Spencer Ackerman talking:
The Guardian excerpted the Guantánamo Bay manuscript of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose interrogation at Guantánamo Bay is just one of the most brutal that we’ve ever known about thus far. And my editor asked me if I would go through the manuscript ahead of the excerpt and just see if there were any news stories we might want to do out of it. And one of the footnotes mentioned that in government reports and other sources, including a really fantastic piece of reporting by Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, his 2013 book, The Terror Courts, the lead interrogator during the most intense torturous period of Slahi’s interrogation was a Chicago police officer named Richard Zuley.
And I thought, “Well, I had never heard about a U.S. police officer being in any U.S. military or intelligence interrogation facility. What must his record in Chicago have been like?” and, from there, found some court cases, including Lathierial Boyd’s federal civil rights case against Zuley, got in contact with his lawyer, found out about some more cases and started pulling records to find out what this guy’s record in Chicago was. And we found some really ominous parallels between how he policed Chicago streets and what he did in Guantánamo Bay torture centers.
Lathierial Boyd, after 23 years of being put in prison on a murder that there was never any physical evidence that he committed, was found in 2013 by an investigation from the Cook County state’s attorney to have his conviction voided, as it was completely baseless, and they found there was no evidence that could justify keeping him in prison, even though he had served 23 years.
after he got out, they file—Lathierial Boyd and his attorney, Kathleen Zellner, filed a civil rights suit to try and get some kind of justice for Lathierial and, as well, try and create both more disclosure around the way Chicago police practices have operated, including Richard Zuley.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi remains at Guantánamo to this day and is yet to be charged with a crime. it wasn’t just that the military couldn’t charge—or anyone couldn’t charge—Slahi with anything. Military investigators for the prosecution found that the reason why they couldn’t charge him with anything is what Richard Zuley did to Mohamedou Slahi, that the torture that Slahi was subjected to by the United States of America so tainted all of the evidence in this case that it became fundamentally unchargeable. In 2010, by the way, a federal judge ruled in Slahi’s habeas case that he had to be let go. Barack Obama’s Justice Department has appealed that decision, and that’s why Slahi is still in Guantánamo Bay today.
Now, as we were reporting this, we found that there were these connections between the way Zuley tortured Slahi and his police work as a Chicago detective. Slahi was short-shackled for extended periods of time. We found that happened to Lathierial Boyd. We found that happened to Benita Johnson. We found that happened to Andre Griggs. Johnson and Griggs, for instance, were shackled for between, they say, 24 and 30 hours in their cases. Andre Griggs was suffering through heroin withdrawal during that time, and he wasn’t given medication for that.
This was done as a method to try and get Griggs and Johnson to confess to crimes that they say they never committed. Those confessions formed the vast majority of the evidence against them. And this was something that we saw, as well, Zuley doing at Guantánamo. He told Slahi, “You can either be a witness, or you can be a defendant.” All he had to do was confess. Slahi’s torture, much like with Griggs and with Johnson, was so bad that eventually he just said, “I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me.” As he put it in his book, “If you want to buy, I am selling.”
Before that happened, as just one of the methods that Zuley employed, Zuley threatened to have his mother taken to Guantánamo Bay in what he described as its all-male environment. I don’t think it’s particularly hard to understand that to be a rape threat.
Chicago has a long history of this issue of police torture. This month, the notorious Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, was released from a halfway house after he served four-and-a-half years for lying under oath. But what he’s accused of was leading a torture ring that interrogated more than a hundred African-American men in Chicago in the 1970s and ’80s. They routinely used electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags, typewriter covers, among other methods, to extract confessions from men who were later shown to be innocent. The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project documented some of the men’s stories.
Statistics compiled by the People’s Law Office show Chicago has paid at least $64 million in settlements and judgments in civil rights cases related to Burge’s police abuses alone. The Chicago Reader reported some of the Burge techniques may have been learned when he was in Vietnam, where he served as a military policeman.
Even though Jon Burge and Richard Zuley served in Chicago around the same time, supposedly, from everyone I’ve talked to, including Flint Taylor, who’s Burge’s probably chief legal investigator, doesn’t seem like they actually worked together. Nevertheless, there is a context for this in Chicago. There’s a long-standing tradition of police abuses, primarily against African-American residents of Chicago. It sits now, with what we’re reporting, at this uncomfortable intersection between both that long and nefarious history of abuse against African Americans, primarily, in Chicago and this post-9/11 era in which secret detentions, longtime interrogations without charge, and so forth, seem to be now increasingly influencing domestic police work.
— source democracynow.org
Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian, where he has published a two-part series on police abuse in Chicago.