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.