The "Torturable Class"

I seriously doubt Chicago is unique - or even unusual - in this.

Liliana Segura at The Nation:

On January 25, 1990, the Chicago Reader, the free alternative weekly, published a cover story, nearly 20,000 words long, titled “House of Screams.” Written and reported over the course of a year by journalist John Conroy, the investigation exposed, in meticulous detail, a long and chilling history of abuse by police against suspects on the South Side of Chicago. At the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit, Police Commander Jon Burge had overseen and participated in the systemic torture of an untold number of African-American men, dating back to the early 1970s. They had been beaten, burned against radiators, suffocated with plastic bags and, most disturbingly, had their genitals subjected to electric shocks. “Fun time” was how Burge referred to the electrocution sessions, which, Conroy would later reveal, drew on his experience as a military police officer in Vietnam.

Despite its bombshell revelations, the story did not spark immediate or widespread outrage. Even the local dailies failed to run with it. So over the next seventeen years, Conroy would write twenty-two more articles about Chicago’s police torture regime—stories that laid bare the extent of the abuse and decried the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. Among those who knew about the torture was former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley, sworn in as mayor months before “House of Screams” was published. Some fifty men claim to have been brutalized in the eight years he served as state’s attorney.) In 2003, out of concern that innocent men had been convicted and sentenced to die based on confessions that had been tortured out of them, Governor George Ryan famously emptied Illinois’s death row, commuting 167 sentences and pardoning four men.

SNIP

When I ask Conroy why he thinks there was not more accountability—or even outrage—over the years of brutality meted out against so many men, he echoes a line from his play, delivered by the lawyer for Otha Jeffries. “I think it’s that there’s a torturable class in this country,” he says. So revelation after revelation, “people just didn’t care.”

That goes for the media outside Chicago, too, which mostly ignored the story for years. “This is the biggest national police scandal of the past fifty years,” Conroy says, reminding me of the innocent men who landed on death row. “Corruption is one thing. This was attempted murder.”

Read the whole horrifying thing.

And that was decades before the Warren Terra militarized police forces across the country and President Smirky himself assured them that torture is the patriotic thing to do.