The shootings brought to four the number of officers killed in the district in just a month, sending the police department on a frenzied manhunt that Jesse Jackson likened to a “military occupation.” Hordes of cops invaded apartments and swept innocent black men from streets. “It was a reign of terror,” the Chicago Reader quoted a detective as saying. “I don’t know what Kristallnacht was like, but this was probably close.” The gang unit’s “idea is you go out and pick up two thousand pounds of nigger and eventually you’ll get the right one.”15
The Wilson brothers escaped the dragnet, but like most crooks who get caught, they were not very smart. When Jackie made the mistake of asking an old acquaintance to paint his Impala and fix its grillwork, the repairman recognized the car from the police description and called the cops. Andrew was the first arrested, by Jon Burge personally.
As in many instances of coerced confessions, this one came from a mentally defective man who had an IQ of seventy-three and never learned to read, even later after years of effort in prison. Yet torture has a way of focusing memory, and Wilson’s account of police brutality remained mostly consistent, with only minor variations. As he told it, two other cops, not Burge, administered the initial abuse, which he resisted at first. He did not yield to the kicks and slaps and beatings, which left bruises and cuts on his right eyelid and elsewhere on his face. Nor did he give in to the plastic bag over his head or the cigarette burn on his arm. (Another victim described biting a hole in the bag so he could breathe.) When Burge entered, Wilson remembered, he told his officers that “if it had been him, he would not have messed up [Wilson’s] face.” Indeed.
Moved to a nearby room and shackled to the wall, Wilson refused Burge’s order to confess. Then came the “Vietnam treatment.” A grocery bag was brought in by two other officers, who took out a black box with a crank on the side and two wires ending in alligator clips. One was snapped onto his nostril, the other to his ear, which was left with telltale marks. A turn of the crank delivered a charge. Still no confession.
He was moved to yet another room, he recalled, and Burge took over, cranking electricity into his earlobes, then into his fingers as Wilson ground his teeth and screamed. “Burge then took out a device that looked like a curling iron,” reported a court-appointed special prosecutor. With his prisoner “on his knees stretched across the radiator … Burge began rubbing the device between Wilson’s legs, and Wilson could feel a tingling sensation. The shock from this device was stronger than from the crank device.” (Cattle prods were used on other prisoners.) If Wilson confessed, Burge assured him, all this would cease. Wilson finally agreed.
But torture is more complex than a cold method of extracting information; it boils with revenge and sadism. After Wilson admitted to the murders, two officers “continued to abuse him” as they transported him to the jail and then to the hospital. One cop smashed him in the back of the head with a gun, opening a gash that required stitches, the special prosecutor confirmed, and one or both told him to refuse medical treatment “if he knew what was good for him.”
Wilson moved to suppress his confession at trial, lost, and was sentenced to death. Thanks to the cops’ zealous carelessness in leaving cuts, bruises, and burns that were documented by two doctors and a nurse, however, his story had the traction of credibility. It led the Illinois Supreme Court to find coercion and send the case back for retrial, minus the confession. Enough other evidence existed to convince the new jurors of his guilt, but they couldn’t agree on execution, so he received a life sentence.
From behind bars, Wilson continued his quest to expose the torture. He filed a civil suit and persuaded a jury that a de facto police policy of abuse existed; the city paid $1 million in damages.16 It was a rare victory for a convict, especially a hardened cop killer, yet it never quelled his emotions, which overtook him until he died in prison in 2007. He could not discuss his torture without tears. “He still cried when he talked about it,” said his lawyer, John Stainthorp, “and it still made him furious that he cried. Obviously for Andrew it was important to be strong. One thing about torture is that it makes you weak, and it makes you know that you are weak.”17
Weakness and disintegration cannot reliably bring truth. When a man’s esteem collapses into hollow ruins, belief in a falsehood may gradually occupy the vacuum, as Arthur Koestler leads readers to witness in Darkness at Noon. His composite character Rubashov is yielding to manipulation by his interrogator, Gletkin: “He had believed that he had drunk the cup of humiliation to the dregs. Now he was to find that powerlessness had as many grades as power; that defeat could become as vertiginous as victory, and that its depths were bottomless. And, step by step, Gletkin forced him down the ladder.”18
That was in Moscow, in the 1930s. In Chicago, in the 1980s, Andrew Wilson proved himself stronger than he felt, and the American system of justice, haltingly, nourished his small seed of power until it overwhelmed even the police. His persistence led to other suits by other victims, which brought lesser settlements and, more important, a bounty of sworn affidavits and investigations by journalists and officials.
The resulting descriptions of the victims’ experiences in the police interrogation rooms added up to an unusually detailed picture of a torture system, exposed by prisoners’ complaints, relentless reporting by John Conroy of the Chicago Reader, a belated finding of torture by the police department’s Office of Professional Standards,19 and a four-year investigation by a special state’s attorney (prosecutor) appointed by the Cook County Circuit Court. The special prosecutor concluded in 2006 that the abuse of three suspects could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and that victims in “many other cases” were telling the truth. The three-year statute of limitations had run out, however, so no indictments could be brought against any officers for torture.
At least one civil suit provided a hook for charging one officer. In 2008, Jon Burge was indicted by a federal grand jury for committing perjury and obstruction of justice by denying under oath that he or officers under his command had ever used any of a long list of abusive methods, from “verbal coercion” to “physical beatings” to “electric shock.” The indictment asserted that he had, and Burge was arrested at his retirement home in Florida.20 He was convicted by a jury in 2010 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison—too little to satisfy some of his victims.
The plaintiff in the civil case, Madison Hobley, had been seen by two witnesses at a service station pumping a gallon of gasoline into a can an hour before his apartment burst into flames, killing his wife, his year-old son, and five other residents. The fire was ruled arson. In Area 2, he claimed, officers denied him a lawyer, handcuffed him to a wall, hit and kicked him, and covered his head with a plastic typewriter cover. He blacked out and, when he came to, was given a lie detector test, which he was told he’d failed. Hobley then confessed orally, according to an officer who had allegedly kicked him in the shins, but the confession was never written or recorded, and Hobley consistently denied admitting anything. He was found guilty nonetheless and sentenced to death, and his purported confession was confirmed by every court up the line. He finally gained a pardon as part of Governor George Ryan’s effort to cleanse death row of questionable convictions.
As in Wilson’s case, though, Hobley might have been found guilty even without his supposed confession, given the other evidence available. Besides being immoral and impractical, torture is sometimes superfluous.
So it was with another Chicago defendant, Phillip Adkins, whose confession was omitted from trial with no ill effects for the prosecution. He was convicted anyway of attempted murder and armed robbery for taking hostage and pistol-whipping an off-duty cop, who happened to be a customer at a gas station during a holdup. Arresting officers had driven him to an isolated area near railroad tracks, Adkins said, then hit him again and again in the stomach and groin with fists and a flashlight until he was weaving in and out of consciousness, lost control of his bowels, and defecated and urinated on h
imself. A cop bought a pair of khaki shorts, had him change clothes, and disposed of his soiled jeans and underpants. At the station house, he gave a confession—and a complaint about brutality—to an assistant state’s attorney. He was admitted to intensive care, and the hospital records showing trauma and possible kidney damage made his account credible to the special prosecutor two decades later. He was sentenced to eighteen years and paroled after eight.
In other instances, though, the coerced confession was the only thing that the detectives bothered to get, a substitute for solid investigation. Children were not immune. After a 1991 gang shooting, Marcus Wiggins, thirteen, was picked up, taken to a station-house interrogation room, and told to put his hands on the table, he testified. Electrodes from a box were attached to his hands. “My hands started burning, feeling like it was being burned,” he said. “I was—I was shaking and my—and my jaws got tight and my eyes felt they went blank.… I felt like I was spinning.… It felt like my jaws was like—they was—I can’t say the word. It felt like my jaws was sucking in.… I felt like I was going to die.”21 Charges were dropped, and the city settled his lawsuit for nearly $100,000.
Similarly, the Chicago police beat Alfonzo Pinex until he confessed to a gang-related murder, but they had little else as reliable evidence against him. Detectives had collected statements from other alleged participants in the crime, two of whom were ultimately convicted. When the policemen played the tapes for Pinex, though, he stonewalled, said they were lying, and asked for his lawyer. The cops replied with a fist in his right eye, he claimed, followed by punches in the ribs, a knee in the left eye, and so much beating that he defecated in his pants. In the midst of the maelstrom, he yelled that he’d say anything they demanded and finally signed a police report full of lies, including a fabrication that he’d been advised of his Miranda rights to silence and an attorney.
When his lawyer arrived, she found him crying and hysterical. He told her of the torture, she moved to suppress his confession, and the judge agreed on the grounds that he’d been denied his request for counsel, without ruling on the alleged beating. Then two key witnesses refused to testify, leaving the prosecution with no case and no choice but to drop the charge.
A remarkable sentence appears at the end of the statement signed jointly by Pinex, a detective, and an assistant state’s attorney: “Pinex said that he had been treated well by the police and that no threats or promises had been made in return for this statement.”22 It was the boilerplate shield against accusations of brutality, which gave police superiors, prosecutors, and judges an excuse to look the other way for most of two decades.
Like the CIA’s practice of torturing terrorism suspects, the police torture of criminal suspects was enabled by widespread complicity. Chicago officials may not have ordered the abuse, but neither did they bring it to a halt. The police superintendent, Richard Brzeczek, failed to pursue a reliable complaint about Wilson’s injuries from the doctor at the prison health services, merely forwarding the letter to his investigative office but never following up with his own men.23 He sent it also to Cook County’s chief prosecutor, the state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, who later became Chicago’s mayor, asking for guidance on how to investigate without jeopardizing Wilson’s prosecution. Daley never replied and never acted.24
“Despite the fact that Brzeczek believed that officers in the Violent Crimes unit of Detective Area 2 had tortured Andrew Wilson, he kept that belief to himself for over twenty years,” the special prosecutor concluded. “He also kept Burge in command at Area 2 and issued a letter of commendation to all of the detectives at Area 2.”25
What’s more, a number of Daley’s subordinates, assistant state’s attorneys, were told of the torture by victim after victim; many suspects testified that they had complained as prosecutors entered interrogation rooms to take confessions. The Cook County bench is now peppered with those former prosecutors and others who were involved. A lawyers’ petition in 2006 asking that civil suits be moved out of the county contained this count: Three judges were former Chicago police detectives, two of whom had worked with Burge. Three other judges had defended the city in lawsuits over police brutality. Sixteen judges had been assistant state’s attorneys involved in torture cases, either having taken confessions, prosecuted those who’d given them, or testified for officers at police board hearings.26
After Burge was finally fired, the police union tried to enter a float honoring him in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
HUMANE TORTURE BY THE CIA
The Chicago tortures were rationalized by community safety. The CIA tortures after September 11 were rationalized by national security. Invoking safety and security to justify torture is like injecting religion into warfare: the higher purpose excuses the lower impulse.
Despotic regimes play this mind game on their own soil as a method of control. Democracies can do it abroad while staying relatively civil at home, as the British demonstrated in Malaya, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. They imagine the international frontier as a wall sealing the homeland from the necessary roughness beyond.
That may be so in certain cases but something of an illusion in others, as the United States has recently discovered. In our latest misconception, we thought we could lock the toxic mixture of security and torture safely outside. We have now relearned the fact that borders are never airtight. The cry of national security has stirred fears and impaired liberty inside America’s boundaries beginning with the eighteenth century’s Alien and Sedition Acts, continuing through the early twentieth century’s Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Japanese internment during World War II, the secret surveillance of dissident citizens during the Cold War, and echoing into the current era shaped by 9/11.
Most torture carried out during the presidency of George W. Bush was not committed in the United States. We could argue about it from a safe distance as it occurred in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and invisible CIA prisons in unknown countries. It was a passionate moral issue, certainly, but not one that appeared to penetrate American justice, which seemed insulated from American misdeeds overseas. That has not proved entirely correct, for torture opened a way of thinking.
Under the Bush administration’s legal rationale, “Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, waterboarded, and all the rest—if the alleged national security justification was compelling,” wrote Philip Zelikow, a State Department lawyer who tried to stop it.27 If torture is acceptable in a military prison to prevent a terrorist attack, why not in a federal lockup to stop a presidential assassination, or in a county jail to head off a school shooting, a child’s kidnapping?
So far it cannot be done in a county jail, not constitutionally anyway. Yet brutal interrogations outside have tainted the American system inside.
After Obama came into office with a pledge to close Guantánamo and resolve the prisoners’ cases, his lawyers struggled to pull inmates from the netherworld of lawless confinement and abuse into some form of a fair, truth-finding process. Bush had originally designated them enemy combatants, unilaterally deciding that they could be left in Guantánamo indefinitely with no charges brought or allegations tested in trial. Had that policy held, the interrogation methods might have been legally irrelevant, aimed at gathering intelligence rather than building prosecutions. But those transferred to the criminal justice system would suddenly have rights, and torture would become an exasperating legal problem.
Evidence coerced cannot be introduced in trial, a simple protection under interpretations of the Fifth Amendment. In theory, that rendered inadmissible the confessions and much information extracted by the Bush administration, leaving Obama prosecutors with a mess of useless, unreliable dossiers. Judges don’t always see coercion where defendants do, making it far from certain that every piece of information pried from prisoners would be excluded. But since these were not prosecutions the government was willing to lose, only those based on evi
dence gathered properly, without abuse, could be safely tried in criminal court.
Even cases built on more than coerced confessions relied on supposedly “clean” evidence that had sometimes been uncovered by leads from witnesses who had talked under torture. There was a close call for prosecutors of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, tried in 2010 for conspiring to bomb the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Finding that Ghailani had been coerced into naming a man who had sold him the explosives, the judge ruled that even though the seller was willing to testify, he could not do so, since his identity was the product of abusive questioning. Without that evidence, the jury barely found grounds for guilt, and Ghailani was convicted on just one of more than two hundred counts. So the “enhanced interrogation” worked its way into the crevices of a prosecution and contaminated the otherwise admissible proof needed to convict. (He was sentenced to life nonetheless.)
Unwittingly, American officials had modeled their torture methods on Chinese techniques designed precisely to generate false confessions for propaganda purposes. The CIA, which had little interrogation experience, derived its program from the samples of torture used in SERE, the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course that trained U.S. military pilots, Special Forces troops, and others in what to expect if captured. The ranking Bush administration officials who approved the CIA approach reportedly did not know, and did not trouble themselves to learn, that the SERE methods were created to mimic the abuses encountered by American prisoners of the Chinese during the Korean War. Some GIs had succumbed, giving phony statements of guilt and remorse, produced not by “brainwashing,” according to government reports at the time, but by less sophisticated brutalities—forced standing, cold cells, sleep disruption, and food limitations—tactics adopted a half century later by the CIA. “The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” said a study in 1956.28
Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (Vintage) Page 4