Families of the Victims Tortured by Chicago Detectives Rejoice at First Arrest

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/104732/families_of_the_victims_tortured_by_chicago_detectives_rejoice_at_first_arrest/

A 25-year fight to bring Jon Burge and police who systematically tortured black men to justice makes a critical breakthrough.

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2008.

It began as a dirty open secret and is now Chicago lore: From the 1970s into the 1990s, African American men in the city of Chicago were routinely arrested, taken into police custody, and tortured, during interrogations lasting hours on end. An estimated 150 black men endured abuse that included savage beatings, suffocation with bags and typewriter covers, and in many instances, electrical shocks applied to their genitals. The goal was to secure confessions, and more often than not, it worked, whether the suspect was guilty or not.

At the head of Chicago's police torture ring was Jon Burge, a decorated Vietnam veteran who once made his name for himself as a young cop on the beat on the South Side of Chicago. As Police Commander, first at Area Three on Chicago's North side and then at Area Two on the South, Burge is said to have instituted some of the same techniques he saw deployed in Vietnam, to brutal effect. Forced into early retirement over the torture of a man named Andrew Wilson in 1993, Jon Burge has long been virtually synonymous with racism and police brutality in Chicago. Yet his name remains mostly unfamiliar to the rest of the country, in no small part because neither he nor his subordinates have ever been held accountable for their alleged crimes. Until now.

On Tuesday, October 21, Federal agents arrested Burge, now 60 years old, at his home in Tampa, Florida, where he has been living off a taxpayers' paid pension. This Monday, he will be arraigned at a Chicago courtroom, where he will not only face charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, he will come face to face with activists, family members and loved ones of men who, decades ago, were tortured under his command.

"They should apologize for what they did to him."

Carolyn Johnson was at her home in Chicago the morning Jon Burge was arrested. "I was doing my hair and a news flash came on -- and when the news flash came on, it showed Burge being arrested outside his house in Tampa, Florida!" Excitement creeps into her voice as she tells the story over the phone two days later -- "I called a million people," she says. After all, it was news she's been waiting to hear for more than 15 years.

[midnight]

1. I listened to this over the radio a few days ago. I was struck by

the decades it took to bring this case to the day of light. How is it that our system has so little citizen oversight? And in the wake of this story there was info. posted here about twenty states where law enforcement is or has been trained by black water. Unfortunately Illinois was one of the states using black water.

[amdezurik]

2. listen to the little piggies sqeal

they all made "threatening moves"...they breathed