In 1969, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was gunned down by Chicago Police in his bedroom. This week on Intercepted: Famed civil rights lawyer Flint Taylor discusses his 13 year struggle for justice for Hampton, his work in exposing the torture program in Chicago that was unleashed on black men, and his career fighting against violent corrupt cops, the city of Chicago, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Taylor’s new memoir is called “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.” As Donald Trump ramps up drone strikes, he has officially wiped out the already minimal accountability guidelines implemented by Barack Obama. Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union talks about the expansion of drone strikes under Trump, how Obama paved the way for his successor, and what we might expect from Attorney General William Barr. Meghan McCain is not Jewish, but she is accusing a Jewish comic artist of creating “one of the most anti-Semitic things” she has ever seen: a cartoon about her hypocrisy in attacking Ilhan Omar and appropriating Jewish suffering. Artist Eli Valley talks about why he drew it and why he believes McCain’s attacks on his cartoon prove the very point he was making.
Andrew Lelling: We’re here today to announce charges in the largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice.
Announcer: On the campus of one of America’s leading universities —
Donald J. Trump: I understand things. I comprehend very well.
Announcer: The most gifted mind to ever enter its classrooms.
DJT: Better than I think almost anybody, OK?
Stellan Skarsgård as Gerald Lambeau: This boy’s genius is unparalleled. I need someone who can get through to them.
DJT: So, I mean I was born with a certain intellect that is good for this. You know I have very high aptitude. I’m like a smart person.
Announcer: Some people can never believe in themselves until someone believes in them.
DJT: You wouldn’t believe it but I was a very good student. I was a good student. I was a good student. You know, I was a good student. I was always a good student. And I was a good student.
Robin Williams as Sean Maguire: You can do anything you want. You are bound by nothing.
DJT: I was a very smart guy, good student, all that stuff, OK? I was a great student, went to the best schools, all that stuff. Look, I was a good student, went to the best schools, and all that stuff. I mean, I was a good student at the best school and all of that. You know, I was a good student, went to a great school, and all that stuff. I was a great student. I went to the best schools. So I was a very good student at the best schools. I was a great student. Went to the best school.
Announcer: And some, never know how much they can have until they discover how much they can give.
Michael Cohen: I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the college board to never release his grades or SAT scores.
[Music interlude.]
Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.
JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City. And this is episode 86 of Intercepted.
Walter Mondale: That the FBI possessed the ability to enter into this field and to investigate and to intimidate and seek to neutralize and indeed replace a civil rights leader that they thought to be politically unacceptable. Is that correct?
Frederick Schwarz: Yes.
JS: The history of the United States is rife with stories, programs, laws that have at their center a dedication to crushing and ending black lives. This nation was built on slavery. It was built on a white supremacist ideology. It was intended to be a white man’s paradise served and serviced by its non-white, disenfranchised residents — millions of whom were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and brought in chains by ship to the United States.
Slavery was ultimately ended. But the ideology behind it persisted. The white power structure in this country fought militantly against giving rights to black people. It fought against allowing them to use the same bathrooms as white people, or to it eat in restaurants alongside white people. It fought against their right to vote or to seek office.
Newscaster: As in many places in the south, voter registration was designed to keep Negro voting to a minimum. Difficult literacy tests were administered by white officials and Negroes who attempted to register were often harassed.
JS: And all of this was what played out in public, in full view. But it hardly stopped there. In the mid-1950s, the notorious FBI director for life J. Edgar Hoover created a program that was aimed at secretly destroying political and social movements, including black liberation movements. That program was known as COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence program.
Edgar Hoover: Today, you have in charge of the communist party a hardcore fanatical group of members who are dedicated to the overthrow of our government by force and violence.
JS: Originally, COINTELPRO was aimed at infiltrating and destroying the Communist Party in the U.S., but J. Edgar Hoover also directed that all covert operations aimed at destroying black liberation movements that they should be placed under the program as well. So under COINTELPRO, you had black leaders such as Martin Luther King being surveilled, Malcolm X, Black Panther leaders, non-violent activists like Bayard Rustin, the fighter Muhammad Ali all of them were monitored around the clock. Smear campaigns were waged against them in the media. Hoover actually tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into committing suicide.
WM: And the tactics they used apparently had no end… They involved even plans to replace him with someone else the FBI was to select as a national civil rights leader.
JS: Agent provocateurs were sent to infiltrate Black groups, Native American groups, antiwar organizations, socialist parties. Their purpose was to sow division, to provoke violence, to destroy the movements from within. It was not until 1971 when the COINTELPRO program broke out into the public light.
Carl Stern: The documents prove for the first time that the FBI undertook a program in 1968 to harass and destroy new left political organizations whose views the federal police agency disagreed with. Wrote FBI director Hoover, the purpose of the program would be to expose and disrupt the new left. We must frustrate every effort of these groups and individuals to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherence. In every instance, consideration should be given to disrupt the organized activity of these groups. Director Hoover detailed the set up of the program, saying anarchists and revolutionists had to be neutralized if law and order and a civilized society were to survive.
JS: And it must be noted that several targets of COINTELPRO operations were assassinated during this secret reign of the COINTELPRO program. We still do not have the full story of whether the FBI was directly involved in many of those political assassinations that took place in this country.
And even after COINTELPRO was publicly exposed, the tactics and aims of the program have not died, including to this day. We know that these tactics are still used against Black Lives Matter activists, against Muslim groups, activists in the U.S., anti-war organizations, environmental groups, and most recently journalists reporting on the border in this country.
Mari Payton: Individuals on the list include journalists, an attorney and dozens of others labeled by the U.S. government as an organizer or instigator. They all have a connection to the migrant caravan at the San Diego-Mexico border. Customs and Border Protection did not deny the database exists and defended its use.
JS: As COINTELPRO was in full swing, the U.S. intensified its war in Vietnam. In that war, the U.S. ran assassination operations, including under the CIA’s so-called Phoenix Program. They used torture. They killed massive numbers of civilians. And a good number of the people who participated in these crimes abroad returned home to the United States and became police officers. Among these there was a man named Jon Burge. He was a military police officer in Vietnam and then joined the Chicago Police Department, rising to become a prominent detective.
During his time in the Chicago Police, Jon Burge married the worlds of the murderous war in Vietnam with the most extreme crimes of the COINTELPRO program. He ran what can only be called a torture program in the city of Chicago that was aimed at getting confessions from black men to crimes that many of them had nothing to do with. Burge used many of the very tactics that he learned and implemented in Vietnam as a prison guard on the black men he encountered when he became a police officer in the city of Chicago. This torture included a makeshift torture machine that was used to electrically shock suspects, including by attaching alligator clips to the genitals of men and jolting their bodies with painful electric shocks.
At the same time, the Chicago police — in concert with the FBI — murdered the most prominent Black Panther leader in Illinois in his bedroom in the middle of the night. That leader was Fred Hampton, the chair of the Illinois Black Panthers and a national leader of the party. And our next guest was in that house soon after Fred Hampton and his fellow Black Panther Mark Clark were killed. He recalls standing in a pool of blood on December 4, 1969.
Civil Rights Lawyer Flint Taylor on His New Book “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago”
I am talking about the now-legendary lawyer, Flint Taylor. He’s a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, an office which has been dedicated to litigating civil rights, police violence, government misconduct, and death penalty cases for over 45 years. He spent 13 years fighting for justice for Hampton and Clark. He was also one of the main people responsible for exposing Jon Burge and his torturing of black men. And Flint Taylor has won tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits brought on behalf of some of Burge’s torture victims. Flint Taylor has an incredible and devastating new book out. It’s called “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.” And Flint Taylor joins me now. Flint, welcome to Intercepted.
Flint Taylor: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
JS: I want to start where you start in your book with the murder of Fred Hampton. First, explain who Fred Hampton was.
FT: Well, Fred Hampton was a 21-year-old, very charismatic young leader of the Black Panther Party here in Chicago.
Fred Hampton: We’ll work with anybody, form coalitions with anybody that has revolution on their mind. We’re not a racist organization because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism and we know that racism is a by-product of capitalism. Everything would be all right if everything was put back into the hands of the people and we’re going to have to put it back into the hands of the people.
FT: He was very much an up-and-coming star in the Panther Party in 1969.
FH: And why they want to get rid of me because I’m saying something that might wake up some other exploited people, some other oppressed people and if all these people ever get together then these pigs who are exploiting us, we’ll [inaudible]. That’s why they want to get rid of us.
FT: And he was targeted not only by the Chicago police and the district attorney known as a state’s attorney here in Chicago, Edwin Hanrahan.
FH: We don’t think to fight fire with fire, we’re getting ready to fight fire with water. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re still in the city. We’re not going to fight reactionary pigs, and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our parts. We’re going to fight their reactions with all those people getting together and have an international proletariat revolution.
Crowd: Right on!
FH: And let’s say all power to all people.
FT: And it turns out the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and the counterintelligence program of the FBI —
JS: COINTELPRO, you’re referring to?
FT: Exactly.
FH: You can jail the revolutionary but you can’t jail revolution. You can run a freedom fight around the country but you can’t run freedom fighting around the country. You can shoot a liberator but you can’t shoot liberation. If you do, you come up with answers that don’t answer, relations that don’t explain, solutions that don’t solve, and conclusions that don’t conclude. If you’re there to struggle, you better win. If you don’t struggle, then you don’t deserve to win. You don’t deserve to win. We’ve said simply, you’ve got to get out here and you’ve got to involve yourself in the struggle. You’ve got to come out here and put yourself on the line. You’ve got to come out here and support the Vanguard party of international proletariat and revolutionary struggles. That’s the Black Panther Party.
Newscaster: This is the NBC News noon report. The latest news with Jorie Lueloff.
Jorie Lueloff: Good afternoon. The 20-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton was shot and killed in a predawn shootout with state’s attorney’s police in his West Side apartment.
JS: What happened the night that Fred Hampton was killed?
FT: I think it’s pretty clear it was an assassination. It happened at 4:30 in the morning on December 4th, 1969. He was asleep along with many other young Black Panthers, many of whom were like 17, 18 years old when the police came on a raid, 14 police officers with machine guns shotguns and they burst into the front and the back of this little apartment and they fired over 90 shots into the bedrooms. Fred Hampton never awoke and they shot him through the head twice and dragged his body off of the bed that he was sleeping on as a trophy and lay it on the floor outside of the bedroom.
JS: How did you Flint end up going to the house that night?
FT: We, the People’s Law Office, which had been founded only months before by young lawyers and law students — I was one of the law students. We represented the Panthers in Chicago and we represented Fred Hampton. The Panthers who survived reached out and we got a call, come to the chairman’s crib. He’s been murdered and the police had left it open. They hadn’t closed it off like made it a crime scene like you would expect they would with the yellow tape. So, we were able to enter the apartment and for the next ten days myself and many others spent that time taking evidence, taking video, and taking pictures and the Panthers very politically astute as they were they had daily guide-tours of the apartment showing people in the community what had happened, showing the walls where the bullets had gone in, and showing where the machine guns had riddled the plasterboard walls.
Archive: This here is the room where first brother Mark Clark was murdered at.
A: Don’t touch nothing. Don’t move nothing. We want to keep all the things just the way it is.
A: Don’t touch no walls. Please don’t.
TK: This here’s the door that they said that sister fired through with a shotgun but if a sister had fired through this door with a shotgun, you could look at the wall out there, and see something hole where the pellets left out there. You can see no signs of a shotgun blast being fired through this door here.
FT: The reaction of one older African American woman that while I was taking evidence kind of stopped and looked at the walls and she shook her head and she said, “Ain’t nothing but a northern lynching.” Literally thousands of Chicagoans, African American and concerned white people went through that apartment for the 10 days or so till the police decided that they had to close it.
JS: When you say that it’s clear now that this was an assassination, explain what you’re basing that on.
FT: Well, I’m basing it on 13 years of fighting to uncover the truth of the case. The dominant narrative was that it was a shootout, that the vicious and racist Black Panthers had fired 100 shots at the police and the police and only answered back.
Keith Klein: As soon as Sergeant Daniel Groth and Officer James Davis who were leading our men, announced their office, occupants of the apartment attacked them with shotgun fire. The officers immediately took cover. The occupants continued firing at our policemen from several rooms within the apartment. Thereafter, three times, Sergeant Groth ordered all his men to cease firing, and told the occupants to come out with their hands up. Each time, one of the occupants replied, ‘Shoot it out,’ and continued firing at police officers.
FT: Of course, we were able to show by the apartment itself that was a bold-faced lie. They had charged the Panthers who had survived with attempted murder. We were able to show that the ballistics reports that they were trying to base the fact that the Panthers fired shots were fabricated and in fact, those shots were fired by police weapons rather than Panther weapons. Those cases were dismissed and then we went to a civil suit during which we were able to uncover the fact that not only was there a COINTELPRO program designed to target and destroy the Black Panther Party, but that specifically the FBI had drafted a floor plan of the apartment shown where Fred Hampton would be sleeping and in fact, the bed where he was murdered. And the FBI in their racial matters COINTELPRO unit had passed that on to the state’s attorney’s police and the Chicago police and that they had used that as the kind of bedrock of that 4:30 in the morning raid. Nonetheless, given that, they found there was no probable cause to charge any of the officers or Hanrahan or anyone with any kind of violations of law.
FH: We always said the Black Panther Party, that they can do whatever they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere, but when I leave, you can remember I said with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat. I am the people. I’m not the pig. You’ve got to make a distinction and the people are going to have to attack the pig. The people are going to have to stand up against the pig. That’s what the Panthers are doing. That’s what the Panthers are doing all over the world.
JS: You fought this, then legal, battle and then you have the rise of a now notorious figure within the Chicago Police Department Lieutenant Jon Burge. And he ends up being put in charge of a search for those responsible for a series of shootings that had occurred in broad daylight in Chicago. And Burge then goes on a rampage throughout the city. First describe who Jon Burge was.
FT: Jon Burge grew up on the Southeast Side of Chicago in a changing neighborhood. He flunked out of college and became a military police officer, a sergeant in Vietnam on a POW camp where it was later demonstrated that they were doing wholesale torture during interrogations and that they were using such tactics as electric shock. After he left Vietnam, he came back to Chicago, became a police officer, and quickly became a detective. He brought those dehumanization and racist attitudes and tactics back to Chicago and quickly rose in the ranks to lieutenant in charge of the entire detective division on the far South Side of Chicago, a predominantly African American part of the city. And he used those tactics to interrogate people who were suspected of committing serious crimes.
JS: What is the earliest evidence that you have of Burge torturing African American men in police custody?
FT:1972 and 1973, Burge got to area two, as it was known, and shortly thereafter there was a serious case where a young white boy had been seriously brutalized by some African American attackers. And Burge was involved in that investigation and the four people that they focused on were all brutally beaten in one form or another. The first time that we hear of actual use of electric shock with what my book refers to as the torture machine was in early 1973. A man named Anthony Holmes who was suspected of a murder, who was also a reputed gang leader, he was brought to area two and had electric shock administered to him as well as suffocation what they call “dry submarino” with a bag over his head in order to attempt to get a confession from him to a series of crimes that they thought he had knowledge of.
Anthony Holmes: I was laying flat on the floor. He lifted me up off the floor. I was on my back and he lifted me up and pulled the bag off my head. I know that I woke up, opened my eyes, the bag was off of my head. And I felt like I said, the last time, this is it. It felt like a thousand needles going through my body. Each time they shocked me and then I got the burning sensation. It was just too much. So when you lifted me off the floor the last time, I said, this is it. Whatever they want me to say or do, I did it, whatever it is, I killed the president, yeah I did that too. I didn’t care. I just wanted out of there.
JS: You use the phrase the torture machine and while people aren’t able to see it, maybe you could describe that machine.
FT: It turns out that Burge and his people used several machines to torture. Also, using plastic typewriter covers to do the dry submarino and suffocation and of course, using various weapons from mock executions. But the major torture machine that was described to us by Andrew Wilson, one of the two people who was picked up during this manhunt that you referred to earlier in 1982 —
Newscaster: Good evening, Chicago police at this moment are scouring the city, trying to hunt down three suspects who are believed to be responsible for shooting two Chicago policeman this afternoon. One of the policemen is dead. The other is now —
Newscaster: Police detectives swarmed the scene at 81st and Morgan. An all-points bulletin was issued for two black gunmen driving a late model Brown Chevrolet Impala.
Newscaster: Here’s what’s new tonight: Both Chicago policemen are dead. Three young men are being questioned as suspects.
Newscaster: ChicagoPolice tonight are stepping up what is already one of the most massive manhunts —
FT: The torture machine was a black box with a field generator in it and by field generator — again, this goes back to Vietnam. In Vietnam, they had foam generators and they had a crank on them and they generated sufficient electricity so that you could talk over the wires in the battlefields, in the bogs and whatever in Vietnam. So, if you took this and you put it in a box, which is what Burge did, you then attach wires and you put alligator clips on the end of those wires and then you have a torture device. And what you can do is then attach those alligator clips to the nose, to the fingers, to the genitals, and then, you crank the box.
[Cranking.]
FT: And when you crank the box, you get enough electricity to shock the person who has the wires attached to them. Burge who had a boat — named the Vigilante, we later uncovered — had thrown this box into Lake Michigan or into the Chicago River sometime subsequent to the torture of Andrew Wilson.
Andrew Wilson: He put the wire on my fingers my baby finger, one on one finger and one on the other finger. And then he kept cranking it and kept cranking and kept cranking it. And I was hollering and screaming. I was calling for help and stuff. My teeth was grinding. Flickering in my head, pain and all that stuff. He kept cranking and cranking and cranking it, kept on doing it over and over and over. It hurts but it stays in your head. OK. It stays in your head and it grinds your teeth. It grinds constantly. It grinds constantly. The pain just stays in your head. Burge asked me, “was I going to make a statement? Or was he going to torture me some more?” And I told him I would make a statement. I’d sign anything they gave me because I didn’t want to be tortured anymore. Burge said we’re going to fry your black ass now because of the statement I gave him.
FT: So we never were able to obtain the actual box. But through the description of Andrew Wilson we constructed a facsimile of the box right down to the fact that it would give a shock and in fact, that torture was the culmination of a five-day manhunt that was just a terror regime led by Jon Burge and countenanced and encouraged by the mayor at that time, Jane Byrne and the State’s Attorney of Cook County Richard M. Daley. At that point, in 1987, 1988, we then became Andrew Wilson’s lawyers. That’s when I started to become intimately aware of the details of not only the torture of Andrew Wilson. There were some other names that Berge had used bragging about having tortured them and that started us out on this crusade, so to speak, evidentiary and investigative crusade to find the men who had been tortured. And that’s led over the last 30 years as is chronicled in the book to documenting over 125 cases of police torture during that 20-year period from 1972 to 1991.
And the title of my book is the “Torture Machine” partly because of that and partly because the machine, the Chicago machine, the Daley machine, the Democratic machine, whatever you want to call it, was so responsible for part and parcel of this happening, this 20 years of police torture as well as, covering it up and refusing to prosecute Burge or any of the people that worked for him. But rather promoting him and using the illicit and unconstitutional evidence that they would get from men who were tortured thinking that they were actually on the brink of death. Prosecutors taking those confessions, being in those station rooms, knowing that this was happening using that evidence in court, judges knowing it was happening, not throwing out the confessions but rather refusing to credit the stories that were being told again and again by tortured suspects and people who ultimately would end up convicted, many of whom actually ended up on Illinois death row.
Darrell Cannon: You know I was just “a nigga” to them. That’s it. They kept using that word like that was my name, you know. So, no ma’am, they had no respect for me being a human being. I never expected “police officers” to do anything that barbaric, you know, but because the fact that I’m Afro-American, you know, who’s going to believe me in court? Nobody.
FT: One of the most moving stories in the book is the story of Darrell Cannon. Two of Burge’s henchmen, his most trusted lieutenants, picked up Darrell in 1983 as a suspect in a murder case, took him to an abandoned area near some factories where there was a body of water and some old railroad tracks and they tortured him. First, they attempted to hang him up by his handcuffs. But that didn’t work. So, they then took a shotgun out of their trunk and they took the shotgun and they forced it into his mouth. They then pulled the trigger on the shotgun that was in Darrell’s mouth. He thought it was going to go off. It didn’t. They did it three times and the third time, Darrell described it as he pictured that the back of his head had been blown off. They threw him in the back of the detective car, pulled his pants down, and they had a handy little cattle prod and they used a cattle prod on his genitals and ultimately they got him to sign a confession back at the station that he was accountable, that he had driven the car in which the murder had taken place, and Darrell’s case went on for decades.
JS: In fact, I remember, Flint, I believe it was the first time that I was with you in person in Chicago was years ago when Darrell had finally gotten out of prison. And I have never been able to shake from my mind Darrell struggling through the emotion, the tears, the pain to tell publicly his story but explain how he eventually got out, when he got out, and what the resolution of that case was.
FT: He was sentenced to life and they put him in the supermax prison in Tamms which is at the very, very southern tip of stay in clan country. During that time, we were developing all this evidence of a pattern and practice of police torture. We were able to get Darrell a new hearing in his case armed with evidence that not only was he tortured by these henchmen for Burge but there was a whole litany of different cases that Burge and his men had tortured people. And in 2007, which was 24 years after he was first tortured, he got out of prison.
JS: Talk about who else knew or was aware that Burge was running these torture operations. How high up did it go in the government, in the city of Chicago or state of Illinois?
FT: State’s attorney Daley knew that torture took place at police headquarters as well as that area two. The police superintendent knew that the mayor of the city of Chicago Jane Byrne knew and encouraged it. She met with Burge on at least two or three occasions, we learned decades later, and she said whatever is necessary. And of course, at that point, Burge was a lieutenant who was the head of an entire police area. So, we’re talking about people very high up. Daley himself was presented with medical evidence that Andrew Wilson had been tortured. He was the prosecutor and he decided not to prosecute Burge because he knew that if he did that the case against Andrew and Jackie Wilson would be jeopardized so he instead commended Burge as did the superintendent of police. And because of that in 1982, we have another 10 years of torture that goes on before the evidence that we uncovered was taken to the police department and a reinvestigation was done and ultimately Burge was fired in 1993.
JS: And what happened after Burge was fired? Was he ultimately charged with any crimes?
FT: Yes, 15 years later.
Interrogator: Mr. Burge, would you state your full name and spell it for the record, please?
Jon Burge: John, J-O-N, middle initial G, as in George, Burge, B-U-R-G-E.
Interrogator: Now, during that 25 years, 20 years of working with the Chicago Police Department, did you come across instances of police torture?
JB: I will adopt my prior answer to the first question as my answer to that question.
Interrogator: Are you taking your Fifth Amendment rights?
JB: Yes, that is correct. I’ll adapt my initial responses to answer that question.
Interrogator: You take the Fifth Amendment?
JB: Yes, that’s correct.
Interrogator: Were you interrogating a suspect in area two —
JS: It seems as though that regularly there’s sort of this sense that oh, Chicago now has to face up to the actions of its police department and there has to be accountability and this has to be stopped. And yet, we keep having these kinds of cases in Chicago where there is extra-judicial killings or questionable killings by the police, where dirty tricks are used against suspects and where black neighborhoods are laid siege to. What about that legacy and the fact that the Chicago Police Department, it never, never really seems to fundamentally change?
FT: I wouldn’t argue with you. There have been significant victories that the community has accomplished over the years, not the least of which was Burge actually being convicted and being sent to the penitentiary. Of course, it wasn’t for torture it was for perjury and obstruction of justice. And of course, reparations. I mean, this is the first city to have reparations for survivors of police torture, almost exclusively African American men. An apology from the mayor and the City Council directly to those men. And most significantly, a counseling center for victims of torture and brutality. And the fact that the history of police torture will be taught and is already being taught to 8th and 10th graders in the Chicago Public Schools. But you’re correct. When you look at the Laquan McDonald case and the cover-up of that case and the judge who walked those three officers who covered up in the face of the videotape, you look at the power of the Fraternal Order of Police here who basically are more powerful than the police department itself.
Now, all police officers black and white belong to it or are supposed to belong to it. And yet, when it comes time to decide whether to defend Burge and to spend the dues to pay for private lawyers to defend Burge in his firing case and later in his criminal case, that’s unanimously passed. When it comes time to pay the lawyers for Van Dyke, the officer who murdered Laquan McDonald on videotape, the FOP does that. When it’s time to picket in a courtroom where we’re fighting for the release, 36 years later, of a man who was tortured, the FOP is there. And there seems to be, regardless of the fact that there [are] 10 or 15 percent officers of color, that still happens.
And not only does that still happen but even though we have an African American police superintendent who was put in place by Rahm Emanuel after the Laquan McDonald tape became public, he came from within the department. He knows where all the bones are buried. He, in fact, was part of the culture of the code of silence and of racism even though he is African American, over all these years. And in fact he, as have several of the prior African American superintendents, basically been connected to that machine and also been in fact, frontmen for the politics of racism and brutality that comes from the Democratic machine on down.
JS: Well, Flint Taylor, I want to thank you, first and foremost, for the tireless work that you’ve done over these decades and the work that you’ve done to free people against the odds who were tortured by agents of the state or unjustly imprisoned by agents of the state. Thank you so much, Flint Taylor, for writing the book and for the work that you have done for so long.
FT: Thank you as well. I’m pleased and honored to be on your show and right back at you for all the wonderful work that you do.
JS: Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He’s spent his life fighting against the torture and extrajudicial killings of black people targeted by the Chicago police. His new book is called “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.” It’s published by Haymarket Books.
— source theintercept.com | Mar 13 2019