Holy mother of god.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago's west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights...Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the "Nato Three", was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged. 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."

Interesting that it was a political protester who wound up there, isn't it?

This, of course, continues to be a rough century for the Chicago P.D. It began with the revelationsregarding Jon Burge, a rogue cop who routinely tortured suspects for 20 years on the city's South and West Sides. Then, more recently, it was revealed that another alleged CPD torturer named Richard Zuley had taken his act from Chicago's North Side to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. And now this. I'm no expert, but I think it might behoove some ambitious assistant US Attorney in Cook County to get Mayor Rahm Emanuel under oath and find out what he knows about how Chicago became East Germany. (To be fair, the state's attorney for Cook County is on to the Zuley case, at least.) But this is what can happen if you normalize torture in the public mind the way that the Avignon Presidency and its acolytes did and then, when a new administration comes in, it declines to prosecute the people involved and, indeed, it fights to keep secret what was done in the name of the American people. Authoritarians wear all kinds of uniforms, and they can convince themselves that almost everyone is a threat of some kind or another. This is now a country that tortures, and torture does not stop at the water's edge. It is a decision that was made for us, but it is a decision that nobody, not even the president the country elected twice, has chosen fully to reverse. This is a country that tortures. And we live with it.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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