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A Secret "Black Site" Revealed In Chicago: "When You Go In, You Just Disappear"
Located in a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side is where, according to the Guardian, one can find the domestic equivalent of a CIA "black site" - an illegal, off-the-books interrogation compound used by Chicago special police units, one which renders "Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside"; a place whose former occupants say is where you end up when you are "disappeared"; a place which confirms that when it comes to the eternal "who is better - us or them" debate, there really is no difference: "It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.” It's a Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib rolled into one. In short: it is a place where the US constitution and basic human rights have absolutely no access.
And it may be located in a building just down your street.
According to an exclusive piece by the Guardian that is sure to send not only shivers down the spine of those who are still paying attention, but ripples across the "land of the free", not least because if there is one dark site on US soil, there are countless more - places where every single constitutional right of US citizens is trampled on - the secretive warehouse known as Homan Square is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. However, there is one huge difference: while those abuses impacted people overseas, 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.
Every former communist block country had them: hidden, dark places where the secret police could have their way with you, and even kill you if it so desired, and nobody would have any clue or recourse of action; something for which the "evil empire" was mocked by the "free western world." As it turns out, the "evil empire" can now be found in at least one of the most populated American cities:
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.
What exactly takes place at Homan square? Well, if it prohibited by the constitution, changes are you can find it in this red-bricked warehouse in west Chicago. Among the 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.
The place had been largely shrouded in secrecy until the Guardian managed to find some people who were willing to talk:
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.”
Actually, based on the revelations about how the open and democratic US state deals with opposing voices, the practice continues to this date and at a level that would make George Orwell blush. it is, however, hidden for the most part, and usually takes place in the shadows, although increasingly those among the population who are not too stoned, too transfixed by their iApps and sitcoms, or too depressed to care, are starting to notice. That is not to say that the superstate won't deny it is, at times, the moral and ethical equivalent of the basest of middle-eastern "barbarians" it is waging an ideological war against (if only on behalf of the military-industrial complex).
Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.
“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.
And yet, when a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name. A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.
So it's a "new thing" - but don't worry, it's all about being "patriotic." Like the NSA, or the Department of Homeland Security. Because one never knows just which US mall the next "terrorist" will blow up.
Which is probably why in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”
And while the ubiquitous "terrorism" excuse for any and every extra-constitutional action could apply here as well, the reality is that Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.
Guantanamo In West Chicago
While America was distracted, focusing its attention on the water cooler scandal of the day, America raised at least one and likely countless more "Guantanamo centers", places where the detained have absolutely no human rights. Only it wasn't in Cuba: it was among America's own suburbia.
On a smaller scale, 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.
“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”
Stalin, or any other banana republic dictator would be proud.
Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods. “I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”
And as if by seamless transition, all of the above ties in to another very critical topic in recent years - the SWATiziation of America's police forces:
Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.
“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said. “They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
Too late: they already have. And they are everywhere...
... just waiting for the right moment to spring on the "land of the free" and show everyone just how quickly the myth of freedom can be crushed under the reinforced wheels of 432 (and now many more) Police-controlled MRAPs now spread evenly across the bastion of democracy and human rights and personal liberties.
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I read a little history.
SC of course, opened the Civil War. That state has a huge Federal military presence. Also, during President Jackson's term, SC tried nullification of tariffs. Jackson (born in SC) threatened to personally take the Army to SC and start hanging legislators. The Nullifiers surrendered their attempt, and a compromise was worked out.
Oh sure,
They're all like little kids...
Once they know the CIA has their own torture holding centers, it's like, "Me, me, me...I want one too."
Sheesh, wait until they start the death-camps. Fuckhead Falls who has 2 Mraps that can't get out of second gear before they hit the town limits will want their own concentration camps too.
Gangsters...They're all alike.
Now, let's fix this system corrupted down to it's bones by... voting.
Throw the bums out! Replacing them with bums2 (or recycled bums0, who were out of power for a few years, living off revolving door contracts, lavish corporate donations etc).
In a viable country a year from now a few people that requested, established and run this facility would be behind bars. It's not enough to be able to uncover legal crimes and criminals with titles - they have to pay with their wealth and for gross violations freedom. Recycling them every few years is just nowhere near enough to disincentivize predation. With corrupt justice system, there's no viable check on either enforcement nor lawmakers. They will just run wilder every year.
"... just waiting for the right moment to spring on the "land of the free" and show everyone just how quickly the myth of freedom can be crushed under the reinforced wheels of 432 (and now many more) Police-controlled MRAPs now spread evenly across the bastion of democracy and human rights and personal liberties."
We already got a preview of that in Boston recently when the search was on for the marathon bomber. Video of forced searches....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MezLoczjfY
Looks like this will be Chuy's new home after forcing Rahm Emmanuel into a run off.....
We need anti armor weapoins, and plenty of 'em.
Just what was the FBI doing, or the Illinois State Troopers, in the last 40 years this was going on? Oh, that's right...setting up their OWN secret dungeons.
We need anti armor weapoins, and plenty of 'em.
Just what was the FBI doing, or the Illinois State Troopers, in the last 40 years this was going on? Oh, that's right...setting up their OWN secret dungeons.
Weird.
They'll stage a drill in Boston, pass it off as a terrorist bombing, then move the militarized Police State into motion to see how the Big Gulp Populace will react. Result: COMPLICITY.
They'll stage the Sandy Hook drill, pass it off as a terrorist shooting, bulldoze the site and destroy the evidence of its fraud. Result: THEY GODDAMN BUY IT.
This "black site" doesn't really surprise me, but it does surprise me that it's been made public. Something's fishy here.
Nevertheless, if you're fortunate enough to have a job, take some time on the weekends and practice your rifle skills.
We rounded up some folks
We disappear-ed some folks
Escape From Chicago starring Kurt Russell 200,000 as Snake Plissken and Project Mayhem as Fresno Bob.
Oh well i guess to a normal civilian - The cops are criminals in Uniform.
What they do surprises no one.
And as for the few honest cops- they dont talk for fear of their lives.
I know a State Trooper Capt. that trained at Quantico on lie detectors and they do talk.
There's quite a few cops at State and Fed. levels that are disturbed at the transformation from criminal apprehension to the emphasis of 'civilian population control' and identifying 'political insurrectionists' with extremely broad definitions under who that might be.
He knows some of what we all know, how far down the hole he's gone, I'm not sure, but what brought it home to him he said, was his training in Washington not only included standard criminal lie detector techniques but also 'domestic terrorist interrogation' with one of the prime suspect categories being his son, a returned combat veteran with forward operation leadership skills.
This guy is a Tai Kwan Do master that taught my son and is probably the most engaging personable yet deeply intellectual people I have ever met. His knowledge of Eastern philosophy is immense and wide ranging and he imparts this to his students as much as martial skills. "Harm no one, but defend the weak and yourself from harm." To him, honor is not just another word but a living, breathing ideal to perfect. This is a guy that humbles you by comparison, yet are proud to call a friend.
I don't see him as often as I used to and that much information that I got took a bit of probing as he's generally pretty tight-lipped about his work, but the good guys are talking and they don't like what they see at all. There's a lot of the brighter cops that got into law enforcement for the right reasons and they are not pleased with the level of thugs that are getting hired over the last ten years or so.
At least there will be a few good guys on our side when the mask comes off.
Chertoff's Roach Motel -
based on the STASI Model, for your comfort & convenience.
Anyone else notice all the single down votes/red arrows at all the comments trashing Rahm and Obozo? Rahm or Obozo must have a single troll awake early this morning monitoring ZH...
We are screwed. Secession anyone?
Well, you get a red down arrow from me on this comment.
Like Obama and Emanuel have been president and mayor, respectively, since 1999. And this illegal detention center in Chicago - it's the only one, right?
Where there is smoke, there is fire. And there is never only one cockroach.
Or never one person who still wants to remain clueless as to the reality of our world.
You must be simple. Rahm and Obama are Chicago protegees. They are just another link in the chain. You think Obama or Rahm were able to attain power without a nod from TPTB in Chicago? The same ones that blessed these sites in "1999"?
Go fuck yourself.
A "black site" in Chicago... Thats racis right there. I'm tellin' The Right Reverend Al Sharpton about this.
The Boomerang was bound to come back.
Like most places on this planet, only a small minority will take the time to consider what has been disclosed.
And a minority of that minority will bother to enquire about what the hell has brought about this situation.
Chicago Police process hundreds of black gangsta thugs every day. That anyone objects to those thugs being off the street for a day, is really pathetic. Or worse. Yeah, I lived in the gritty innards of Chicago 40 years and I know what I'm talking about.
Thats right, I lived in Chicago for 39 years, and there are reasons they give it nicknames like "Chi-raq', or how in the early 1990's there were companies making Kevlar lined back to school clothes for kids, unfortunately gang activity is a disease all big cities have. What scares me about this story is that it is in Chicago. Carl Sandburg said it best, "...Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the big shoulders."
The people of Chicago (as a whole) are the best anywhere, and if something like this can happen there, it can happen *anywhere*
Like I said, processing bad-ass crimnals and turd world invaders at that facility is one thing.
Switching it to process armed white surbaban political dissenters and patriots would be a whole 'nuther thing.
I object to the system that created those thugs. You know, the great society that told black women they could get free money as long as they kicked baby daddy out of the house. The one that deliberately exported jobs overseas. The one that turned schools over to a teachers union that has a minority of teachers and a majority of support personnel who don't give a shit about educating ayone. The system that puts hurdle after hurdle in front of any entrepenuer wanting to start a business ($1million for a taxi medallion and lawsuits against Uber). The one that locks kids up for weed and then makes them unemployable. Yeah, I don't like the feral rats in the streets either but the anger is for those that created them.
This is a result of a failed War on Drugs. This is the result of a failed War on Poverty. This is the result of a failed gun control policy that has kept firearms out of the hands of everyone but the criminals.
This is the result of the systematic violation of the Constitution. Should it surprise anyone that this is what we get?
Notice there is no published address (there never is...). Because if there were, it would most likely be burned to the ground in a mysterious case of arson. At least that should be every citizen's response to an abusive, corrupt system. I did google "Homan Square" and there is one facility marked Chicago PD on google maps. Same building or not?
Standard Disclaimer:
I even believe there is a sign at the entrance to this secret facility that reads: "Unattended Children Will be Given Espresso and a Free Kitten"
Run around that neighborhood yelling "I want to burn down a mosque!" or "I want to shoot Rahm."
You'll find it pretty quick.
Suburban white people won't do anything when men in black start kidnapping their sisters and brothers en masse?
Tell that to the 5 to 10 million mostly white folks who are pissed off already and armed WITH ARMALTE AR-10 CARBINE GAS-POWERED SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPONS!
America may be a lot of things, but it is not a disarmed, sad defeated nation like oh say, 90% of Europe, Japan, the former USSR and so forth. If the grid goes down tomorrow, many good men with rifles will rule the roost in many places. What happens in between those places is anyones guess.
Sanctions on Russia.
No more AK's being imported.
You'll have to buy American. Lots of backorders.
Who needs firefight weapons like an AK or an AR10 for an insurgency?
You'd live longer and be more effective with a rusty trusty bolt action rifle for hit and run sniping.
black house, Safe house and dont forget the White house!
As I recall wasn't Adam Kokesh 'disappeared' awhile back? Anyone know what happen to him?
That bitch probably joined Academi so he could go kill some Ukrainian grannies. Either that or he joined the IDF.
EVERY armed thug driving about in any armored vehicle/helicopter has to come out sooner or later. NO army/government can defeat a determined population if it has firearms and is willing to oppose any oppressor by using them. Remember Vietnam.
A mile from where my brother worked! Explains his stories of black SUVs "cleaning up the neighborhood" in the early am...
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-ame...
"Even the women" were brick shit-houses he said; not doughty Chicago cops.
Apparently the building specializes in prostitution
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=homan+square&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&...
Now there's soccer moms jogging in the morning around there. Real estate prices are way up.
Habeus Corpus
OKay there were 7 pages of comments when I read this so I may have missed it but why is it that after DECADES this is only now coming to light and quoted and/or discussed in the article-meaning The Gaurdian had CONTACT with these people-are several ATTORNEYS who up until now have just kept silent including "Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes", "Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney", "Andrea Lyon...DEAN of Valpariaso Law School" ?
What exactly have these folks been doing up until now?
This is the number one problem in this shit show of a country. No one has the guts to stand up and DO anything. Everyone just happily herds into rail cars off to slaughter like good stupid fat cows.
Haha that's funny, this dude Preson wrote about it earlier here: http://prestonclive.whotrades.com/blog/43343359181
He seems to have quite a bitter opinion on this,but I guess to each its own. I personally don't see anything wrong with this.
Everyone knows what is in room 101
Assuming this were proven to be true, it is illogical to jump from indicting the Chicago police for (at the very least) skirting habeas corpus laws to indicting every aspect of the American justice system. Is this typical or an aberration? It is a question worth asking honestly and not cynically. It is well known that Chicagoans tolerate a level of corruption in their city that would not be tolerated elsewhere.
That said, these allegations are not proven to be true. They are allegations. Good reporting demands that specific examples of persons being detained in this facility while a habeas corpus demand was pending. In other words, when a judge said produce the body and the police refused, there should be hell to pay. If this did not happen, why?