February 25, 2015 archive

What?  It could never happen here?

Only all the time.

Chicago’s Homan Square ‘black site’: surveillance, military-style vehicles and a metal cage

By Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 24 February 2015 10.34 EST

From the outside, you have to concentrate to realize Homan Square is a police facility. At first glance, it’s an unremarkable red brick warehouse, one of a handful on Chicago’s west side that used to belong to Sears Roebuck, complete with roll-up aluminum doors. No prominent signage tells outsiders it belongs to the police. The complex sits amidst fixtures in a struggling neighborhood: a medical clinic, takeout places, a movie theater, a charter school.

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Brian Jacob Church was taken to Homan Square after police picked him up in 2012 on terrorism charges he beat at trial. He said police first photographed him for a biometrics database, took him down a long cinderblock hallway on a second floor, and handcuffed him to a bench bolted to the floor. He spent the next 17 hours there – approximately, as it was a windowless room and the lights were kept on overhead – while police attempted an interrogation he described as a fishing expedition.

Homan Square struck Church as the police equivalent of a CIA black site. Inside, he saw “big, big vehicles” that looked to him like the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected used by US soldiers and marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When his lawyers were finally permitted access, Church spoke with them through a 12ft x 12ft metal cage.

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Interrogations aren’t the only thing that happen in Homan Square. It’s a headquarters for a number of special police units, including the anti-gang, anti-vice and bomb and arson squad. Published reports describe a surveillance “wire room” inside.

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’

By Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 24 February 2015 16.43 EST

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.

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.”

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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.

Do you think this is the only one?  This “democracy” is not the one our grandfathers died on the beaches of Normandy defending, it’s more like the one that got people lifetime sentences in Spandau.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Ferdinand Marcos flees the Philippines; Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounces Josef Stalin; Samuel Colt patents the revolver; Muhammad Ali becomes world boxing champ; Musician George Harrison born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

Look, as a stone cold atheist I think all religion is fundamentally ridiculous and faith of any sort mostly superstition and certainly no substitute for reason, logic, and science.

That said, I don’t find Islam any more reprehensible than Mormonism, indeed they share several characteristics that make them simply Christian heresies like Arianism and Rastafarianism (two totally different things mon).

For instance, both believe in prophets after Jesus who were divinely inspired by God to write ‘corrected’ testaments of His Word to substitute and extend the generally accepted texts of Abrahamaic revelation.

Interestingly enough Americanism (“A group of related heresies which were defined as the endorsement of freedom of the press, liberalism, individualism, and separation of church and state, and as an insistence upon individual initiative, which could be incompatible with the principle of Catholicism of obedience to authority.”) was condemned by Pope Leo XIII on his letter Testem benevolentiae nostrae in 1899.

So if you’re even reading this I can virtually guarantee you’re going to Hell just like me if I believed in that sort of thing.

I think what pisses off Christians so much about Islam is that faithful practitioners are genuinely holier than thou (pray 5 times a day, no booze, no pork) and that they so kicked butt as a military force and an enlightened civilization that didn’t barbarically destroy every bit of ‘pagan’ knowledge as witchcraft out of sheer ignorance they in short order created an Empire (Caliphate) larger than Rome, a fact you won’t often hear admitted because they were (gasp) interracial and not usually covered in filth.

So that sentiment drives the vast majority of Islamophobic racists.  Now sophisticated pretenders like Bill Maher claim that Islam is inherently political and dedicated to conquest and it is, but so is Christianity and Judaism (you can make a case that Christianity is pacifistic but those who do are generally martyred in ways much more gruesome than mere beheading).  In reality it is the same egocentric exceptional racism that leads them to this conclusion and if they were true atheists (rarer than true Scotsmen) they’d spend just as much time or more condemning our own cultural biases instead of buying into them out of piss-pants fear some evil Ay-rab is going to boogeyman out from under their bed and slit their throat while they sleep.

Fear something real, like the next asshole who runs a Stop Sign and T-Bones your body to a bloody pulp.

Last night only the panel had to keep it 100, but the monologue was funny.

Continuity

He ruined my adulterous ‘Love Shack’

Yes, it is in fact true that the driving motivation for establishing the NYC Emergency Command Center at the World Trade Center (literally the largest target in New York City) is that it was only a block away from the apartment Rudy was using to bang Judy Nathan so his wife didn’t know.

This week’s guests-

• Tuesday 2/24: Lynsey Addario
• Wednesday 2/25: Conan O’Brien
• Thursday 2/26: Olivia Wilde

What I like about Lynsey Addario is she’s a homey, born in Norwalk which while part of the Fairfield County Gold Coast is not as tony as you think.  She’ll be on to plug It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.

Christine Lagarde’s two part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.