CHICAGO POLICE TORTURE
Saw the chilling and powerful “Death and the Maiden” at Victory Garden Theater last night, followed by an inspiring conversation with Chicago torture survivors and anti-torture activists and lawyers. Please see it, and also join the movement for reparations:change.org/petitions/pass-the-ordinance-seeking-reparations-for-the-chicago-police-torture-survivors
I was inspired to re-read the following written in 2008 by Bernardine Dohrn from our book Race Course: Against White Supremacy, but for the latest go to peopleslawoffice.com:
In 1969, a young man named Jon Burge returned to Chicago from military service in Viet Nam. Part of his assignment in Viet Nam was to guard and accompany detainees who were interrogated as suspected Viet Cong guerrillas at Dong Tam base, south of
Saigon. Army records show that 1,507 detainees were interrogated in the three-month period starting November 1, 1968, when Sergeant Burge was assigned to the Ninth Military Police Company of the Ninth Infantry Division. Back in Chicago, he joined the Chicago Police Department in 1970, and was assigned to Area Two, a police station on Chicago’s south side. Over a period of twenty years, as is now widely acknowledged, a group of white police officers engaged in the routine torture of more than one hundred
African American suspects at Area Two stationhouse. The torture methods included electrically shocking suspects’ testicles, tongues, and ears (using a “black box” from Vietnam and cattle prods), burning suspects by shackling them to boiling radiators, and
putting lit cigarettes on their arms, legs, and chests, suffocating them with typewriter covers, forcing gun barrels into their mouths to simulate mock executions, and depriving them of water, food, and sleep. All of the victims were African American men. More than thirty-five years later, not a single person has been indicted for these
crimes—a pattern of total impunity.
For the past three years, I’ve had the distressing but dynamic experience of teaching a law school seminar on torture. Simultaneously, I’ve had the good fortune of participating in the Chicago Coalition Against Police Torture with a large circle of CHICAGO POLICE TORTURE | Bill Ayers:
I was inspired to re-read the following written in 2008 by Bernardine Dohrn from our book Race Course: Against White Supremacy, but for the latest go to peopleslawoffice.com:
In 1969, a young man named Jon Burge returned to Chicago from military service in Viet Nam. Part of his assignment in Viet Nam was to guard and accompany detainees who were interrogated as suspected Viet Cong guerrillas at Dong Tam base, south of
Saigon. Army records show that 1,507 detainees were interrogated in the three-month period starting November 1, 1968, when Sergeant Burge was assigned to the Ninth Military Police Company of the Ninth Infantry Division. Back in Chicago, he joined the Chicago Police Department in 1970, and was assigned to Area Two, a police station on Chicago’s south side. Over a period of twenty years, as is now widely acknowledged, a group of white police officers engaged in the routine torture of more than one hundred
African American suspects at Area Two stationhouse. The torture methods included electrically shocking suspects’ testicles, tongues, and ears (using a “black box” from Vietnam and cattle prods), burning suspects by shackling them to boiling radiators, and
putting lit cigarettes on their arms, legs, and chests, suffocating them with typewriter covers, forcing gun barrels into their mouths to simulate mock executions, and depriving them of water, food, and sleep. All of the victims were African American men. More than thirty-five years later, not a single person has been indicted for these
crimes—a pattern of total impunity.
For the past three years, I’ve had the distressing but dynamic experience of teaching a law school seminar on torture. Simultaneously, I’ve had the good fortune of participating in the Chicago Coalition Against Police Torture with a large circle of CHICAGO POLICE TORTURE | Bill Ayers:
