Coming to America: How torture ended up being used in a Chicago black site

In 1929, President Herbert Hoover named a commission to study crime, headed by George Wickersham. The ensuing report mainly focused its attention on alcohol prohibition, which was fueling a massive growth in organized crime. But the commission also found much wanting in American police departments. One section of the report, on police malpractice, became a landmark in the history of American policing.

In those days, torture was common in American police departments, commonly referred to as giving suspects the "third degree." The Wickersham report detailed how brutal interrogations were not just a violation of constitutional rights, but part of general incompetence that let many criminals escape punishment.

It led to a massive overhaul of policing across the nation, as the scholar Darius Rejali documented in his book Torture and Democracy. Following a series of Supreme Court cases, some of which cited the Wickersham report, courts began tossing out convictions obtained through torture. Reforms were implemented that gradually expunged torture from most American policing.

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That work is right now being undone. American police are re-embracing torture in just the way that experts like Rejali said we would. Torture has a long history in American police departments, and if vigilance is not maintained, it will crop up again and again. The Obama administration's cowardly unwillingness to pursue any accountability at all for CIA torturers during the Bush era has all but ensured that fact.

Though most routine police torture was gone by the 1950s or so, there were some important exceptions. In Chicago, for example, torture has likely never been fully expelled from the police department. The infamous torturer Jon Burge, recently released from prison, was part of a systematic torture ring in the city's Area 2. Fired from the police force in 1993, he was later convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for perjury.

More recently, Guardian reporter Spencer Ackerman published a series of amazing stories about another Chicago detective named Richard Zuley, who allegedly tortured people before Sept. 11, leading to several false convictions. Later, Zuley was part of the torture team at Guantanamo Bay.

However, Burge himself probably learned his torture techniques during his time in the Vietnam War. As Rejali argues, Burge's preferred method, electroshock torture using a magneto, was common during that war, when it was done with the magneto from a hand-cranked field telephone.

The point isn't quite that overseas torture has come back to haunt us. Rather it shows how the borders between all the various domestic and overseas security services are highly permeable. Torture techniques are passed in both directions, and can persist for decades even in the face of determined efforts to stamp them out.

Torture will always be a temptation among the most reactionary police and spooks, like the ones who unironically cite the Col. Jessup speech justifying murder from A Few Good Men. They portray themselves as the macho tough guys willing to do the dirty work to fight crime, in spite of any sissy liberal laws. That is, in fact, the position of virtually the whole Republican Party.

So if there aren't very strong norms and institutions in place to investigate and halt torture, and if the laws against it aren't even enforced, then wannabe fascists in police departments everywhere will choose the rubber hose over the microscope and the notebook.

That brings me to another Ackerman scoop from last week. He revealed that Chicago police have been running an off-the-books interrogation center at Homan Square, where detainees could be tortured without being booked or processed. It strongly smacks of the infamous CIA black sites that once proliferated around the globe, but the torture is classically American. At The Intercept, one former detainee described what it was like when he was held there in 2006:

A hot, stifling room, endless questioning, and sleep deprivation are a set of techniques Rejali calls "sweating." Before the Wickersham report, it was the most common form of American torture. It very well may be again.