Innocents Tortured by Chicago PD at Secret Warehouse

Reuven Glezer, Staff Reporter

Early last week, the discovery of a domestic “black site” in Chicago’s Homan Square has cast a line of questioning and discovery towards the Chicago Police Department, who are accused of operating the site as an off-the-books interrogation center.

Brian Jacob Church, a parolee previously convicted on terrorism charges, was taken to the site by Chicago PD and interrogated for 17 hours in a military-style compound, believed he was now “disappeared,” but eventually released. Others weren’t so lucky – unconfirmed reports by The Guardian claims that one man did not leave Homan Square alive after what can only be assumed was his subjection to enhanced interrogation practices. Homan Square is not officially listed by Chicago PD as a location for booking suspects, and some names of suspects were changed on official reports from the police department to avoid any connection to Homan Square.

While former Chicago detectives claim that the facility had not been in operation until the 1990s, one cannot help but feel the echoes of other major torture sites run by American officials post-9/11. The oft-cited facility for American torture practices is, of course, Guantanamo Bay, but the discovery of the Homan Square “black site” rings similarly to the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2003.

Abu Ghraib was an active prison that the United States used during the initial invasion of Iraq to hold terror suspects, but it became the center of a major scandal when photographs of abuse led by US military members became public. Soon, wide reports of rape, murder, torture, and sodomy became clear as day with the Associated Press releasing a special report on human rights abuses within the prison. The photos of prisoners forced to masturbate while then-Specialist Lynndie England pointed and prisoners on leashes brought light to American paranoia and disturbing tactics in the War on Terror.

Homan Square is experiencing a similar outing. In a post-9/11 world, torture tactics coupled with police and/or military brutality have become a trending norm and “open secret.

The Chicago PD apparently fell into this norm, with reports coming out of them willfully detaining a 15-year old at the known torture site for questioning, as well as the detainees being proportionally people of color.

The Chicago PD has denied that the warehouse is a black site, claiming that it is a publicly-known site used by the department, without explaining what it was used for in the first place. For a department that has a long history of police abuse, keeping quiet about illegal practices in a mysterious warehouse seems fundamental.

“When we think about Abu Ghraib […] they’re one of the reasons that civil liberties activists were so nervous about the existence of these places,” says Mr. Curmi, the tenth grade Qualitative Research and former Social Justice teacher here at Millennium Brooklyn. “More so Guantanamo than Abu Ghraib was the potential for human rights abuses on the international scale but the potential for the abuses of American civil liberties. As an American citizen, thinking about our constitutional rights and our civil liberties, it is scary, and I think it should be scary to everyone that, regardless of the history of 9/11 and the threat of terrorism, that an American citizen can be abducted essentially and held indefinitely without trial, and subjected to all sorts of torture.”

As the building’s prominence has slowly grown over the course of the site’s exposure, there have been calls to close the black site, and for answers to be put forth about the people who have allegedly disappeared behind the warehouse’s walls. Federal response at this point has been minimal, resulting in some protesters of the site accusing President Obama of being silent in the face of the warehouse’s discovery, drawing connections between this incident and the federal government’s lack of palpable dialogue during the Ferguson protests. The pressure is currently on for someone, whether it is the federal government, the municipal authority, or Chicago PD, to shut down Homan Square’s homegrown torture facility. Some concessions have been made, with a local politician, Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin, being permitted to examine the facility on the 9th of March.

Regardless, the impact is already apparent. Twitter has already brought the hashtag #Gitmo2Chicago to life, drawing imagery of America’s infamous military prison, and bringing it closer to home than most would care to admit. Certainly Chicago PD and Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuelare in the latter position, claiming that the reporting on the black site isn’t true and that they “follow the rules.”