The shocking video:
…and the story, via the Guardian:
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
- Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
- Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
- Shackling for prolonged periods.
- Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
- Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.
This, my friends, is what a police state looks like.
Others: The Intercept, Common Dreams, msnbc.com, Mediaite, The Verge, Booman Tribune, and Hit & Run
Traditionally, the US has fought short successful wars, with “complete surrender” as the only accepted outcome. Internal resistance to wars fell behind the wars themselves and actions like the Palmer Raids and the Un-American Activities Committees took place after the formal completions of the wars. The normal paranoia over spy rings and infiltration, with exceptions like the quick incarnation of Japanese citizens at the start of WWII, were slow to organize and even slower to produce results, if any. Likewise, actual anti-war protests (the New York riots in the Civil War, for example) have fallen out of the history texts and are largely collectively forgotten.
The situations during and after the Vietnam and Oil Wars (for lack of a better name) are completely different. The architecture of these conflicts were complex and always in flux. There was a (single) major military action against the U.S. which was completely successful.
Our (the citizens) primary sources of sophisticated information about what we were (trying) to do were technocrats in the military and quasi-military establishments with sufficient access to the inevitable deep and comprehensive bureaucratic records to dump complete libraries of data into well hidden archives. Such archives can fit on a few key chain ornaments and be duplicated almost instantly using any old desktop computer. All one can say is that we are still very good at fighting the previous war.
Of course, civil liberties always suffer in time of war. The problems we currently face relate to the proportion of “inalienable” rights we are willing to (temporarily) sacrifice to try to control the current confusing and truly dangerous circumstances. Our reputation as a country (one of very few) that lives up to its principles, is defunct for some decades. While the trade-off is inevitable, I see no evidence of serious understanding of such issues by the powers that be. That is, the ease with which a “dirty nuclear bomb” (no “bang”, much scattered radioactivity) and subsequent cancers, can be constructed, distributed and used seems too easy to to cheaply and quickly control. Visions of bombs in tennis shoes are easy of build and certainly are terrifying. I, together with the powers that be and the general citizenry, simply cannot determine a simple method of dealing with the threat.
The question is whether or not the current police state will continue to exist, and at what level. With wars like these, the usual American approaches to cleaning up afterwards certainly won’t work. Perverting our values, with neither better ideas nor ways of defining goals, seems to me to be simply a way to make things worse even faster.
Very well put…