traffic. There are both marked and unmarked cars in the yard. There’s an evidence locker in Homan Square that the cops have been saying makes the whole place public, and allows people to go look for that.
But as we started investigating, we had heard reports from lawyers and from police reform activists, criminologists, that what happens in Homan Square, beyond the sort of above and visible practices, involve things that you would only really hear about at CIA black sites overseas—extended detentions in which people are shackled and don’t have records made of where they are. That might seem, on the face of it, mundane, until you think: Relatives and lawyers have no way, when someone’s taken there, to figure out where these people are, which, as we had heard again from the attorneys who had dealt with police there, was a really disturbing thing. Finally, they had told us that when they went, as attorneys, to try and seek out their clients at Homan Square, on the few times that they were able to find out that someone was there, police would either turn them away or, when they tried to ascertain whereabout information over the phone, they would get the runaround and people maybe not telling them that they were sure that their clients had been there, or asking them, "How do we know that you’re actually a lawyer?" We subsequently found out that, you know, kind of sotto voce, in 2011, ’12, local activists and lawyers had brought this up with the Chicago police and had gotten the police to change some of their procedures, to make it clear that attorneys were allowed to visit. But we had found cases even after that where attorneys had said that they had been waiting outside Homan Square for the better part of an hour and gotten turned away.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to get your response to the Chicago Police Department’s statement to your reports in The Guardian about Homan Square. They wrote, quote, "CPD abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property." So could you respond to what the Chicago Police Department’s response was to the report, and also elaborate who exactly first likened this facility to a CIA black site? One of the people whom you interviewed for the piece?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s correct. To go first to the Chicago police’s response to our story—and I appreciate you allowing me the time to talk about it—notice all the things they don’t say. They don’t say when attorneys have the right to talk to their clients there. They don’t say when attorneys get to access their clients at Homan Square. They don’t say what those booking—what those records are. They don’t say—that would document someone’s appearance at Homan Square. They don’t say when those records have to be made. They don’t say in what method those are supposed to be public. They never address at all the central question of someone being booked at Homan Square, of records being made available to the public, available to their lawyers and available to their families there. We asked the police those questions when they issued us and other news organizations those statements, and we’ve still yet to hear anything. For that matter, before we published the story, days before we published the story, we sent an extensive list of questions to the police. We got nothing. I went to Homan Square on Friday and was promptly turned away. There are lots of questions here that the police really do have to answer that are outstanding.
AMY GOODMAN: The mayor was running for—was running again for his office. Did you go to Mayor Emanuel himself or to his office to ask some questions?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: I didn’t go to Mayor Emanuel’s office. One of my colleagues at The Guardian has put questions to Rahm Emanuel, and we’ll see if we get any answers from that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to bring into the conversation Victoria Suter, who traveled to Chicago on May 12, 2012, to attend the NATO protest. Four days later, she and 11 others were taken to Homan Square in Chicago after police raided the apartment where they were staying. Suter spent 18 hours in solitary confinement before being allowed to speak to a lawyer. She joins us now from Charlotte. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Victoria.
VICTORIA SUTER: Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you got in touch with us after we reported on the piece yesterday, and said, "Wait a second, I am one of those people who was held at Homan Square." Talk about your experience.
VICTORIA SUTER: In Homan Square itself, from the raid in the Bridgeport neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, I was put in an unmarked vehicle. It was the standard undercover cop car, you know, a silver Crown Vic. And not being from Chicago, I tried to keep track of what turns they were making where, at first, but after a certain point I couldn’t keep up with it. I was already asking to see a lawyer. And I kept asking, "Where are you taking me? Where are you taking me?" And the only response that I got was: "We’re going to give you a tour of hell on Homan." And—
AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. What did they say?
VICTORIA SUTER: I had no idea what that meant. And—
AMY GOODMAN: "We’re going to give you"—what did they say? "We’re going to give you a tour"—
VICTORIA SUTER: They said, "of hell on Homan." And when we arrived there, it was dark. I couldn’t see the outside of the building. But we went in through a garage. There were really large, like military vehicles. They were black, just absolutely massive. There was—one of the other people arrested in that raid with me, they took him in first and left me outside with another officer, and then they took me inside. I was taken to a room, not particularly big, no windows. They put ankle shackles on me at that point and cuffed my right arm to a bar that ran behind the bench, where I stayed for 18 hours prior to being able to see an attorney. There was only one small window and a door that had—
AMY GOODMAN: Did you ask to speak to an attorney before that 18-hour period?
VICTORIA SUTER: Yes, I had been asking since the time of my arrest and the entire transport between Bridgeport and Homan.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And did you ever come to learn, Victoria, why the police had raided the apartment you were staying in and why you were detained for as long as you were and under the conditions you were?
VICTORIA SUTER: At that point in time, I had no idea what was going on. I was laying down to go to sleep when the raid occurred. And so, you know, you’re going down to—laying down to go to sleep, and then, all of a sudden, the doors are kicked in, and there’s guns on you, and you’re being taken away in handcuffs in an unmarked car to this place that you have no idea where you are. No one’s telling you anything. No one’s telling you what charges are possibly being filed against you. And it was all very chaotic and disorienting. And then, as we continued asking, while in Homan, "What are the charges? What are the charges? Where are we? Why are we here?" we got absolutely no answers the entire time I was there.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, ultimately, after 18 hours, what were you charged with?
VICTORIA SUTER: I was not charged with anything. After 18 hours, I was transferred into the Cook County Jail at 26th and California on the West Side, and I was released several hours after my transfer in with no charges. I was told—they knew that I was there to protest NATO. And upon my release, I was told, you know, "If we see you out there this weekend, we’re going to pull you back in and charge you with these guys." But we still had no idea what those charges were at that point in time.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian’s investigation found that Homan Square has been in operation since the 1990s, is that correct?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: They took over the facility itself in the late ’90s.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Who’s they?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: The Chicago police, started operating out of that facility around, I want to say, like 1997 or so. They started—they moved more and more operations in there. The period where it looks like, according to our sources, that they’ve started operating these sorts of interrogations and detentions without booking and without legal access seems to have really picked up around 2005, although we’re not totally sure when in fact it—when in fact it starts.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what drew your attention to this facility?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Thank you so much for asking. I was investigating a story that Amy mentioned about a connection between a Chicago detective who became a Guantánamo Bay torturer, tortured a man named Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who’s still at Guantánamo today. And as I was discussing this with a Chicago police reform activist, in the course of that conversation, that guy, Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project, mentioned to me that institutional problems with Chicago policing ran so deep that Chicago even operates its own form of a black site. And I was just like, "What? That can’t be right. That doesn’t happen in the United States. That’s nuts."
And I started looking at it further and talking to more and more attorneys about this, particularly people who do front-line visits to police facilities, and they said, "No, there’s this place called Homan Square. We try to get access to it, and routinely we don’t." One attorney told me that it’s even become, amongst people in this legal community, almost like an open secret, where if you hear from someone that their relative has been picked up by police, but there’s no record of them in central booking, they just start figuring, "Well, they must be at Homan. We’ll call and try and find out if we can get access to them." And most often they don’t.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, we just showed two white prisoners at Homan—Brian Jacob Church, we showed a clip of, who you interviewed, and then, as well, Victoria Suter. But you say mainly what we’re talking about here, people taken to this site and, as you call it, disappeared—many don’t know where they are—are black and brown people in Chicago.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right. The attorneys who do these front-line police visits told me that typically these are people of color who are most often impacted, including people who, when we tried to speak with them through their attorneys, declined, out of fear that there would be retaliation by the Chicago police.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and then we want to come back and talk about this police detective, Richard Zuley, who went from Chicago to Guantánamo, and what happened there. We’re also going to ask you about Jon Burge, known for torturing people in police stations in Chicago, and what has happened to him. Spencer Ackerman is national security editor at The Guardian, where he’s published a two-part series on police abuse in Chicago, "The Disappeared: Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'" and "Bad Lieutenant: American Police Brutality, Exported from Chicago to Guantánamo." That’s what we’re talking about next. Stay with us.
Militants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State have reportedly abducted at least 220 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. Meanwhile, the Islamic State militant nicknamed "Jihadi John," who has been featured in several beheading videos, has been identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born former resident of London. In other news, two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Also this week, UNESCO is has condemned the Islamic State for destroying the Mosul public library, which housed more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. UNESCO described the incident as "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Earlier today, video was posted online that appears to show members of the Islamic State smashing ancient artifacts inside a Mosul museum. The video shows men toppling statues and using sledgehammers and drills to destroy the artifacts. The Guardian reports one of the statues destroyed was a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 9th century B.C. Live from Iraq, we are joined by Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is "The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the Middle East. Militants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State have reportedly abducted at least 220 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Islamic State has seized 10 villages near the city of Hasaka.
Meanwhile, the BBC and Washington Post have revealed the identity of the British man nicknamed "Jihadi John," who’s been featured in several Islamic State beheading videos. The outlets say the Kuwaiti-born man is Mohammed Emwazi, who lived in west London and was known to British security services. He first appeared in a video last August when he allegedly killed the American journalist James Foley.
In other news, two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Hospital sources told Reuters a strike near the Syrian border killed nine civilians and 17 Islamic State militants, while a separate bombing west of Baghdad killed 11 civilians and six militants. The Pentagon has also announced a shipment of 10,000 U.S. M16 rifles and other military supplies to Iraq this week, as U.S. troops train Iraqi forces for an operation this spring to try to retake Iraq’s second-biggest city, Mosul, from Islamic State militants.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, UNESCO is condemning the Islamic State for destroying the Mosul public library, which housed more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts. UNESCO described the incident as, quote, "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Earlier today, video was posted online that appears to show members of the so-called Islamic State smashing ancient artifacts inside a Mosul museum. The video shows men toppling statues and using sledgehammers and drills to destroy the artifacts. The Guardian reports one of the statues destroyed was a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity that dates back to the 9th century B.C.
We go now to Iraq, where we’re joined by Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is titled The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. One of his recent articles from Iraq is headlined "Private Donors from Gulf Oil States Helping to Bankroll Salaries of Up to 100,000 ISIS Fighters." Last year, he received the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award in England. He joins us now from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Why don’t we go right to the headline of that piece, Patrick? Talk about who is funding the self-proclaimed Islamic State?
PATRICK COCKBURN: It looks as though the Islamic State has much more money than it ought to have. It’s raised certainly 100,000, and getting on over 200,000, soldiers. They’re all being paid. It’s introduced conscription. It recently lowered the age of conscription below 18. If you join up, you don’t get much. You get $400 a month. If you’re a foreign fighter, you’ll get $800 a month and your keep. But this is a pretty large army they’re putting in the field, and they don’t have many sources of revenue. They have some oil. They have some taxes. So, there’s a great big gap there, which senior Kurdish officials and officials in Baghdad have told me they’re convinced come from private donors in the oil states of the Gulf. That’s the only real explanation for that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Patrick Cockburn, you’ve been talking to people who have been fleeing Mosul, the city that’s now entirely controlled by the Islamic State. Could you explain what people have been saying about what conditions are like there?
PATRICK COCKBURN: The conditions are pretty grim. There’s a shortage of electricity. There’s a shortage of clean water. That’s so bad that lots of people are in hospital with various complaints, illnesses, because of eating dirty water. There’s executions. Women forced to wear the niqab, so everything is covered, but one woman whose eyes weren’t quite covered was taken to a police station and was forced to bite on a sort of donkey or horse’s bit, that you put in the mouth of a horse, and to bite so hard until there was blood all over her mouth, and she had to go to hospital. So, it’s pretty vicious.
But one should also say two things. One, that the Sunni Arabs in Mosul are very frightened of ISIS, what they call DAESH, of ISIS, but they’re also very frightened of the idea of the Iraqi army or the Shia militias capturing Mosul. So, they don’t really know which way to go. I was talking this morning to some people in a refugee camp here in Erbil who had left Mosul because their parents had been in the Iraqi police force. And what happened was that they had fled Mosul, but then ISIS goes to their houses and blows them up and then puts the video of the explosion on the social media, so the—saying this is a message to even people who have fled, that they’re blowing up their houses.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Patrick Cockburn, given the brutality that you’re describing, why is it that people are, in some cases, as you say, equally scared of the Iraqi military taking over?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Because every place that the Shia militia and the—it’s mostly—the main fighting force of the Baghdad government at the moment is not the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army has actually failed to take back any city in Iraq or town in Iraq since the beginning of last year, since Fallujah fell to ISIS. But the Shia militia, that probably have about 120,000 men—the Iraqi army probably has about 40,000 to 50,000—where they take over cities or towns, they haven’t taken many, but were they have taken them over, or villages, they treat all the inhabitants, if they’re Sunni Arabs, as if they were members of ISIS. It doesn’t matter if these people are completely opposed to ISIS: They’re still treated as members of ISIS. So the young men disappear. In some cases, they’re killed. In some cases, they’re tortured or put in prison. So, houses are burned. People are driven out.
And there’s one other point, a very important one, I’d like to make, which I don’t think people have taken on board. As you know, that the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, have said there’s going to be an offensive to capture Mosul. But the major relief organizations, the World Food Program, believe that if there’s an attack on Mosul, there’s going to be an exodus of up to a million refugees, of basically the Sunni Arabs who live in Mosul, that they’re going to flee the city when airstrikes intensify and they believe it’s going to come under attack. At the moment, they couldn’t get into the Kurdish region. They’re banned. So they’re all going to be on the road. So, they’re pre-positioning supplies for one of the biggest exodus of refugees that we’ve seen, I don’t know for how long. But it’s going to be massive. There’s going to be terrible suffering, and many will die.
AMY GOODMAN: Already the self-proclaimed Islamic State controls a swath of land that covers millions and millions of people. Is the Islamic State going to last? And also, if you could respond to this latest identification, supposedly, of the man that has been called "Jihadi John," who stands in the video as he was about to execute, for example, the American journalist James Foley—the Kuwaiti-born Mohammed Emwazi. British security said that they were following him. The significance of this? Three arrests in Brooklyn—these young people were supposedly going to join up with Islamic State in Syria. The three girls in Britain, the young women who supposedly have gone to join. Can you put all of this together?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah, I mean, there are about or said to be 20,000 foreign jihadis who have gone to the Islamic State. One of the amazing things is that they’re still quite easily able to cross the Turkish frontier into Syria to—into the Islamic State, despite the fact that Turkey is meant to be part of the coalition to eliminate the Islamic State. But there’s a 500-mile border between Syria and Turkey, and it still seems to be generally open.
Now, when these foreigners arrive in the Islamic State, they’re often not much good as fighters, because those from western Europe and America don’t speak Arabic. Even those that do are not professional soldiers. So they often become suicide bombers, or they’re given particularly sort of high-profile jobs for execution and so forth.
But the Islamic State is very obsessed, almost, with the idea of dominating the news agenda, and it doesn’t really matter how they do it. So they know that if you have a Japanese hostage and you demand $200 million ransom, that that’s going to be leading the news. For a long time, cutting off people’s heads led the news. Then that—people became used to that, so they burn to death this Jordanian pilot in a cage, knowing again that will dominate the news, will be assertion of their strength. And they do that particularly when they’ve had a military setback. When things aren’t going too well on the battlefront, they want the news to be dominated by some assertion of power on their part, which may be a hideous atrocity, usually is, but they feel they’ve achieved their aim if that’s what everybody’s talking about. They said at one moment on their social media that media is half jihad. So it’s something they do very consciously, and it’s something they use, particularly foreigners entering the Islamic State, as a method of publicity.
AMY GOODMAN: And will they last? Patrick Cockburn, will they last, do you think, Islamic State? And what do you think should be done?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Will they last? Well, at the moment—last year, they had a 100-day campaign in which they captured an area which is larger than Great Britain. They defeated the Iraqi army. They defeated the—inflicted defeats on the Syrian army, massive defeats on the Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, on almost everybody else. Since then, they haven’t been quite so successful against the Syrian Kurds and others, but they control pretty well the same area. And they’re recruiting vast numbers of people. I was at the battlefront here west of Erbil yesterday, and I was talking to a commander. And although he said that ISIS was losing a lot of men in attacks they had been making, they’ve still been able to recruit people and recruit people from the local area. I think, abroad, people get the impression somehow it’s all foreign jihadis. Actually, it isn’t. It’s mostly Syrians and Iraqis. And there are at least six or seven million people within the confines of the Islamic State. And if you’re calling up all the young men, you can put a very large army into the field.
Now, to defeat them, we have the Iraqi army here. But as I said earlier, the Iraqi army has not recaptured a single city or town since January last year. So talk of them defeating the Islamic State, of taking Mosul, taking these other cities, looks pretty optimistic. In Syria, the Syrian Kurds are fighting pretty hard. They’ve been advancing. That’s one of the reasons that these poor Assyrian Christians have been kidnapped by Islamic State. They’re supported by U.S. airstrikes. But that only really happens where there are a lot of Kurds in Syria, which is not that big. In the rest of Syria, it’s very noticeable the U.S. airstrikes are not against the Islamic State where it is combating the Syrian army. So, the pressure is there, but it’s not sufficient to defeat the Islamic State, to my mind. And the Islamic State’s many enemies are all there, but they’re disunited, and they distrust and hate each other almost as much, or if not more, than they hate the Islamic State.
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, we want to thank you for being with us, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. We’ll link to your article, "Private Donors from Gulf Oil States Helping to Bankroll Salaries of Up to 100,000 ISIS Fighters."
A former Guantánamo Bay interrogator involved in torture was also a longtime Chicago police officer known for abusing people of color. According to The Guardian, Richard Zuley spent three decades as a notoriously brutal detective on the Chicago police force. From 1977 to 2007, Zuley used tactics including torture, threats and abuse to elicit confessions from suspects, the majority of whom were not white. One of those confessions was later ruled to be false, and the sentence was vacated. Zuley’s methods included shackling suspects to walls through eyebolts for several hours, allegedly planting evidence, and issuing threats of harm to family members and sentences of the death penalty unless a suspect confessed. Zuley was also accused of brutal methods at Guantánamo Bay, where he was a reserve officer in charge of interrogating a prisoner who said he made a false confession due to torture. The Guardian report comes just after the notorious Chicago police commander Jon Burge was released from a halfway house after he served four-and-a-half years for lying under oath about torturing prisoners in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s. We speak to Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re speaking to Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian. Last week, he published a story headlined "Bad Lieutenant: American Police Brutality, Exported from Chicago to Guantánamo." The article looked at Richard Zuley, who used torture to extract confessions from minorities for years in Chicago and then went on to work at Guantánamo. This is a clip of Lathierial Boyd, one of the innocent men Zuley interrogated in Chicago.
LATHIERIAL BOYD: I was mounted to the wall and floor. I remained in that room through two lineups. And I remember I asked—after that second lineup, I asked Zuley if anybody had picked me out of the lineup, and he said no. And I said, "See, I told you. You got the wrong guy. I haven’t done anything." He smiled at me and said, "We’re charging you anyway."
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Lathierial Boyd served 23 years in prison before he was found to be wrongfully convicted. So, Spencer, can you talk more about Richard Zuley and how you came across his police record?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Sure. The Guardian excerpted the Guantánamo Bay manuscript of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose interrogation at Guantánamo Bay is just one of the most brutal that we’ve ever known about thus far. And my editor asked me if I would go through the manuscript ahead of the excerpt and just see if there were any news stories we might want to do out of it. And one of the footnotes mentioned that in government reports and other sources, including a really fantastic piece of reporting by Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, his 2013 book, The Terror Courts, the lead interrogator during the most intense torturous period of Slahi’s interrogation was a Chicago police officer named Richard Zuley.
And I thought, "Well, I had never heard about a U.S. police officer being in any U.S. military or intelligence interrogation facility. What must his record in Chicago have been like?" and, from there, found some court cases, including Lathierial Boyd’s federal civil rights case against Zuley, got in contact with his lawyer, found out about some more cases and started pulling records to find out what this guy’s record in Chicago was. And we found some really ominous parallels between how he policed Chicago streets and what he did in Guantánamo Bay torture centers.
AMY GOODMAN: And what happened with Lathierial ultimately?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Lathierial Boyd, after 23 years of being put in prison on a murder that there was never any physical evidence that he committed, was found in 2013 by an investigation from the Cook County state’s attorney to have his conviction voided, as it was completely baseless, and they found there was no evidence that could justify keeping him in prison, even though he had served 23 years.
AMY GOODMAN: And the suit?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: And now, after he got out, they file—Lathierial Boyd and his attorney, Kathleen Zellner, filed a civil rights suit to try and get some kind of justice for Lathierial and, as well, try and create both more disclosure around the way Chicago police practices have operated, including Richard Zuley.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to one of Zuley’s victims—this one, though, not in Chicago, in Guantánamo—Mohamedou Ould Slahi. During interrogations at Guantánamo, you report—approved then by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—Slahi detailed the treatment in his memoir, which was just published. In this clip from The Guardian’s video report about his case, we hear his lawyer Nancy Hollander and actor Dominic West reading from his diary.
NANCY HOLLANDER: Mohamedou was subjected to a whole list of torture techniques that had been approved by the secretary of defense.
YAHID OULD SLAHI: [translated] They told him they had taken my mother from Mauritania and put her in a single cell in Guantánamo. And if he didn’t give officials the information they expected, she would be severely tortured.
NANCY HOLLANDER: Significantly, they included what in Guantánamo was known as the "frequent flyer program." And they called it that because they wouldn’t let people sleep. And they proceeded to torture him.
MOHAMEDOU OULD SLAHI: [read by Dominic West] "Blindfold the [expletive] if he tries to look." One of them hit me hard across the face, and quickly put the goggles on my eyes, ear muffs on my ears, and a small bag over my head. They tightened the chains around my ankles and my wrists; afterwards, I started to bleed. I thought they were going to execute me.
AMY GOODMAN: Mohamedou Ould Slahi remains at Guantánamo to this day and is yet to be charged with a crime. Spencer Ackerman, if you can talk about this and then also talk about whether the Chicago media is following up on these explosive reports where you’re making these connections?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yeah, so, it wasn’t just that the military couldn’t charge—or anyone couldn’t charge—Slahi with anything. Military investigators for the prosecution found that the reason why they couldn’t charge him with anything is what Richard Zuley did to Mohamedou Slahi, that the torture that Slahi was subjected to by the United States of America so tainted all of the evidence in this case that it became fundamentally unchargeable. In 2010, by the way, a federal judge ruled in Slahi’s habeas case that he had to be let go. Barack Obama’s Justice Department has appealed that decision, and that’s why Slahi is still in Guantánamo Bay today.
Now, as we were reporting this, we found that there were these connections between the way Zuley tortured Slahi and his police work as a Chicago detective. Slahi was short-shackled for extended periods of time. We found that happened to Lathierial Boyd. We found that happened to Benita Johnson. We found that happened to Andre Griggs. Johnson and Griggs, for instance, were shackled for between, they say, 24 and 30 hours in their cases. Andre Griggs was suffering through heroin withdrawal during that time, and he wasn’t given medication for that.
This was done as a method to try and get Griggs and Johnson to confess to crimes that they say they never committed. Those confessions formed the vast majority of the evidence against them. And this was something that we saw, as well, Zuley doing at Guantánamo. He told Slahi, "You can either be a witness, or you can be a defendant." All he had to do was confess. Slahi’s torture, much like with Griggs and with Johnson, was so bad that eventually he just said, "I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me." As he put it in his book, "If you want to buy, I am selling."
Before that happened, as just one of the methods that Zuley employed, Zuley threatened to have his mother taken to Guantánamo Bay in what he described as its all-male environment. I don’t think it’s particularly hard to understand that to be a rape threat.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, before we go, Chicago has a long history of this issue of police torture. This month, the notorious Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, was released from a halfway house after he served four-and-a-half years for lying under oath. But what he’s accused of was leading a torture ring that interrogated more than a hundred African-American men in Chicago in the 1970s and '80s. They routinely used electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags, typewriter covers, among other methods, to extract confessions from men who were later shown to be innocent. The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project documented some of the men's stories. This is Shadeed Mu’min.
SHADEED MU’MIN: He handcuffed me real tight, know what I’m saying? He cut my circulation off. He went out of the room and stayed, I guess, for about an hour, and then came back and tried to talk to me. What could I tell him, you know, about the robbery? I told him, "I couldn’t tell you anything about no robbery. I know nothing about what you’re talking about." And he said then that, "Oh, you’re going to play tough." Said, "You will tell us, before you leave here, what we want to know." Said, "I’ve been known to get out of peoples what I want." He got real upset and said, "You will talk, you black mother [bleep]." He said, "I’ll make you talk, or kill you as I want." So, I still don’t understand. So he—in anger, he rushed to the typewriter and grabbed the plastic cover off there and just crammed it down over my head. And it’s like he was a madman. And several officers were helping him. But I was trying to get my arms out from behind the chair, but I couldn’t do anything. And I passed out. And like I say, he gave me a breath of air. And I came to, conscious. And he—"You ready to talk?" And I said, "I don’t have anything to tell you still." So he do it again. The third time, out of the third time, that’s when I told him, I said, "I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, man. Just don’t do this no more."
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Shadeed Mu’min speaking about his interrogation by former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Statistics compiled by the People’s Law Office show Chicago has paid at least $64 million in settlements and judgments in civil rights cases related to Burge’s police abuses alone. The Chicago Reader reported some of the Burge techniques may have been learned when he was in Vietnam, where he served as a military policeman. Spencer, we’re going to end on Jon Burge. Any connection to Richard Zuley?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, not directly. Even though they served in Chicago around the same time, supposedly, from everyone I’ve talked to, including Flint Taylor, who’s Burge’s probably chief legal investigator, doesn’t seem like they actually worked together. Nevertheless, there is a context for this in Chicago. There’s a long-standing tradition of police abuses, primarily against African-American residents of Chicago. It sits now, with what we’re reporting, at this uncomfortable intersection between both that long and nefarious history of abuse against African Americans, primarily, in Chicago and this post-9/11 era in which secret detentions, longtime interrogations without charge, and so forth, seem to be now increasingly influencing domestic police work.
AMY GOODMAN: And is the Chicago media picking it up, especially in this time of a mayoral re-election race?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: They seem to be running reports based primarily on the Chicago police denial given to us. We’ll see if that changes.
AMY GOODMAN: Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian, where he’s published a two-part series on police abuse in Chicago, "The Disappeared: Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'" and "Bad Lieutenant: American Police Brutality, Exported from Chicago to Guantánamo." We’ll link to them at our website, as well as your interview, as well, with Victoria Suter.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we go to northern Iraq, to Erbil, to speak with journalist Patrick Cockburn. Stay with us.
Headlines:
Iraq: U.S.-Led Airstrikes Kill 20 Civilians
Two U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have reportedly killed over three dozen people in Iraq, including at least 20 civilians. Hospital sources told Reuters a strike near the Syrian border killed nine civilians and 17 Islamic State militants, while a separate bombing west of Baghdad killed 11 civilians and six militants.
ISIS Militant "Jihadi John" Identified
The BBC and Washington Post have revealed the identity of the British man nicknamed "Jihadi John" who has been featured in several Islamic State beheading videos. The outlets say the Kuwaiti-born man is Mohammed Emwazi, who lived in West London and was known to British security services.
ISIS Captures Up to 300 Christian Hostages
ISIS militants have continued to capture Christians from villages in northeastern Syria during a three-day offensive. Activist groups have put the total number of Christian hostages between 220 and 300.
HRW Condemns Syria’s Use of Barrel Bombs
In other news from Syria, Human Rights Watch says the Syrian government’s use of improvised barrel bombs on rebel-held areas has increased over the past year. Hundreds of bombings have been carried out in Daraa and Aleppo, two key rebel-held battlegrounds in Syria’s civil war. The news comes just as the United Nations seeks to secure a truce in Aleppo after the Assad regime said it is willing to stop the attacks. In a statement, Human Rights Watch said: "For a year, the security council has done nothing to stop Bashar al-Assad’s murderous air bombing campaign on rebel-held areas, which has terrorized, killed, and displaced civilians. Amid talk of a possible temporary cessation of strikes on Aleppo, the question is whether Russia and China will finally allow the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions to stop barrel bombs."
Afghanistan: Suicide Bomber Targets NATO Envoy’s Car
In Afghanistan, a suicide car bomber has attacked a vehicle belonging to the top NATO envoy in the country. Turkish officials say the attack on the security team of envoy Ismail Aramaz killed a Turkish soldier and wounded at least one other person. The blast took place in the capital Kabul, near a number of embassies.
Avalanches Kill Over 200 amid Heavy Snow in Afghanistan
In northern Afghanistan, more than 200 people have been killed in a series of avalanches amidst heavy snowfall. The avalanches engulfed homes across multiple provinces, burying the people beneath. Agence France-Presse reports at least 168 people were killed in the province of Panjshir, where local authorities say they have not seen so much snow for decades.
Bolivia: Thousands Displaced by "Unprecedented" Floods
In northern Bolivia, thousands of people have been displaced by historic floods after the Acre River overflowed its banks. Footage from the area shows residents paddling in boats through flooded streets. Vice President Álvaro García Linera spoke during a visit to the region.
Vice President Álvaro García Linera: "As you have seen, various houses, various towns have been affected. It is unprecedented. We see flooding each year, but this year it has reached levels we have not seen before. ... In our visit through these streets, which have now become rivers, we have seen between 500 and 800 houses affected, at least. That means 800, 1,000, 1,500 families who have had water rising up to the second floor in their houses. In some cases, the water is covering the roof."
Georgia: Extreme Weather Delays Execution of Woman
Scientists have warned increased flooding and heavy snowfall are both fueled by human-caused climate change, as are the bitter cold and snowstorms battering swaths of the United States. In Georgia, the weather delayed the execution of Kelly Renee Gissendaner, who was set to become the first woman put to death in the state in about 70 years. The delay marks the first time Georgia has postponed an execution due to extreme weather.
FCC Set to Pass Historic Net Neutrality Rules
The Federal Communications Commission votes today on historic rules to protect an open Internet. Earlier this month, after receiving a record number of public comments, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler proposed reclassifying the Internet as a "telecommunications service" under Title II of the Communications Act. The new rules would prevent Internet service providers like Comcast from blocking access to websites, slowing down content or providing paid fast lanes for Internet service. The FCC is expected to pass the rules, setting up a showdown with Republican lawmakers and telecom companies.
3 Brooklyn Men Arrested for Bid to Join ISIS in Case Involving Informant
Three residents of Brooklyn, New York, have been arrested and charged with supporting the Islamic State. Authorities say one of the suspects was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport while attempting to fly to Turkey and join the militants in Syria. A second man, who had a ticket for next month, was arrested in Brooklyn. A third was picked up in Florida and accused of helping fund their plans. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would increase counterterrorism measures.
Mayor Bill de Blasio: "We all take the threat of ISIS very, very seriously. The vigilance levels that we maintain every day are our best shield, but we’re going to continue to deepen our anti-terrorism capacity. And I think so much of what we’re trying to do is making sure that not only do we have the number of officers on anti-terror duty that we need, the training, the equipment, etc., but that we’re also constantly deepening our relationship with communities all over the city, so there’s a flow of information."
The Brooklyn case involved the use of a confidential informant paid by the government who befriended two of the men and helped them with travel arrangements. The informant apparently helped the 19-year-old suspect with travel documents after his mother became worried and took her son’s passport. The Intercept news website notes: "Crucially, it appears that only after the introduction of the informant did any actual actual arrangements to commit a criminal act come into existence."
Supreme Court Appears to Side with Muslim Woman Denied Job over Hijab
The U.S. Supreme Court has heard arguments in a landmark religious discrimination case involving a Muslim woman rejected from a job for wearing a headscarf. Samantha Elauf was denied a job at an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, even though she was rated highly by her interviewer, because a manager objected to her hijab. The retailer’s rules on employee attire included a ban on caps. The Supreme Court justices appear poised to reverse a lower court ruling rejecting Elauf’s case because she had not explicitly disclosed her religion or asked for an exemption. Christine Nazer, a spokesperson for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which brought the case, read a statement from Elauf outside the court.
Christine Nazer, reading statement by Samantha Elauf: "No one had ever told me that I could not wear a headscarf and sell clothing. Then I learned I was not hired by Abercrombie because I wear a headscarf, which is a symbol of modesty in my Muslim faith. This was shocking to me. I am grateful to the EEOC for looking into my complaint and taking my religious discrimination case to the courts. I am not only standing up for myself, but for all people who wish to adhere to their faith while at work."
Snowden Docs Reveal Canada’s Mass Collection of Email
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed the Canadian government is stashing millions of its own citizens’ emails. Under a massive cybersecurity operation revealed jointly by the CBC and The Intercept, Canada has monitored visits to government websites and collected emails to the government at a rate of 400,000 per day, sometimes keeping the data for years.
Mexico Condemns 2nd Police Killing of Immigrant in U.S.
Mexico has condemned the police killing of an unarmed Mexican immigrant in Texas, two weeks after another such killing sparked protests in Washington state. Mexican authorities say police in Grapevine, Texas, violated a decades-old treaty by waiting four days to inform them of the killing of Rubén García Villalpando. Police say they shot García during a traffic stop after he defied orders to halt and walked toward a patrol car with his hands in the air. The shooting came just days after the police killing of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Washington. Authorities say police fired 17 shots at Zambrano, hitting him five or six times. Cellphone video shows Zambrano, who was also unarmed, turning to face police and raising his hands before he is shot.
Marijuana Becomes Legal in Washington, D.C., Despite GOP Threats
Marijuana has become legal in the nation’s capital. Starting today, adults over 21 can possess up to two ounces of pot in Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser vowed to press ahead with legalization, despite opposition from Republicans in Congress, who even threatened to jail her. Congress has oversight of laws in D.C., and Republicans tucked a measure into a spending bill to block new laws easing marijuana rules in the district. But Bowser says the restriction is invalid, because it passed a month after pot legalization was approved by 70 percent of D.C. voters.
Mayor Muriel Bowser: "We know that the residents of the District of Columbia spoke loud and clear last November 4th when they adopted Initiative 71 to legalize small amounts of marijuana in Washington, D.C. And we are, our government is prepared to implement and enforce Initiative 71 in the District of Columbia."
Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz told The Washington Post the mayor’s move was illegal, saying, "You can go to prison for this." D.C. joins three states — Washington, Colorado and Alaska — where pot is now legal. Meanwhile, House lawmakers in Georgia have overwhelmingly passed a bill to legalize cannabis oil for patients with seizure disorders and other conditions. This comes as new research in the journal Scientific Reports has found marijuana is about 114 times less deadly than alcohol. The study found alcohol is by far the riskiest drug, followed by heroin, cocaine and tobacco.
British MP Questions "Moral Authority" of HSBC Exec
The leaders of bank giant HSBC faced questions and calls for their resignation from British lawmakers over the bank’s role in tax dodging and money laundering. The International Consortium of Journalists has reported HSBC used its private Swiss arm to hide more than $100 billion in accounts used by weapons dealers, tax dodgers, dictators and celebrities. British Parliament member Mike Kane questioned HSBC chair Stuart Gulliver.
Mike Kane: "Nobody is going to be punished for this. You, yourself, with your own tax affairs, looks like you’re at the outer limits of aggressive tax avoidance. Do you think you have the moral authority to carry on this changed process in HSBC?"
Stuart Gulliver: "I don’t think that the non-dom laws, which are quite clear, would represent aggressive tax avoidance, and I believe the changes that I have made to the firm clearly demonstrate the sincerity of my desire to actually improve HSBC."
Court Dismisses Lawsuit over Brooklyn Bridge Mass Arrest of Occupy Protesters
Civil rights groups have condemned the decision by a federal appeals court panel to dismiss a class-action lawsuit over New York City’s 2011 mass arrest of Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. In August, the same panel allowed the lawsuit challenging the arrest of more than 700 peaceful protesters to move forward. But this week, the panel reversed itself, dismissing the case. In a statement, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which filed the lawsuit, said: "The Court has abruptly doubled back on itself to tell the people of New York that if they participate in a police-led and escorted march, peaceful and compliant with all directives from the police, they can be subject to a shocking corralling and mass arrest by the NYPD without any notice that such permission has been revoked or opportunity to disperse."
Dori Maynard, Media Diversity Advocate, Dies at 56
Dori Maynard, a journalist and longtime advocate for media diversity and accurate news coverage of people of color, has died of complications from lung cancer at the age of 56. Maynard was president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, co-founded by and named for her father, who became the first African American to own a major daily newspaper when he bought the Oakland Tribune in 1983. In a recent interview posted by the Institute for Black Male Achievement, Maynard answered the question: "Why do you do what you do?"
Dori Maynard: "So, for years, when people would ask me this question, I would tell them, 'Because I don't want my younger brothers to get shot.’ And I think people thought I was being a little overly dramatic. And then Trayvon Martin got shot, and then Jordan Davis got shot, and I think people began to understand what I was saying, which is that that’s happening against the backdrop of a steady barrage of inaccurate and distorted coverage of black men, that pigeonholes them in coverage, makes them look like predators, or riddled with pathology, makes them the face of the problem. And until we change that, no matter what we do to prepare black men to be successful in this society, we’re sending them out into a hostile environment."
Dori Maynard died at home in West Oakland, California, on Tuesday.
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COLUMN
"TV Meteorologists Should Say It Loud and Clear: Climate Change Is Here" by Amy Goodman
President Barack Obama issued the third veto in his more than six years in office, rejecting S.1 (Senate Bill One), the “Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act.” This was the new congressional Republican majority’s first bill this year, attempting to force the construction of a pipeline designed to carry Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. ports in Texas for export. A broad international coalition has been fighting the project for years. Climate scientist James Hansen, the former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in The New York Times that if the pipeline gets built, “it will be game over for the climate.”
This vote and veto came as much of the U.S. was gripped by extreme cold weather, with cities like Boston reeling from historically deep snowfall and Southern states like Georgia getting snowed in. Meanwhile, most of California braces for even more drought. The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.
Millions of dollars are poured into flashy television “Weather Centers.” Now these sets, with their polished presenters, are being upgraded to “Severe Weather Centers” or “Extreme Weather Centers.” Why not make the link? As they flash the words “Severe Weather,” why not also flash the words, “Climate Change” or “Global Warming?” Why not explain how global warming can actually lead to more snowfall, or to, yes, colder weather? The public depends on broadcasters for most of their news and information, even in this Internet age. How could a drought in California be related to Niagara Falls freezing over thousands of miles away? People aren’t stupid. The daily deluge of sensational weather reporting must include explanations of the deeper changes occurring to our entire planet.
Check out the advertisements that sandwich the newscasts. Often, you are presented with a highly produced, compelling ad describing how clean and wonderful the fossil-fuel industry is. But is this really the case? Look at what happened this month when more than 100 U.S. cities reported record cold: An explosion at an ExxonMobil refinery south of Los Angeles rocked the surrounding area with the equivalent of a 1.4-magnitude earthquake. In West Virginia, an oil tanker “bomb” train derailed and exploded, lighting up the night sky with massive fireballs and forcing the evacuation of two towns. Two days earlier, another oil train derailed in Ontario, Canada, and left rail cars burning for days.
Beyond these explosions, there are the leaks, the spills, the toxic air pollution that causes epidemic asthma in impacted communities. And all these ill effects of the fossil-fuel industry are small, when compared with the ongoing destruction caused by worsening, and potentially irreversible, climate change.
The debate over climate change is over. The U.N.‘s Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report, written by 800 scientists from 80 countries, that summarized the findings of more than 30,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and concluded:
“Human influence on the climate system is clear; the more we disrupt our climate, the more we risk severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts; and we have the means to limit climate change and build a more prosperous, sustainable future.” Compare that with the handful of scientists who deny the reality of climate change. One champion among them, Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, received $1.2 million from fossil-fuel interests, including oil baron Charles Koch, according to an investigation conducted by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center. Dr. Soon failed to report these contributions, and is now being investigated by the Smithsonian for possible ethical violations.
Among those for whom the science is clear and the debate settled: the Pentagon. Under the Obama administration, as well as under President Bush before him, the Department of Defense has named climate change as a major threat to national security. Likewise, large insurance companies carefully track the number of billion-dollar climate disasters that occur every year, since these catastrophes impact their bottom line.
Just when the public needs increased reporting on these issues, some of the largest news organizations are scaling back their climate reporting. Last October, NPR reduced its staff of four covering the environment and climate change to just one person, working part time. The New York Times gutted its nine-person environmental desk in 2013.
No one weather event is proof of climate change, but the trends are clear. Meteorologists, especially those on the television news programs, have a duty to state the cold, hard facts: Climate change is real, it is a planetary threat, and there is plenty we can do about it.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2015 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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