Chicago ‘Black Sites’ Expose More on How the City Tortures Its Residents

By Jamilah King Feb 25, 2015

First there was Spencer Ackerman’s bombshell report in the Guardian connecting the dots between a longtime Chicago police officer’s torturous reign against that city’s black residents and the subsequent abuse experienced by U.S. detainees at Guantánamo. Now, there’s more: news that the Chicago police department has long maintained an off-the-books compound called Homan Square used to torture city residents, one that’s being called the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, which has allegedly been run for 40 years, held people as young as 15 years old.

From the Guardian:

"Homan Square is definitely an unusual place," Church told the Guardian on Friday. "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."

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. 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.

Read more at the Guardian.