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CHICAGO TO GUANTÁNAMO: EXPERIMENTS IN AN ECOSYSTEM OF VIOLENCE
by Maira Khwaja, with contributed research from Marie Mendoza
In May 2021, Abdul Rabbani was released from Guantánamo Bay after nine- teen years in US captivity. His brother, Ahmed Rabbani, remains inside. In 2002, the Rabbani brothers were taken from their homes in Karachi, Pakistan, by Pakistani authorities on behalf of the US military, based on a false tip that Ahmed was actually a wanted terrorist named Hassan Ghul. The police tor- tured the brothers and then gave them to the US military to be further interro- gated at a CIA black site in Kabul. Ahmed was a thirty-three-year-old taxi driver with a minor criminal history; he had dropped out of school at age fifteen. Ghul was separately captured, released, and later killed in a 2012 drone strike. Ahmed, who never faced a trial, now weighs seventy-nine pounds, down from his peak of 170, following a 3,000-day hunger strike. He says that 52% of his body has escaped Guantánamo.
Andrew and Jackie Wilson, two of the earliest known survivors of tor- ture at the hands of Chicago Police Department (CPD) Officer Jon Burge, shared a similar fate as the Rabbanis. They were arrested in 1982 on a tip, coerced through torturing a suspect, that they had killed CPD officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. They were tortured into confession: both brothers were connected to a hand-cranked generator and given electric shocks. Their legal fights lasted decades. Andrew ultimately died in prison in 2007. Jackie was released in 2018 and granted a certificate of innocence in December 2020.
The Wilsons and the Rabbanis, with their shared histories—one brother eventually freed and the other denied justice—were both victims of US imperialism’s modes of policing. In an attempt to prove the government’s power and control after a high-profile crime—with the Wilsons, the murder of police officers; with the Rabbanis, 9/11—state actors used torture to make an enemy out of vulnerable Black and brown men, abroad and at home. With this shared logic and pattern, the line between the US military abroad and domestic police departments is increasingly blurred. Indeed, military service has been a stepping stone, and often a revolving door, to CPD. This relationship was made plain in Chicago in the aftermath of the Vietnam War—which shaped the logic of Burge and his henchmen—and in the generations that followed, within CPD and the Global War on Terror.
In 1968 Burge volunteered for duty in the Vietnam War, where he provided security for convoys and basecamps as a military police officer and served a tour as a provost marshal investigator. He had previously worked as a military police officer in South Korea, and he was assigned to the 9th Military Police Company of the 9th Infantry division when he rejoined the military.
In 1970 Burge joined CPD, where he rose in power to become commander of Area 2. At least seventeen of his associates were also veterans of the US military, most from the Vietnam War.
Over the next two decades, Burge and his affiliates tortured over 125 Black people. Aided and abetted by prosecutors, city officials, and CPD, these officers routinely framed innocent Black men for crimes they had not committed. Often these crimes were high-profile, with an expectation and demand on police to catch the person responsible. Police arrested or kidnapped Black men and boys as young as thirteen years old and forced them to confess to the crimes by using methods like beating, suffocation, sticking a gun in their mouth and cocking it, handcuffing them and burning their bodies against radiators, and shocking their genitals with cattle prods. Infamously, Burge and his associates used a military field telephone with a hand crank as a “black box” of torture, repurposing the wires to electroshock people with nearly one hundred volts of electricity.
The images of Andrew Wilson’s wounds and survivors’ testimonies of torture are reminiscent of another torture history: the images that leaked from Abu Ghraib Prison in 2004. They shocked Americans who witnessed them— How could the smiling US soldiers imagine committing acts so horrific?—and provoked the public to question the George W. Bush administration and US military for allowing the torture. The images portrayed naked Iraqi men with bags on their heads, being forced into sexually degrading positions or acts, handcuffed to walls and threatened with dogs, or preparing for electroshock. Military officers stood nearby, smiling and posing for the photographs taken by a fellow service member. Like those images of the US prison guards torturing Iraqi men, the evidence of torture in Chicago was exceptionalized in the public consciousness: this moment of shameful history is considered uniquely horrible; these officers who tortured innocent people are solely responsible and are no longer in power; this is in the past.
Of course, the Abu Ghraib images did not bring the Iraq War to a halt, just as the revelations of the torture scandal in Chicago—which have since implicated at least seventy-six officers in Area 2 and Area 3, judges, the mayor, and everyone in the state’s attorney’s office under Richard M. Daley—did not pause the city’s practices of policing and incarceration.
Today the city continues to give deference and honor to police officers accused of using unlawful force. From 1988 to 2018, only 3% of 57,570 allegations of use of force led to discipline. In only sixty-four cases did the allegations lead to firing by the Chicago Police Board. In one hundred cases, the officer resigned, keeping their pension. The Citizens Police Data Project at the Invisible Institute also shows that CPD officers are often given departmental awards for valor after filing a use-of-force report. *
Nearly four decades of organizing to free torture survivors, led by the mothers of incarcerated torture survivors, forced the Chicago City Council to pass reparations legislation in 2015. The $5.5 million reparations package paid about fifty-seven torture survivors compensation, funded the Chicago Torture Justice Center for survivor support services, required the teaching of the torture history in Chicago Public Schools, and promised to fund a permanent memorial.
“We still deal with too many public officials who do not want to deal with these egregious human rights violations,” said Mogul, who has represented twelve torture survivors during twenty-five years at the People’s Law Office. As a cofounder of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Mogul says the City of Chicago is reluctant to support a permanent acknowledgement of the concept of reparations. Mogul explained: “[Reparations] requires holistic redress and public acknowledgment. There may be refusal to provide reparations in the Burge cases, because it then requires people to provide reparations for the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the genocide of indigenous people.”
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The Chicago Police Board fired Burge in 1993 after finding that he had abused Andrew Wilson. The other officers involved, John Yucaitis and Patrick O’Hara, were suspended for fifteen months. Though Burge was sentenced to federal prison in 2011 for four and a half years for perjury and obstruction of justice, his affiliates have escaped accountability. Officers associated with Burge went on with their careers and retired from CPD to enjoy pensions and other positions of power in the government (see chart 2, p. 53).
One of Burge’s contemporaries, Richard Zuley, also joined CPD in 1970. Zuley, who is most infamous for his direct link to torture at Guantánamo, took a leave of absence from CPD from 1982 to 1987 to work in counterterrorism for the US Navy. It is unclear what his counterterrorism work included, where he was deployed, or how it may have influenced his behavior in Chicago. When Zuley returned to Chicago, he worked on the North Side, like Burge (who was in Unit 630, Area 3, within what is now called Detective Area North), in Unit 606, Central Investigations. Although it is not in official records that they ever worked together, Zuley and Burge shared colleagues (see chart 1, p. 52).
Zuley was seen as an expert during his twenty-five-year career as a detective, investigating high-profile crimes like the murder of seven-year-old Dantrell Davis. Over that same career, he tortured at least five people in Chicago. In Area 3, he tortured Lee Harris, who was once his close informant, in 1989, and Benita Johnson in 1995. He handcuffed her to a wall for over twenty-four hours and threatened her family.
Zuley’s recurring interrogation technique of threatening a suspect’s family became well known after his time as a senior interrogator at Guantánamo from 2002 to 2004. As described in Spencer Ackerman’s reporting for The Guardian, Zuley tortured Mohamedou Ould Slahi into a confession, using prolonged shackling, family threats, mock executions, extreme temperatures, and sleep deprivation. Zuley befriended Slahi before the interrogation and then used what he learned to threaten Slahi’s mother with arrest if he did not confess.
Back in Chicago, Zuley was assigned in 2003 to Burge’s old position, commander of Unit 630 in Area 3 (within Detective Area North). After his time in Guantánamo and retirement from CPD in 2007, Zuley worked as the senior emergency management coordinator for the Cook County Department of Health. Later he worked for the Chicago Department of Aviation as a projects administrator and interim emergency management director until 2017. At the time of this publication, he collects his pension and lives in Florida.
Like Zuley, younger officers named in torture cases—for example, Kenneth Boudreau, who is named in Burge-affiliated and Zuley-affiliated cases—have drifted in and out of security work, training and consulting in private military-esque firms following their retirement. These officers have not admitted culpability, even decades later. Boudreau is named in at least forty-six torture claims, thirteen of them alongside the now-deceased Michael Kill (between the two of them, seventy-two people have accused them of using torture, including twenty who have been exonerated).
As recently as August 2021, one of Boudreau and Kill’s youngest victims of torture and coerced confession, Johnny Plummer, won an appeal of his murder case to the Illinois Appellate Court, after thirty years in prison. Plummer testified that in 1991, when he was fifteen, Boudreau and Kill tortured him into confession at Area 3 police headquarters by hitting him with a flashlight, punching him in the face, handcuffing him to a radiator and ring on the wall, and interrogating him for thirty-nine hours. When granting the appeal, the court cited the detectives’ pattern and practice of abuse. And still, Boudreau shared in a 2018 podcast interview with the vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police that he believes that the ongoing civil suits for torture claims and exoneration are “not just garbage. It’s a travesty of justice, what they’re doing to the system. . . . I have a problem with exoneration. . . . Alright, some evidence came up or there’s a change in the court, there’s a change in the case law. So is he factually innocent? By a court? There’s factual innocence then there’s actual innocence. And there’s nobody here that’s [had] actual innocence.”
Today Boudreau is CEO at Embassy Security Group. According to his Facebook page, he is also involved with DAVAD Civilian Defense, a private civilian firearms training company in Chicago. Before retiring from CPD in 2014, his last position was as the commanding officer in the Gang School Safety Team, which collaborates with Chicago Public Schools, and as a leader in creating the team’s social media surveillance unit.
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It is important to recognize that connection to Burge is not the root or determining factor as to which CPD officers act with impunity. Burge’s legacy for other officers lies not in direct training on the use of torture or interrogation, but in setting the precedent for what tactics CPD considers defensible.
Other teams of more recent CPD officers—like the five officers who comprised the Skullcap Crew in former high-rise public housing, or the officers who were involved in Sergeant Ronald Watts’s criminal drug enterprise within public housing—have abused their power by torturing suspects and coercing confessions. These officers, who never worked with Burge, participated in a similar reign of terror. Watts’s legacy of false arrests and extortion in Ida B. Wells public housing was detailed in Jamie Kalven’s investigation “Code of Silence” in 2016. Since then, 169 cases tied to Watts and his crew have been overturned. Watts and Officer Kallatt Mohammed were sentenced to prison for twenty-two and eighteen months, respectively, in 2013 after being caught by the FBI admitting they routinely extorted money from drug dealers. No other officers have faced consequences. At the time of publication, dozens more people await their exoneration.
The Skullcap Crew—composed of Edwin Utreras, Robert Stegmiller, Christ Savickas, Andrew Schoeff, and Joe Seinitz—joined CPD in the late 1990s and was a widely feared team of officers within the Public Housing South Unit. Former residents of now-demolished Stateway Gardens have described locking their doors when the crew approached. In 2003, for example, they invaded Diane Bond’s home in Stateway Gardens twice without a warrant, destroyed her altar and belongings, sexually violated her by making her search her vagina for drugs, punched her in the face, and threatened her and her son. Bond filed official police complaints that resulted in no discipline. Her lawsuit against the officers, Bond v. Utreras (2005), ended in a settlement. Bond last visited me and my colleagues in 2018 and shared that she still sleeps with a bar across her door.
Though the Skullcap Crew has been named in more than twenty federal lawsuits, all members are still part of CPD, except for Seinitz, who retired in 2007 and went on to advise the Department of Defense throughout the remainder of the Iraq War. He proudly discloses on his LinkedIn page that he led the “CLEAT anti terrorism unit,” posting photographs of his SWAT team, which combined Iraqi and American forces to run nighttime “capture kill missions to restore peace” in Al-Anbar, Iraq. Since 2016 Seinitz has described his role at the Department of Defense as “classified.”
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Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba are considered black sites of torture in American public memory of the Global War on Terror. As the Global War on Terror has expanded and evolved beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, the first two sites have closed; Guantánamo remains open—twenty years after its opening as an extralegal detention prison—with thirty-nine men still imprisoned. Until recently, public discourse on American policing has held these histories and ongoing war abroad at a mental and social distance. However, the summer of protests in 2020 following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor made the militarized domestic landscape more palpable, as police departments around the country simultaneously deployed military tanks and tear gas, and the National Guard that had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan was called in to support urban police departments with checkpoints and traffic control.
Police departments began inheriting surplus military equipment in 1990, after the National Defense Authorization Act passed, allowing for the transfer of excess Department of Defense property to law enforcement agencies around the country in an effort to bolster the war on drugs. The 1033 program of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), for example, sends disposed or obsolete military property to over 8,200 law enforcement agencies around the United States. In 2016 the DLA infamously distributed and then recalled prohibited equipment, including tracked armored vehicles, Vietnam-era grenade launchers, and bayonets.
Common discourse refers to this phenomenon as the militarization of police. However, Khury Petersen-Smith, the Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, asserts that this militarization and use of torture is consistent with American histories of violence. Beyond equipment enhancement, it is clear that Chicago did not become more militarized as a direct result of the Global War on Terror. Instead, Chicago helped shape the Global War on Terror, while continuing to embrace the military’s investments in technologies of violence. Chicago is an active participant in testing and pushing the violent limits of the law, feeding and celebrating military work and tactics, and rewarding police with career success for using force.
In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry defined torture as “a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation.” While the United Nations defines torture as the inflicted suffering on someone for the purpose of obtaining information, or as punishment for a suspected crime, Scarry made a delicate but critical distinction: “The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.”1 The interrogation is framed as the motive, but ultimately the content of what is coerced is much less important than the act of confession, or the act of ultimately sharing any information. The interrogation itself is part of the act of torture and is predicated on fragile power, not an actual need for the information.
This assertion of insecure power is evident in the police and military’s parallel torture techniques, described in the testimonies of survivors. Willie Porch, for example, testified in Andrew Wilson’s second civil trial in 1989 that Burge and his associates tortured him by standing on his testicles, hitting him in the head with a gun, and attempting to hang him by his handcuffs to a hook on the door. The latter is reminiscent of strappado, a military torture method in which a person is hung at their wrists from a post on the ceiling, causing immense pain and eventual shoulder dislocation. The testimonies of survivors of torture held at Guantánamo—along with infamous photographs and cases like the death of Manadel al-Jamadi, who was killed during interrogation at Abu Ghraib in 2003—describe being handcuffed in this position during interrogations. Al-Jamadi, for example, died while handcuffed to bars on a high window, his hands pulled behind his back until he was nearly hanging.
Scarry, in The Body in Pain, found commonalities in torture from the histories of Greece, the Phillippines, Israel, Vietnam, and Korea. Like the similarities we see between CPD and Global War on Terror torture stories, Scarry explained: “The world is reduced to a single room or set of rooms. . . . It is itself literally converted into another weapon, into an agent of pain. . . . So too the contents of the room, its furnishings, are converted into weapons.”
These publicized moments in our modern histories of torture by state actors are not uniquely horrible. Horrible, yes, but not unique. When the state declares there must be an enemy to punish for a crime, while valorizing the militant and dehumanizing the poor and racialized “other,” then abuse with impunity should be expected. What is unique in these moments of torture history, with CPD officers and US military personnel at Guantánamo, is that there was enough attention paid by enough people to make these testimonies impossible to forget.
The people who committed these acts of torture were not born uniquely evil, one can hope, nor were they the originators of the torture mechanisms. Rather, they were active and rewarded participants in an ecosystem of violence. These state actors of CPD and US military learned this violence from the system they take pride in, from the sharing of knowledge and techniques between sites of violence. They then received promotions and contracts to promote their knowledge. Chicago figures prominently as a site in this ecosystem of violence—just as Abu Ghraib did, just as Vietnam did, just as Guantánamo continues to do today.
In an interview for this essay about his ongoing research, Petersen-Smith asserted that these practices of torture in Chicago and the Global War on Terror track with American histories of violence. Further, he argued, these specific geographies are sites of knowledge and testing grounds for new methods of control, and these police and military actors are treated as “scholars of violence.” He called the relationships between police departments and military history not a linear or direct chronology, but “circuits of violence between the US domestic regime and the extent of the US empire.” He continued: “The US empire has been an incubator of technologies of violence and control. There are particular sites of incubation that are sort of like test cases. Chicago is a site, Vietnam was a site, Guantánamo Bay is a site, Israel is a site. . . . US police departments in particular are sites of knowledge and technologies, of surveillance and control and violence, that have a utility with the imperial project abroad and vice versa.”
Petersen-Smith explained that these test cases push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, and when they get away with torture techniques, other states can adopt them. In Guantánamo, the United States piloted the special legal designation of “non-legal combatants” so that detainees are not considered prisoners of war.
“[The military] holds them on US territory, which Guantánamo Bay is, but not in the continental United States. And that [geography] puts them in the gray zone where basically the US has the power to do what they want to these people. But those people don’t have the power to have the recourse that comes with being located in the continental United States. And so, other nation states have then adopted that very [legal concept], of non-legal combatants.”
The initial widespread disbelief of torture allegations stems in part from a belief that torture is archaic and does not align with US notions of modernity and civilization, which CPD and US military promote, respectively, as inherent to their purpose in policing poor, crime-ridden areas or invading countries in the Global War on Terror. And when that force or torture practice defies the US Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, then the court of public opinion contorts itself to make sense of why the violation must have been justifiable.
During Andrew Wilson’s civil trials, a recurring theme in Burge’s defense against torture claims was that Wilson was a criminal and not to be trusted. In the aftermath of the high-profile killing of two police officers, the public widely believed that the treatment Wilson received before his trial was retribution for the murder of the officers and that Burge and his associates were emotionally distressed about the loss of their colleagues. Lawyers for the city cited Burge’s military credentials as a justification for why the jury should believe the officer’s word over Wilson’s. The jury gave deference to Burge.
What leads an officer to commit torture? The public desire to call torture an anomaly, or the belief that it is fixable with some reform or the firing of some police or military officers, is understandable, because it embodies a trust and hope in the current system of policing and war. However, we can see that torture is necessarily a part of the mode of policing and war that US society is built on.
To make sense of the horrors Burge, Zuley, and their associates participated in, Petersen-Smith pointed to the system that raised them:
"I think there’s this idea that something special happened to Jon Burge in Vietnam, and that that explains why he would do something so monstrous. And obviously lots of things happen to people who are in combat and it is a wildly traumatic experience. Look at the world Jon Burge grew up in. Look at the world Richard Zuley grew up in. You grow up in the United States and you are primed to then go and commit and develop and hone forms of violence elsewhere and bring it back here. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world for the US to support and incubate violence, and then not just import it, but be in a relationship to it."
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The Chicago Police Torture Archive names at least 120 officers implicated in Jon Burge-related torture lawsuits.
Chart 1 (p. 52, see book PDF) lists Chicago police officers from those cases who also have military connections. There are at least seventeen Chicago police officers from the Burge cases with a confirmed military background, two of whom overlapped with Richard Zuley. Because military history is not public record, military involvement was confirmed primarily through obituaries and self-disclosure. Six police officers served in the marines, one (Burge) in the military police, one in the air force, one in the navy, and the rest unspecified. Five served in Vietnam, and the rest did not indicate. The two officers who worked with both Burge and Zuley are indicated in orange.
Chart 2 (p. 53, see book PDF) lists officers named in Burge-related torture lawsuits who went on to hold positions of power after their CPD careers. Reporting by Marie Mendoza.
Chart 1: Name & Known Military History
Jon Burge: Enlisted in the US Army Reserve. Trained for eight weeks at a military police (MP) school in Georgia. Served as a MP officer in South Korea. Served in Vietnam (1968), assigned to the 9th Military Police Company of the 9th Infantry Division. Burge said that during his Vietnam War tours he escorted convoys, provided security for forward support bases, supervised security for the divisional central basecamp in Dong Tam, and served as a provost marshal investigator. John Conroy, who covered the Burge cases for the Chicago Reader for decades, wrote in 2006 that Burge may have learned torture techniques during his two years in Vietnam: “Veterans of his company have reported that they participated in the electrical torture of Vietcong suspects, shocking them using hand-cranked field telephones. A similar device was used to shock suspects at Area 2. Both places, the torturers often targeted the genitals … The first publicly known complaint of electric shock interrogation at Area 2 dates from 1973.” Burge joined CPD in 1970 and was promoted to detective at Area 2 in 1972, at age twenty-four.
Leroy Almanza: US Army veteran. Served in the 82nd Airborne Division. The 82nd specializes in joint forcible entry operations. Based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the division is the primary fighting arm of the XVIII Airborne Corps.
George Basile: US Marine Corps veteran. Served in Vietnam.
Leonard Bajenski: US Marine Corps veteran.
John Byrne: US Marine Corps veteran.
Peter Dignan: US Marine Corps veteran. Served in Vietnam for fourteen months (rank: corporal E-4).
Robert Dwyer: US Marine Corps veteran.
John Yucaitis: US Army veteran.
William Egan: US Marine Corps veteran.
George Karl: US Army veteran. Served in Vietnam.
Frank Laverty: US Army veteran (rank: staff sergeant).
Michael Kill: US Army veteran.
Thomas McKenna: US Army veteran.
William Moser Jr: US Army veteran.
Alvin Palmer: US Army veteran.
Thomas Shine: US Marine Corps veteran.
Fred Hill (name highlighted in orange): US Army veteran. Served in the 82nd Airborne Division.
Kenneth Boudreau (name highlighted in orange): US Army Reserve veteran (rank: first sergeant). Served in the 416th TEC and the 822nd Military Police Company (CBT)(SPT). Took leave from CPD for Gulf War deployment: September 1990–July 1991. Served as protective service officer and aide to camp for the commanding general of engineer forces.
Richard Zuley (name highlighted in orange): US Navy (retired). Served as liaison officer (LNO) for EUCOM (the Pentagon’s European command, which helped to kidnap and bring prisoners to Guantánamo). Served as senior interrogator and special projects team chief, Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (2002–04).
Chart 2: Name & Post-CPD Career
Jon Burge: Chicago has paid out over $42,775,000 in settlements to Jon Burge torture victims. Dismissed from CPD in 1993, he was later convicted to four to five years in prison for perjury, in 2011. Upon release, he lived in Florida, collecting his pension. He died in 2018.
John Byrne: Conroy reported that Byrne “Left CPD after he got his law degree but was subsequently disbarred for taking money from clients—including police officers and firefighters–—for whom he did no work.” Today, Byrne (74) collects a police pension and works as a private investigator.
Peter Dignan: Retired from CPD, with a pension. Later became chief of the fugitive unit at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
Sammy Lacey: Retired from CPD after twenty-eight years (1975–2003). Served as branch president of South Side NAACP from 2003–08. Became a practicing attorney, concentrating on criminal defense and civil litigation for the last eleven years. Ran for judge of circuit court of Cook County.
Frank Laverty: Retired from CPD. Later became an attorney, working as a legal consultant and expert witness for CPD. Owned a private legal practice. Died in 2006.
Kenneth Boudreau: Led CPD collaboration to create the Chicago Public Schools’ Gang School Safety Team and Social Media Surveillance Unit. After retirement, he became CEO of Embassy Security Group.
Richard Zuley: Senior emergency management coordinator for Cook County Department of Health. Later, employed by Chicago Department of Aviation as a projects administrator and interim emergency management director. Retired in 2017.
Louis Caesar: Police advisor for DynCorp, a private military contractor.
William Marley: CPD police officer, central detective area.
Dennis McGuire: Co-chair of investment committee for FOP Lodge 7.
Bill Kuschner: Chief of police for three police departments: Berwyn, DesPlaines, and Lakemoor.
Daniel McWeeny: Investigator for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.
Anthony Maslanka: Managing director at Chicago Electrical Company.
For more see: bit.ly/burgenetwork
