A Secret “Black Site” Revealed In Chicago: “When You Go In, You Just Disappear”

Tyler Durden's picture

Located in a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side is where, according to the Guardian, one can find the domestic equivalent of a CIA “black site” – an illegal, off-the-books interrogation compound used by Chicago special police units, one which renders “Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside”; a place whose former occupants say is where you end up when you are “disappeared”; a place which confirms that when it comes to the eternal “who is better – us or them” debate, there really is no difference: “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.” It’s a Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib rolled into one. In short: it is a place where the US constitution and basic human rights have absolutely no access.

And it may be located in a building just down your street.

 

According to an exclusive piece by the Guardian that is sure to send not only shivers down the spine of those who are still paying attention, but ripples across the “land of the free”, not least because if there is one dark site on US soil, there are countless more – places where every single constitutional right of US citizens is trampled on – the secretive warehouse known as Homan Square is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. However, there is one huge difference: while those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

 

Every former communist block country had them: hidden, dark places where the secret police could have their way with you, and even kill you if it so desired, and nobody would have any clue or recourse of action; something for which the “evil empire” was mocked by the “free western world.” As it turns out, the “evil empire” can now be found in at least one of the most populated American cities:

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

What exactly takes place at Homan square? Well, if it prohibited by the constitution, changes are you can find it in this red-bricked warehouse in west Chicago. Among the alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

  • Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
  • Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
  • Shackling for prolonged periods.
  • Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
  • Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
  • At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

The place had been largely shrouded in secrecy until the Guardian managed to find some people who were willing to talk:

It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

 

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution. “This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

Actually, based on the revelations about how the open and democratic US state deals with opposing voices, the practice continues to this date and at a level that would make George Orwell blush. it is, however, hidden for the most part, and usually takes place in the shadows, although increasingly those among the population who are not too stoned, too transfixed by their iApps and sitcoms, or too depressed to care, are starting to notice. That is not to say that the superstate won’t deny it is, at times, the moral and ethical equivalent of the basest of middle-eastern “barbarians” it is waging an ideological war against (if only on behalf of the military-industrial complex).

Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.

 

“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.

And yet, when a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name. A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.

So it’s a “new thing” – but don’t worry, it’s all about being “patriotic.” Like the NSA, or the Department of Homeland Security. Because one never knows just which US mall the next “terrorist” will blow up.

Which is probably why in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.

They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”

And while the ubiquitous “terrorism” excuse for any and every extra-constitutional action could apply here as well, the reality is that Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.

Guantanamo In West Chicago

While America was distracted, focusing its attention on the water cooler scandal of the day, America raised at least one and likely countless more “Guantanamo centers”, places where the detained have absolutely no human rights. Only it wasn’t in Cuba: it was among America’s own suburbia.

On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.

 

“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”

Stalin, or any other banana republic dictator would be proud.

Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods. “I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.

 

Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.

 

Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”

And as if by seamless transition, all of the above ties in to another very critical topic in recent years – the SWATiziation of America’s police forces:

Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.

Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said. “They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”

Too late: they already have. And they are everywhere

… just waiting for the right moment to spring on the “land of the free” and show everyone just how quickly the myth of freedom can be crushed under the reinforced wheels of 432 (and now many more) Police-controlled MRAPs now spread evenly across the bastion of democracy and human rights and personal liberties.

9
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
TC
TC

When I saw the headline I thought for sure it was about Obma’s colon. How many innocent gay men have to die to protect his “secret?”

Stucky

Maybe it’s true, maybe not. British rags are worse than Amurikan liars. Not a place I would go to find truth.

Besides, why do the copfuks need a secret hideout? They get away with beatings and murder … even when they are caught on film.

Like this story from yesterday.

78 year old woman brings cookies and cupcakes to her grandkids school ….. copfuk won’t let her in, says there is a restraining order against her (there was NOT!!) ….. grandma leaves …. goe to car to call her son ….. copfuk comes out to car …… bullies her … she tries to explain … he pepper sprays her twice, drags her out of the car, across the lawn, and beats her ………. she winds up in the hospital with a $180,000 bill.

If you or I did that, we’d be in prison for years … but, we don’t wear a blue uniform.

This copfuk needs to go to jail for what he did … and the good inmates need to kill him …. beat him to death, and make it hurt first. This is called “justice”.

Story here –> http://thefreethoughtproject.com/78-year-old-brutally-attacked-police-delivering-cupcakes-grandchildren/

Video;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0tSTo6AC-s8

Thinker

Yeah, that sounds like how the CPD operates. Doesn’t surprise me one bit.

Simon Jester
Simon Jester

Most cops are bullies who rely on intimidation and residual respect for authority to maintain control of the masses. Being able to intimidate and beat helpless citizens is a whole world of difference from fighting determined and motivated patriots. All that military equipment they are being handed will come in handy when the 2nd American Revolution begins; I for one would love to have a pair of NVGs and surplus military body armkr with level 4 plates…

Overthecliff
Overthecliff

Stuckey is right. Read this with a healthy dose of skepticism. If it were true you, you wouldn’t know where it was or even hear about it.

Rise Up
Rise Up

That facility is connected to one of the many D.U.M.B.s (Deep Underground Military Base). They take people down there to feed to the Reptilians.

/tinfoil hat off

IraK
IraK

Ordinary poeple don’t need to worry.
America’s Cheka (the FBI and CIA) would never use America’s Lubyanka Prison (Chicago’s black site) against decent and loyal citizens.
As long as you pay your taxes, go about your business, and don’t speak out, you’ll have nothing to fear from the State.
Others – and some of you TBP unpatriotic contributors and commentators – may be just months away from being mothballed, so be careful.

Hagar
Hagar

Reminds me of Plaquemines Parish, just south of New Orleans along the river. From the early 1900’s the parish was ruled by the Perez clan with an iron hand. One of our mechanics disappeared for over 6 months for a traffic violation…he was also dating a Perez girl. Up until about 1980 one had to have a work permit to work in the parish…usually paid for by the company. One of the offspring was made an Admiral, USNR, so that the Naval Base at Belle Chase could remain open. Wasn’t all bad, very little crime, however, if you found yourself at odds with the locals you would disappear. Usually, the Sailors and Marines got a pass for minor infractions, but the Air Force didn’t. Once when I was Officer of the Day, I had a passel of drunken sailors and Marines delivered to my custody. That was OK until the guys told me that they were still holding some Airmen in jail. The Sargent at Arms knew what to do and was able to bail them out…don’t know where the slush funds came from nor do I know how much, but he had a stash of funds just for this reason. Of course the rowdies got Article 15 punishments, and I assume reimbursed the slush fund. Eventually, about 15 years after the death of the patriarch, Leander Perez, the clan’s hold on the parish waned and political opponents began winning local elections.

As for Chicago, I wouldn’t have expected anything less.

gilberts
gilberts

While this is disgusting, if it’s true (hat tip to Stuckey’s comment), I feel compelled to point out the one glaring detail they breezed past at the end. Terrorist, or not, he was allegedly caught with some kind of “incendiary device” during the riot/protest. It’s one thing to be out expressing yourself, but I’m curious what this guy looked like when he was facing off with the cops. I suspect he wasn’t as quiet and straight laced then.

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading