Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo

[Man from Pickens]

When the Chicago detective Richard Zuley arrived at Guantánamo Bay late in 2002, US military commanders touted him as the hero they had been looking for.

Here was a Navy reserve lieutenant who had spent the last 25 years as a distinguished detective on the mean streets of Chicago, closing case after case – often due to his knack for getting confessions.

But while Zuley’s brutal interrogation techniques – prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others – would get supercharged at Guantánamo for the war on terrorism, a Guardian investigation has uncovered that Zuley used similar tactics for years, behind closed police-station doors, on Chicago’s poor and non-white citizens. Multiple people in prison in Illinois insist they have been wrongly convicted on the basis of coerced confessions extracted by Zuley and his colleagues.

The Guardian examined thousands of court documents from Chicago and interviewed two dozen people with experience at Guantánamo and in the Chicago criminal-justice system. The results of its investigation suggests a continuum between Guantánamo interrogation rooms and Chicago police precincts. Zuley’s detective work, particularly when visited on Chicago’s minority communities, contains a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture.

+@ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-chicago-guantanamo

[guillaumeb]

1. Mark Zuley was not the first

He had an example, perhaps even a mentor. Before Mark Zuley, Jon Burge was the head torturer in Chicago. He obtained many confessions using torture. Thanks perhaps to the efforts of then State's Attorney and one time Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, Burge was never prosecuted or even investigated in spite of numerous allegations of misconduct.


http://articles.chicagotribune.com/keyword/jon-burge