This Spencer Ackerman piece in The Guardian on former Chicago cop Richard Zuley hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention. It details a major investigation by the paper into Zuley, who went from Chicago to Gitmo as a Naval reservist after a 20-plus year career as a police detective, and brought the kind of brutal police intimidation and abuse usually reserved for black suspects in Chicago’s north side to the interrogation rooms at Guantanamo Bay in order to get confessions.
A Chicago detective who led one of the most shocking acts of torture ever conducted at Guantánamo Bay was responsible for implementing a disturbingly similar, years-long regime of brutality to elicit murder confessions from minority Americans.
In a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture, a Guardian investigation can reveal that Richard Zuley, a detective on Chicago’s north side from 1977 to 2007, repeatedly engaged in methods of interrogation resulting in at least one wrongful conviction and subsequent cases more recently thrown into doubt following allegations of abuse.
Zuley’s record suggests a continuum between police abuses in urban America and the wartime detention scandals that continue to do persistent damage to the reputation of the United States. Zuley’s tactics, which would be supercharged at Guantánamo when he took over the interrogation of a high-profile detainee as a US Navy reserve lieutenant, included:
• Shackling suspects to police-precinct walls through eyebolts for hours on end.
• Accusations of planting evidence when there was pressure for a high-profile murder conviction.
• Threats of harm to family members of those under interrogation used as leverage.
• Pressure on suspects to implicate themselves and others.
• Threats of being subject to the death penalty if suspects did not confess.
The Cook County state’s attorney office now has an examination open into a second conviction involving Zuley, filings in an Illinois court showed on Tuesday. (The Guardian is publishing the first part of its investigation on Wednesday.) While representatives of the state’s attorney’s office told the Guardian that the examination concerns only a single case, the office is seeking civilian complaint files regarding Zuley from a local independent police review authority.
Do check out the article there. Of all the horrible torture regime psychopaths working the circus of pain in Gitmo, Zuley appears to be one of the worst. And he had years to hone his technique beating confessions out of black suspects as a Chicago cop. If your goal was to recruit people who could get confessions out of terror detainees by any means necessary, what better farm system for raising career torture experts did America have than urban homicide divisions in major police departments?
We had tons of bad cops like Zuley ready to go after 9/11. They had been getting confessions for years and after what happened in NYC they were ready to take some serious revenge. After warming up in the minor leagues on black men getting beaten until they confessed to murder raps, of course Gitmo was the obvious next stop for guys like that and the Bushies gladly acquired their services “for America”.
Why wouldn’t Dubya’s crew ignore such a perfect resource like that for the wetwork at Gitmo? And of course, the best part is the brain trust behind all that is now on team Jebbie. That’s going to be awesome.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
I can remember, as an adolescent, reading a crime novel in which a potential witness underwent “third degree” question and thinking at the time that it was unrealistic that the police would subject anyone to that. How naive I was then.
Off topic, you mention the “bathroom bill”, have you heard about the “Kentucky Godbotherer Protection Act” of 2015. Not its actual title, but pretty close to the purpose.
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/ky-legislature/2015/02/18/kentucky-bill-seeks-protect-students-political-religious-speech-aclu-calls-unnecessary/23640125/
Xboxershorts
I’m pretty darned sure he was actively recruited specifically because of his CV at Chicago PD.
Yeah, Jeb is his own man…my ass.
dp
How disgusting.
Chris
Sadly, it’s always been clear that any new Republican president would have much the same group of people guiding his foreign policy that W did. The same team was already around for his pop, even Reagan – they’ve had plenty of time to become the only voice in GOP foreign policy.
Mike in NC
Never met a cop who wasn’t a bully and an authoritarian scumbag. The only unions that Republicans respect are police unions. Big surprise!
elmo
@Mike in NC:
I have. One.
In almost a half-century of life, including twenty-five years of practicing law and more than a decade in the security industry.
I’ve met one.
Ryan
You know, I realize that the environment is undoubtedly a factor, probably a major factor, but we don’t need these particular people to serve as our police.
gene108
So The Guardian and by extension the Brits should follow al-Jazeera into becoming enemies of America. Do they not understand American is the greatest best country evah? And therefore everything we do is AWESOME!!!
Why does Britain hate America? We saved their asses from the Germans 70 years ago and Uncle Joe Stalin, 60 years ago. They owe us.
Fergus Wooster
The Guardian has some follow-up this morning.
The Moar You Know
@elmo: I’ve met two! One was my dorm RA, who was a former cop in Oakland, the other guy was bomb squad, and come to think of it I’m not sure if he was officially a cop or not. Close enough, I guess. I don’t know how those guys work. But he was an interesting guy.
I’ve had very little trouble with them ever since I went military buzz cut and cut off all my hair 20 years ago. None actually. The call me “sir” and everything. Which is quite a contrast to how they used to treat me when I looked like a DFH. I used to get pulled over and patted down and screamed at almost every month. “Where’s the dope, fucker?”
Shit, it’s great to be white and middle-aged. Like that Eddie Murphy sketch. Seriously.
Southern Beale
Stop calling it road rage.
This story makes me so fucking angry.
boatboy_srq
@elmo: Four here, in nearly that long. One in NoVA, two in FL, one in SFO. They’re definitely the exception to the rule.
MomSense
@Southern Beale:
Thank you for writing that. It is just another facet in the oh so fucked up gun culture that is running unchecked right now.
boatboy_srq
@Southern Beale: Gun nut goes out hunting gun nut who skeered the kiddies and comes home in a body bag. Tragically predictable. It’s becoming hard to tell which is worse: ordinary citizen shoots passing driver/pedestrian because 2nd-Amendment-and-SYG, or LEO puts suspect on the rack because Blah/Brown.
beth
@Southern Beale: Thank you. I had the same reaction as you. When it came on the news the other night, my husband was shocked that I said it was too bad all the gun nuts involved didn’t just shoot each other. I’m just so sick of their whole “I can only solve problems by shooting someone” culture. I’m tired of being polite about it.
Gin & Tonic
@Southern Beale: Doesn’t make me angry at all, actually. People got what they wanted. No 2-year-old was shot by her 5-year-old brother because Dad kept a loaded gun in the house. This one was karma, pure and simple.
rikyrah
Say it over and over again, Zandar.
Say it over and over again who his initial torture victims were.
Citizen_X
@Southern Beale: QFT:
Citizen_X
@Citizen_X: And from the article, the son who went out gunning for the other guys says,
Yeah? Well, good job, asshole. You could have said, “Chill out, mom. Call the cops and have them deal with ’em.” But you had to go all cowboy, and you got your mother killed.
muddy
@rikyrah: My sister in Chicago will say, “It’s because those people always run to the media.” Yes, I know this is a complete non-sequitur. But it’s what she always says if one side of the story is black. I suppose they should just say, “No comment” and bow their heads in shame that they have been subject to abuse? Best of all, if people she knows have some issue with the government or a business, this sister’s first advice is to write to the paper, because that’s how you get action!!
She is very insistent that this is not racist, “that’s just how they are”, and then scolds me for saying “black” instead of “African-American” and says I am the real racist due to that. Then the weekly duty call comes to an quick end because fuck that shit. ;-) She’s old and basically a shut-in is why I make the weekly call. She gets all her racism from local Chicago tv and papers so far as I can tell, she doesn’t have friends to tell it to her. You’d think she was watching Fox but she doesn’t, and considers herself very liberal. It’s bizarre to me the disconnect there.
kc
All of those things happen every week, if not every day, in police stations across the U.S.
kc
@boatboy_srq:
That family has told at least 3, I think more, different stories about what happened. I think ultimately we’re gonna find out it didn’t have anything to do with a traffic incident. There’s something else going on there.
The Moar You Know
@Southern Beale: My only problem with what happened here is that these two insane people with no impulse control didn’t manage to make it a twofer.
@kc: Agreed, and I think it’s quite obvious what that “something else” was.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
The best link I have is from HuffPo, but basically Chicago has a huge backlog of abuse cases pending dating back to at least the 1970s. This guy ain’t the only one:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/chicago-police-misconduct_0_n_2883433.html
Tenar Darell
I saw it. I bookmarked it. I could only bear to skim it. I flinched. It’s the kind of story where the mirror it holds up is almost like looking at the face of concentrated evil. Very hard to read, and really hard to think about without losing yourself to outrage, anger, and despair.
Marmot
Thanks for staying on the torture topic, Zandar. I’m amazed as you are that our countrymen are basically A-OK with it. Maybe sense will sink in.
Southern Beale
@boatboy_srq:
Well, I thought the NRA talking point was that murderers and criminals stayed away from people they knew were armed? Guess that doesn’t work in Las Vegas. #FAIL
MomSense
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
I wish I could say I’m surprised to find out that this kind of abuse is part of a larger pattern. Disgusting.
sharl
Following is an excerpt from Part-1 of this Guardian reporting by Ackerman – Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo – and I find myself really, really hoping that someone tracks down dear ol’ MGEN Geoffrey Miller (Ret.), who seems to have gone missing
I would love to see this guy tracked down, ideally around the time our next Presidential campaigning cycle fires up, in the (possibly vain) hope that it leads to some critical questions being posed to the front-runners in both parties.
Thanks for front-paging this, Zandar. This story cannot get enough attention.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MomSense:
Turns out that when you train your police to act like an occupying force at home, and then they go overseas to be part of an occupying force, they end up acting the exact same way. Hoocouldanode?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@rikyrah:
Given the slurs I’ve heard against Middle Easterners — particularly ones like “sand nigger” — I’m guessing this guy and the others like him don’t see much difference between the African-Americans they deal with at home and the Iraqis and Afghans they were dealing with overseas.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@elmo: @The Moar You Know:
I know eight. Granted I have the advantage of numbers with 25+ years of practice in and around criminal law. It’s still a tiny percentage.
No, I’m not overly competitive, why do you ask?
Kelvin
I always wondered where Vic Mackey ended up.
Tree With Water
Who recommended Zuley to the military? You can bet he was recruited.
sharl
@Tree With Water: At that time US political and military leaders were desperate to fill all the new positions – management and staff – that had opened up as part of the newly initiated “Great War on Terror”, and they weren’t too picky about who they selected. Experienced police officers were especially valued, and their hiring was easy to justify on a superficial level (and man, there was soooo much that was superficial in the GWoT back then).
Back then, Dick Cheney said something to the effect that, in light of the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, we weren’t gonna be nice, and a disturbingly high percentage of the country was fully on board with that. So even if Zuley’s dark past had been known back then, it is entirely possible that it would have been considered an asset rather than a liability.
Back in those early days of our Glorious Iraq Adventure I discovered a mil-blogger – a politically conservative Mormon, fwiw – who was an Army interrogator, and proud of his profession. He knew that you didn’t get true information from a prisoner without winning his trust, and that torture only made the prisoner say whatever he thought would make the torture stop, i.e., the prisoner would say whatever he thought the interrogator/torturer wanted to hear, truth or not. That professional interrogator was absolutely stunned and appalled when the events at Abu Ghraib came to light, and I’m sure he reacted to events at Guantánamo in the same way.
The folks elected to the White House, the staff they selected, and the military leadership they put in charge, all had an agenda and mode of operation that included rejection of any expert opinion that conflicted with their existing biases. In this particular situation, that included rejection of the expert opinions of interrogators who actually knew how to do that job. The rest, as they say, is history.
boatboy_srq
@kc: Does the backstory matter much if two gun nuts enter and one gun nut leaves? I’m running out of sympathy (or willingness to allow Extenuating Circumstances) when 2nd-Amendment shouters get a taste of their own medicine from one another.
boatboy_srq
@Southern Beale: Of course they don’t – they’re better shots than The Other Guy. Just ask anyone who wasn’t at VA Tech or the Wesley Chapel Cobb Cinema.
gratuitous
Our political elites are the luckiest sons-of-guns the planet has ever seen. Not one of them will be asked any substantive questions about our officially-sanctioned torture, and they will all be allowed to skate away with some nauseating platitude about “looking forward to the future.” At most, there will be an incantation about unspecified mistakes that were made, but no effort made to identify any specific mistake or affix any blame. Then it will be on to something important, like what a bunch of poopyheads the other party is, and what time does tonight’s cocktail party start.
But we’ll all be properly horrified by the barbarians somewhere else who are cutting off people’s heads or burning them alive. There may even be a brief moment of wondering why those barbarians are so barbaric, but that will be quickly subsumed by a litany of just how those barbaric barbarians need to be brought to suffering justice.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@sharl:
Given the history that’s coming out about this guy, he had exactly what they wanted: a proven track record of getting false confessions. They needed a series of “terrorist confessions” they could point to as their metric of success. Catching or stopping actual terrorists would be beside the point.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Also, too, remember that Chicago PD were the brilliant minds who browbeat two little boys into confessing that they’d raped and murdered a little girl, only for the coroner to discover that there was semen on the victim’s body, which boys of that age would be physically unable to leave. So all they managed to do was completely contaminate the memories of the only possible witnesses to the crime.
Chris
@sharl:
The point of torture wasn’t to extract information. The point of torture was to show the American people just how hardcore the President was being in terms of paying back those Filthy Stinking Hajjis for 9/11 (ditto the Iraq War), and to highlight the distinction between hardcore Republican Real Men who’re Taking The Fight To The Terrorists, and the milquetoast limp-wristed liberals who’re so effete and treasonous that they actually pause to wonder whether or not torturing the crap out of a terrorist is a bad thing.
sharl
@Mnemosyne (iPhone), @Chris:
Yep.
tavella
@kc:
Yeah, either it was a drug deal gone bad, or the mom or daughter was involved with the shooter. I’m inclined to think the first, since the the family is obviously lying to cover up wrongdoing of their own. I’m thinking mom feels she got ripped off on her meth buy, goes home to get her son and his guns to go rob the dealer back, dealer kid isn’t having any of that.