When a Ruling Class becomes so indifferent to the needs of those it
rules, to the point where the Ruling Class replaces governing with
Bully Tactics, it is time to remove that Ruling Class from power.
Rom Emanuel, the Ruling Classes number one lackey in Chicago, just
received 45% of the vote in Tuesday's election. This, after spending
over 4 million dollars. While this failure to win outright is a
positive sign, some of us shake our heads over the thought that 45% of
the voters are so brain dead that they simply follow the Pied Piper,
tootling them along to do the beck and call of their Masters. April's
election will tell the tale. Meanwhile, Chicago remains a city in
turmoil. Rom Emanuel, close colleague of President Barak Obama, has
paid lip service to the Working Class needs while toiling to carry out
the demands of his Masters, the Ruling Class.
Mark my words, there is a fierce war raging in our Land. And at the
moment, despite small victories, we, the People, are losing. We are
losing because most of us do not even suspect that war has been
declared upon us. But we now live in Two Americas, the America we
live and work in, and the America behind gates, closed to us by
private guards. That America is one most of us will never enjoy.
That is the America we all have been dreaming about. But there is not
room for our kind. We are merely another resource for the real
America to draw from in order to continue living their Great American
Dream.
They buy our minds with their never ending propaganda. They put our
children in financial bondage in return for a meaningless education.
They take our sons and daughters and place them in harms way in order
to further the Empire's expansion. And when times are tough, they
take our homes, our savings, our pensions, our future security.
They buy Souls and send their Lackeys, like Rom Emanuel, to chat us up
and tell us that they are one of us. Before we believe their words we
need to see their deeds. They present us with a phoney front. Behind
their human-appearing facades lurks pure Greed. Greed is the master
of the Ruling Class. Greed will cause its subjects to turn on anyone
who gets in its conquering path.
Anyway, that's enough rambling for one day. Most of us will glance at
rants such as this, and then go back to our daily grind, thinking that
somehow our troubles will take care of themselves and someone else
will do the work of defeating the ever more oppressive Empire.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Keep in mind, this is Chicago, the home of our esteemed President and the
> city where his trusted ally, Rom Emanuel, may (God forbid), very well be
> re-elected as mayor today.
> Miriam
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Disappeared: Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'
>
> ________________________________________
> The Disappeared: Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'
> By Spencer Ackerman [1] / The Guardian [2]
> February 24, 2015
> The following story first appeared in the Guardian. [3]
> The Chicago [4] 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 [5], according to those familiar
> with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation
> into
> Chicago police abuse [6], 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 [7], the retired Chicago detective [8] turned Guantánamo
> Bay torturer [9]. (On Monday evening, it instead provided a statement to
> MSNBC [10] 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
>
> 'They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be
> permitted in this country - anywhere - but particularly given the strong
> constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with
> crimes,"
> said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church.
> Photo Credit:
> Phil Batta/Guardian
> Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012 [11],
> 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 [12] 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 [13]", 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.
> 'That scares the hell out of me': a throwback to Chicago police abuse with
> a
> post-9/11 feel
>
> 'The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the
> fact that they always creep into other aspects,' criminologist Tracy Siska
> told the Guardian.
> Photo Credit:
> Chandler West/Guardian
> 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 [14]"
> 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 [15]," 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
> [16].
> 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 [7],
> 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."
> Spencer Ackerman writes for The Guardian from Washington, DC.
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [17]
> [18]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/disappeared-police-detain-american
> s-abuse-laden-black-site
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/spencer-ackerman-0
> [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
> [3]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-america
> ns-black-site
> [4] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/chicago
> [5]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-homan-square-black-si
> te
> [6]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/evidence-chicago-detective-ri
> chard-zuley
> [7]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-torture-chicago-po
> lice-brutality
> [8]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/chicago-police-richard-zuley-
> abuse-innocent-man
> [9]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-chi
> cago-guantanamo
> [10]
> http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-february-23-2015-trms
> [11]
> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/terror-indictments-for-chicago-nato-protesters-b
> rian-church-jared-chase-brent-vincent-betterly/
> [12]
> http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04-25/news/chi-sentencing-today-for-
> nato-3-prosecutors-seeking-14year-terms-20140425_1_nato-3-prison-terms-judge
> -thaddeus-wilson
> [13]
> http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-04/news/chi-man-in-custody-found-
> unresponsive-dies-20130202_1_bronzeville-neighborhood-police-custody-homan-s
> quare-neighborhood
> [14] http://www.alternet.org/blank
> [15]
> http://directives.chicagopolice.org/lt2014/data/a7a56e4b-12ccbe26-df812-ccbf
> -527447d507470630.html
> [16]
> http://abc7chicago.com/news/widespread-militarization-of-illinois-police-for
> ces-uncovered-by-i-team/259740/
> [17] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Disappeared:
> Police
> Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'
> [18] http://www.alternet.org/
> [19] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Disappeared: Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'
>
>
> The Disappeared: Police Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'
> By Spencer Ackerman [1] / The Guardian [2]
> February 24, 2015
> The following story first appeared in the Guardian. [3]
> The Chicago [4] 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 [5], according to those familiar
> with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation
> into
> Chicago police abuse [6], 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 [7], the retired Chicago detective [8] turned Guantánamo
> Bay torturer [9]. (On Monday evening, it instead provided a statement to
> MSNBC [10] 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
>
> 'They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be
> permitted in this country - anywhere - but particularly given the strong
> constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with
> crimes,"
> said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church.
> Photo Credit:
> Phil Batta/Guardian
> Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012 [11],
> 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 [12] 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 [13]", 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.
> 'That scares the hell out of me': a throwback to Chicago police abuse with
> a
> post-9/11 feel
>
> 'The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the
> fact that they always creep into other aspects,' criminologist Tracy Siska
> told the Guardian.
> Photo Credit:
> Chandler West/Guardian
> 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 [14]"
> 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 [15]," 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
> [16].
> 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 [7],
> 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."
> Spencer Ackerman writes for The Guardian from Washington, DC.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [17]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[18]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/disappeared-police-detain-american
> s-abuse-laden-black-site
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/spencer-ackerman-0
> [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
> [3]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-america
> ns-black-site
> [4] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/chicago
> [5]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-homan-square-black-si
> te
> [6]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/evidence-chicago-detective-ri
> chard-zuley
> [7]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-torture-chicago-po
> lice-brutality
> [8]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/chicago-police-richard-zuley-
> abuse-innocent-man
> [9]
> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-chi
> cago-guantanamo
> [10]
> http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-february-23-2015-trms
> [11]
> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/terror-indictments-for-chicago-nato-protesters-b
> rian-church-jared-chase-brent-vincent-betterly/
> [12]
> http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04-25/news/chi-sentencing-today-for-
> nato-3-prosecutors-seeking-14year-terms-20140425_1_nato-3-prison-terms-judge
> -thaddeus-wilson
> [13]
> http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-04/news/chi-man-in-custody-found-
> unresponsive-dies-20130202_1_bronzeville-neighborhood-police-custody-homan-s
> quare-neighborhood
> [14] http://www.alternet.org/blank
> [15]
> http://directives.chicagopolice.org/lt2014/data/a7a56e4b-12ccbe26-df812-ccbf
> -527447d507470630.html
> [16]
> http://abc7chicago.com/news/widespread-militarization-of-illinois-police-for
> ces-uncovered-by-i-team/259740/
> [17] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Disappeared:
> Police
> Detain Americans at Abuse-Laden 'Black Site'
> [18] http://www.alternet.org/
> [19] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
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