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May 28, 2010 in Opinion
Amy Goodman: War teaches cruel lessons
Abu Ghraib has nothing over Chicago.
Forty years ago, Jon Burge returned from Vietnam, joined the Chicago Police Department and allegedly began torturing people. He rose in the ranks to become a commander in Chicago’s South Side, called Area 2.
Electric shocks to the genitals, mock executions, suffocation with bags over the head, beatings and painful stress positions are among the torture techniques that Burge and police officers under his command are accused of using to extract confessions from mostly African-American men in Chicago. More than 110 men are known to have been victims of Burge and his associates. Victims often went to prison, some to death row.
Facing mounting evidence and increasing community outcry, Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. He now lives in Florida, collecting his pension.
This week, in a federal criminal trial beginning in Chicago, Burge faces charges, not for torture, but for lying about torture under oath in an earlier civil suit brought by one of his victims (since the statute of limitations on torture, remarkably, has expired). He faces up to 45 years in prison. Burge’s co-conspirators remain uncharged.
Also untouched in the trial is the role played by the current mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, who as state’s attorney for Cook County from 1980 to 1989, and as mayor since then, has consistently fought investigations or prosecutions of the alleged torturers.
Darrell Cannon is one of the men alleging torture against Burge and his associates. He says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than 20 years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. It took him three more years to gain release from prison.
At 6 a.m. on Nov. 2, 1983, Chicago cops under Burge’s command arrested Cannon and drove him to an isolated industrial area on the Chicago waterfront. He related his ordeal to me:
“They did a mock hanging, where I’m cuffed behind my back and one of the detectives would get on the bumper of the detective car, the other two detectives would lift me up to him, and he would grab my handcuffs from behind. They would let me go. That will cause my arms to go up backwards, almost wrenching the inside of my shoulders. … Then they switched to a second torture treatment, where they got their shotgun. … One of them said, ‘Go ahead, blow that nigger’s head off.’ And that’s when (Detective) Peter Dignan forced the shotgun in my mouth. … They did a mock execution three times.”
Cannon refused to confess. He went on: “They then put me in the backseat of a detective car. … They pulled my pants and my shorts down … took an electric cattle prod, turned it on and proceeded to shock me on my testicles.”
Cannon finally made a false and coerced statement, implicating himself as an accomplice to murder, to make the torture stop. He spent 24 years in prison. His attorney, Flint Taylor, is with the People’s Law Office, which has been representing scores of Burge’s torture victims. Taylor pointed out the controversial role of Mayor Daley. “Darrell Cannon here, my client, was tortured in 1983. If Daley had moved in 1982 with the evidence he had to remove Burge from the police force and prosecute him for torture, we would not have Darrell Cannon spending 20, 25 years behind bars and not having him tortured by electric shock. So, the real crime here started many years ago with the cover-up, a cover-up that was engineered by the mayor himself.”
In January 2003, before leaving office, then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, commuted the death sentences of all 156 people on Illinois’ death row, after the innocence of 13 other death-row inmates had been proved. Ryan pardoned four on death row who were known to be victims of Burge’s torture.
Where did it all begin? One thing is clear: In 1968-’69, Burge was an MP at the U.S. Army’s Dong Tam camp in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where captured suspected Viet Cong soldiers were allegedly interrogated with electric, hand-cranked field telephones supplying shocks. Torture techniques similar to this were rampant under Burge’s command in Chicago.
Given ongoing reports of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have to wonder how many Jon Burges are being bred in President Barack Obama’s two wars.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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johnclarke on May 28 at 7:24 a.m.
“Given ongoing reports of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have to wonder how many Jon Burges are being bred in President Barack Obama’s two wars”
One thing IS clear Amy, you are making some giant leaps with your “journalism”. Can you provide any evidence that Burge was directly involved with torture while in the Army? If I am to understand your point, essentially the military is a torture school, and servicemen and women are going to return from “Obama’s two wars” and start torturing innocent people. Do I have that straight? Nice work, you should be proud. Spokesman, where on earth do you find these idiots ?
WillyPeter on May 28 at 8:55 a.m.
You just don’t understand, John. It’s all us disturbed, potential terrorist inclined combat vets - that’s what the Homeland Security loser of a secretary said - who pose profound threats to America’s peace and tranquility. After all, we are daily told this by self- aggrandizing, all-knowing, lefty journalists. Sheeesh.
I am somewhat surprised that Amy kinda implicated the Democrat’s Daley clan. And even more so that she gave pluses to Republican Ryan.
Oooops, ‘scuse me now. As an ol’ infantryman I’m having one of those Viet Nam reveries of all the fun we had in the mud, the jungle, and ‘specially gettin’ shot at…in combat.
SugarShane on May 28 at 9:11 a.m.
Agree with johnclarke, there was an awesome study by Zimbardo conducted with college students where one group was the “guards” and one group were “prisoners” that was supposed to last one month and had to be called off after one week because the guards were brutalizing the prisoners so badly. People are the products of their environments, they arent conditioned or bred to be jerks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
from wiki
mikeln on May 28 at 9:54 a.m.
War is failure, paid for with the blood of our sons and daughters. No one wins a war, we only replace one ideaology with another, good or bad. We will never live in a civilized world as long as we keep blowing it up with million dollor bombs. War changes the very soul of people and really changes the soul of the people who have smelled the guts and gunpowder in combat. Any war fought in the name of someones god is just a war for profit and power. Unless mankind stops this insanity we will go the way of the dinosour. We need to use our resourses to better mankind, not blow it up. I served my country as a marine and have no regrets for my service and believe it gave me the ability to see war for what it really is, total insanity.
johnclarke on May 28 at 11:16 a.m.
Willy Pete, thanks for your service.
Since Amy isn’t letting the any facts interfere with her writing - which I see as revisionist at best….I mean really - one week we are reading Krauthammer telling us we should be torturing, in spite of the hard evidence it does not work - and the next we are reading this bimbo trying to pin torture on “Obama’s war” ? What the hell, over?
For anyone interested in the facts behind our country’s dark slide into this subject matter - unfortunately the story starts right here in the Inland Northwest. Please keep in mind folks, these two guys were not SERE instructors, just wanna-be types that convinced the Bush administration they knew something. They didn’t.
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/breaking/story.asp?ID=18203