One of the many arguments made by critics of America’s post-9/11 security tendencies (drone strikes, mass surveillance, the militarization of police, the short-circuiting of justice standards like due process) is that the tools and habits we develop for use against foreign targets will eventually come home. Once we figure out how to do it to them, we’ll do it—or some version of it—to us.
Broad surveillance was only for foreign agents who wished America harm until it wasn’t. (The secret court that rubber-stamps NSA surveillance “warrants” at home is called the FISC—Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.) Fatal drone strikes were only for non-US citizens until they weren’t. And now, according to the Guardian, the use of “black sites,” where suspects are spirited away, secretly held for long periods of time, interrogated without access to attorneys, and perhaps beaten, has come to the Chicago Police Department.
In the article, political protesters and defense attorneys talk about people who’ve been “disappeared” to Homan Square, a warehouse on Chicago’s west side, where they live in legal limbo without being booked, effectively taking them off the grid. Some emerge with head wounds. From the article:
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.
…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.
In case you’re wondering, the Cook County medical examiner said the fatality was the result of a heroin overdose—still, one would expect someone undergoing a medical emergency while in custody (and one that can easily be reversed with anti-overdose drugs that are widely available to the public) to get a little attention.
The Chicago PD denied these allegations with a brief statement, but attorneys and reporters who’ve tried to visit Homan Square have experienced the we’re-special-and-normal-rules-don’t-apply-here attitude firsthand. In one account, a lawyer tried to get in to see a 15-year-old. When they denied her entry, she hung around:
An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.
The article says Homan Square has been used in one way or another since the late 1990s (it also contains evidence lockers) and it’s obviously on a very different scale from the US’s extraordinary rendition programs abroad—but it carries their echo and makes one wonder what else the War on Terror has in store for us at home.
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