torture comes home

Pat Fitzgerald continues his reign of righteousness, this time taking down a cop who'd gone on a 20+ year torture tour through the CPD. FDL:

That's right, you read it correctly, torturing suspects while they were in custody. Twenty years of torturing suspects. The statute of limitations had run out on the physical assaults on the victims and the city of Chicago had not tried to rescind his pension. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had retired Chicago police commander Jon Burge arrested this Tuesday morning.

TAPPED notes that he got these ideas from his military career:

Wilson said Burge wired him up to a black box and turned a crank that generated an electric shock. This technique bore a striking resemblance to what American troops in Vietnam called "the Bell telephone hour"--shocking prisoners by means of a hand-cranked army field phone. In defending himself against Wilson's suit he said he'd never seen a black box, and though he'd served as a military policeman in the Mekong delta in 1968 and '69 had never heard of field phone interrogations. He bristled at the suggestion that Americans in Vietnam had conducted them.

Burge's peers from the Ninth Military Police Company, however, remember such torture in considerable detail.

See The Chicago Reader's story "Torture Tools" for the full deal.

And see also this interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy.

We're gonna have some big problem in the future, Freikorps-style.