09 May 2006

Savage Pigwatch: The Chicago Gulag and Vanilla Sam's Race War

Democracy Now! featured a segment today describing a torture chamber in the Chicago Pigs' gulag called Area 2 that was set up and used specifically to beat confessions out of Black men - Aaron Patterson being one example - for crimes they did not commit.

Amy Goodman begins:
For nearly two decades a part of the city’s jails known as Area 2 was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.
Listen to the Segment

For more than 35 years, the savagery of Chicago's Pigs - especially the reprehensible John Burge - virtually replicates the tactics the world has seen used by Uncle Sam's GI Joes throughout the world in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo.

Rather than seeing these Pigs for the self-serving liars and thugs that they are, courts on Sam's Plantation unconditionally accept their fraudulent testimony like obedient lapdogs. This unwavering trust by Uncle Sam's fig-leaf 'judicial' system (which itself forms part of the discourse of White Supremacy that infects Vanilla Sam's whole social system) perverts the very idea of justice, concealing Pigs' brutality and savagery while ignoring victims who are languishing in prison gulags because of trumped-up confessions obtained under torture.

Of course, one can hardly expect the Daley Klan to do anything to ameliorate the crimes of Chicago's Pigs. In fact, the torturers receive pensions while taking the 5th on the advice of lawyers paid by the city.

However, thanks to public outcry against the trumped-up charges made by Chicago's Pigs against innocent men like Patterson, the state of Illinois has subsequently exonerated some of the victims framed-up on torture-induced confessions.

However, devoting too much attention to those freed from Uncle Sam's gulag ignores the plight of the myriad political prisoners dying a slow death behind enemy lines. Those seeking justice must strive to Free 'em all and fill the prison cells they now occupy with the crooked, racist Pigs who put them there.