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.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-torture-chicago-police-brutality
Many people have lamented the fact that our police have been militarized. But an equally dangerous trend has been occurring,
the tendency for the military to act like police.
Warriors abide by the code of
war; they may wound or kill their foe on the battlefield, but they still can
have respect for him as a fellow warrior. Police also have a code, but I doubt
they respect their foes. Who can have respect for a criminal, except perhaps
another criminal?
And when soldiers start treating their enemies as if they
were mere criminals, when they start having the same mindset as the police, the
abuses of the street become the abuses of the battlefield, and the cruelty of our
prisons becomes the cruelty of our stockades.
A major factor in all of this is America's refusal to treat our prisoners of war in the manner required by the Geneva Conventions. And the war on terror is not the first time this has happened. For a good description of what Eisenhower did to German POWs after WW2, read Other Losses by James Bacque.
We think we're "avengers", but we're just war criminals.
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