Black sites,“dark sides”: War power,police power,and the violence of the (un)known

On black spaces

Prior to confronting the ways in which redaction operates within the everyday practices of political life, it is first necessary to ask: what is black? Is it simply a color or is it the absence of color? Is black a material or representational practice, a condition, or perhaps a subject position? In 1966, the Rolling Stones released “Paint it black,” a song bearing some overlap with the way black is developed here. The Stones’ Mick Jagger sings:

I see a red door and I want it painted black, No colors anymore I want them to turn black … Maybe then I’ll fade away and not have to face the facts, It’s not easy facin’ up, when your whole world is black …

So that he may “not have to face the facts,” Jagger lyrically sketches Cohen’s “black spaces of the mind,” Badiou’s colorless color, and Žižek’s fetishist disavowal to imaginatively negate some unnamed trauma. ¹ In this use, black is both a color and practice. In setting out what he describes as retinal pessimism, Eugene Thacker (2013) begins by asking if black is merely a color or a suspension of vision produced by the deprivation of light. Because it does not reflect light on the visible spectrum, the strictest adherents of modern color theory are likely to describe black as non-chromatic or achromatic and thus not a color, or rather a non-color. An interesting example of such a condition is Vantablack, an experimental composite billed as the “blackest substance known.” Comprised of “vertically aligned nanotube arrays” which are synthesized in such a way so as to absorb nearly all (99.65%) light of the visible spectrum, Vantablack is not so much a color, paint, or pigment, but an arrangement of exotic materials on the most infinitesimal scale, a non-color. Because it reflects almost no light, we can say without irony that we do not and cannot know what color Vantablack is, because we cannot see it (even though we see it). This distinction presents immediate contradictions because black is, of course, a color. It is the foreboding referent of various artistic genres such as “black” metal, and as the color of death it communicates a muted and somber reverence. So on the one hand we might understand black as the absence of light, while on the other hand black possesses a distinct materiality and performativity. Moving from noun to verb—color to practice—we can also understand “blackening” or “blacking out” as the practice of negating or obliterating the visible and the production of the (un)known. Aligning with the Lacanian “empty place,” Thacker (2013) makes the point that black also marks a condition that precedes color and light—a void. This, as François Laruelle poetically describes, “is the substance of the Universe,” the “formless and empty” black of Genesis (Laruelle, 2013). Like the black bars of the redacted document, in order to be seen, this sort of black negates itself; it creates a condition in which there is “nothing to see,” but we see it. As such, we can say that black exists in these states simultaneously—a color, a non-color, a practice, a presence, an absence, and a void. Therefore, as with the illegible spaces of black sites and black ops, in its most critical application we take black as the singular warning—“there is nothing to see” (and you’re seeing it) …” (Thacker, 2013).

The recognition that there is nothing to see marks an important distinction between the understanding of black developed here and dominant understandings of denial often used to theorize the penal field. For instance, when introducing the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons in 1971, Michel Foucault described the prison as “one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life” (Elden, 2013; emphasis added). From this view, the preceding two centuries of Western/Anglophone penal history have seen the corporal punishments which were the state’s preferred instruments of class and racial ordering dissolve into “softer” modernist techniques for producing obedience, submission, and subjection. And with that, the brutal spectacle of punishment has receded from view—behind prison walls and within “dark zones”—beyond the sight of ordinary eyes. Yet, one would be hard pressed, as Joy James puts it, to rely solely on the Foucauldian vision as it helps to negate a well-worn history of political terrorism, racist violence, and American violence in general (James, 1996: 24). This is a history of US sponsored torture and repression epitomized, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois note, by the disappeared, political subjects whose fates are the consummate disavowal (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004: 23). And though the US state has gone to great lengths to obscure its reliance upon torture, its efforts oftentimes prove unsuccessful (Welch, 2009). In fact, in the context of the so-called torture memos that set out the legal architecture to authorize the CIA’s enhanced interrogation programs, we might say secrecy is but one avenue pursued by the state to authorize such practices, with apathy and bloodlust being others. Perhaps reflecting the latter, Donald Trump ginned up widespread praise during the 2016 presidential election with promises that if elected he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” (Hajjar, 2016). Indeed, recent public opinion surveys seem to confirm this widely held sentiment, with nearly two-thirds of the American public (and more than 80% among self-identified Republicans) explicitly condoning the use of torture against “suspected terrorists” (Kahn, 2016). Because the United States has always retained the most brutal corporal violence as part of its governing practices, it is a mistake to understand torture as simply hidden, the work of rogue actors or a necessity born of exceptional times. Instead, we must consider how rendition, torture, and murder exist openly in the black spaces of everyday life, reproduced through the active political and cultural practices of redaction. As Joseph Pugliese has suggested in his discussion of the notorious CIA black site prison known only as the “Salt Pit,” “the process of redaction must be seen as producing, analogically, its own discursive black sites of silence, loss and death” (Pugliese, 2013: 162). Such a process is tacitly affirmed by the admission of “torturing some folks,” to say nothing of the US government’s well-documented history of “dirty tricks,” assassination, and regime change. Driven by apologias reminding us that we don’t “know the whole story” or “have all the facts,” it becomes for some easier to not know what one knows. Following Žižek, here we might say that the difference between redaction and the standard Foucauldian is simply not knowing or not wanting to know on the one hand, and knowing and pretending not to know on the other. As a recognition of and resignation to the (un)known, these redacted black spaces therefore reveal a distinct mode of political subjectivity. It is here, amidst the everyday terror of police and prisons, that some political subjects admit, “I see that there is nothing to see.”

War and police; black sites and “dark sides”

Seeing that there is nothing to see helps manifest distinct political geographies, which according to Trevor Paglen are described by US security state agents as the “black world” (Paglen, 2009: xii). In his book Blank Spots on the Map, Paglen recounts combing through a United States Geological Survey (USGS) aerial images archive in order to make connections between geography and the extralegal violence of US prisons. In a somewhat Foucauldian sense, Paglen theorized that because prisons built in the era of mass imprisonment were often placed (in blank spots) outside city centers and upon rural landscapes, a sort of cultural distance was created which rendered them largely invisible. These theoretical “blank spots” soon materialized as redacted images, completely blacked out by the USGS and labeled only with the caption “frames edited from original negative” (Paglen, 2009: 11). As is Paglen, we should be clear that these “blank spots” are not blank at all, but rather spaces of the (un)known that bear the warning “there is nothing to see.” This is the same warning grimly offered by Dick Cheney just five days after the 9/11 attacks when he gestured toward the “dark side” of the burgeoning war on terror:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. (Froomkin, 2005; emphasis added)

The dark side to which Cheney refers is, of course, a product of the sovereign exception, whereby “black operatives” wage off-the-books “black budget” wars and the torture administered at “black site prisons” is relexified “enhanced interrogation.” Of course, Cheney’s dark side soon materialized in (un)known locations throughout the world, one of the most notorious being the Bagram Interment Facility, a US military detention camp located inside Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan. It was there, in a portion of the base dubbed the “black jail” that an innocent man known only as Dilawar was tortured to death by US agents (Golden, 2005). As detailed in the award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, US agents snatched Dilawar from a deserted road in Afghanistan, hung him by his wrists until his shoulders dislocated and beat him so mercilessly that had he lived his legs would have required amputation. Just 5′9″ and 122 pounds, the tiny man managed to survive four days in US captivity at Bagram’s black jail. As we now know, hundreds of “ghost prisoners” like Dilawar populated black jails and black sites around the globe. Yet it is the so-called revelations of the enhanced interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison that have offered the most agonizing glimpse into the supposed dark side of the war on terror. Released in 2005, the jarring images of torture, brutality, human suffering, and death instantly became recruiting propaganda for jihadists (Hamm, 2007) and likewise a rallying cry for anti-war activists (Mitchell, 2011). Yet, as critics ranging from Mark Danner (2004) and Seymour Hersh (2004) to Colin Dayan (2007) and Jasbir Puar (2004) soon challenged, despite the outrage, the torture administered at Abu Ghraib was neither exceptional nor singular. In her critique, the criminologist Michelle Brown (2005) suggested that the American commitment to mass imprisonment—technology, legal architecture, cultural sentiment—as its guiding criminal justice strategy set the sociopolitical context that rendered Abu Ghraib a predictable outcome of the war on terror. Critics from various fields quickly challenged the framing of Abu Ghraib as a departure from the routine or as somehow exceptional.

Likewise, Darius Rejali (2009) insists that modern democracies tend to forget willfully or otherwise their own histories of torture, writing off the torture administered by their own agents as indefensible acts of human weakness or a systematic practice confined to those repressive and “undemocratic” regimes of the East and Global South. Of course, as argued here, the torture administered by state agents of all kinds is, as Walter Benjamin (1978) famously warned, not the exception but the rule. Again, writing years before the spectacles of 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, James (1996) pointed to agents from “local police, Texas Rangers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency’s mercenaries and contras” as tangible evidence of the open and unbroken record of US state violence and terror for which the Foucauldian cannot account (James, 1996: 42).

During the colonial acquisition of the Philippines, for instance, US soldiers routinely administered the “water cure” (waterboarding) to recalcitrant Filipinos, a century before the war on terror made the technique notorious (Kramer, 2006). In 1953, then CIA director Allen Dulles commissioned an investigation into the apparently new and highly efficient “brainwashing” techniques of the Soviet Union and China, exposed during the Korean War. Investigators quickly concluded that the techniques employed by the Soviets, which included relay interrogation or “sweating” and involved coercing information with the aid of sleep deprivation, intense lights, and uncomfortably hot rooms, were identical to techniques routinely employed by US police and taught by US operatives to adjunct police systems the world over (Rejali, 2009: 69).

From 1962 to 1974, the US Aid for International Development’s (USAID) Office of Public Safety (OPS) sent approximately 1500 agents abroad to places like Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in order to protect American business interests and support counter-revolutionary activities (Seigel, 2018). As AJ Langguth documented, OPS agents closely aligned with the CIA trained local police in counterinsurgency strategy, tactics, and “interrogation” techniques, including electric shock (Langguth, 1978). Continuing into the 1990s, classified training manuals ² obtained through FOIA requests by journalists at the Baltimore Sun documented the CIA’s administration of torture in Central America through Honduran death squads as early as the 1960s. Unsurprisingly, the Senate investigation confirmed that [name redacted], who oversaw US enhanced interrogations and black site programs since the 1990s, had also supervised similar programs in Central America in the early 1980s (Foster, 2014). As Alfred McCoy has argued, that US officials represented themselves as committed advocates of human rights at home, while they simultaneously trained and armed death squads and outsourced torture “to allied security agencies,” is a powerful reflection of the Janus faced torture policy that the US pursued and perfected during the Cold War (McCoy, 2009: 528).

Hardly revelatory, all of this is well-documented in the voluminous accounts of survivors, journalists, and academics. Even its own high-ranking administrators admit that the CIA has failed to learn from its longstanding history of torture, meaning “each generation of officers is left to improvise anew, with problematic results for our officers as individuals and for our Agency” (Feinstein, 2014). Yet, we should not assume that this is a problem of slippage, training, legal control, or public oversight. Not only have they “tortured some folks,” the US has always and continues to “torture folks.” And so the question remains: how is the use of coercion, torture, and murder repeatedly framed as a scandal in or stain on some imagined “values and history”?

Some have argued that the language of exception normalizes other forms of violence, rendering it essentially invisible. Dylan Rodriguez (2006: 10), for instance, argues that the “spectacle of public consumption” engendered by the images of torture at Abu Ghraib helped to redact the routine violence of police and prisons at home, rendering mass imprisonment an unremarkable “(non)scene of captivity.” In relation to CIA black sites, Christopher Glazek has similarly described American prisons as cultural “blind spots,” urging the public to view the entire US prison system as one massive black site (Glazek, 2012). Rejali (2009) argues that while much of the world is familiar with the iconic images of Abu Ghraib, most “don’t know about the painful but clean tortures that now characterize so much police around the world,” and fewer still would recognize the images of the “Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib” as torture if “police used this procedure on someone in their neighborhood” (Rejali, 2009: 3). To begin to arrest this perpetual cycle of outrage and reform, the coercion, torture, and murder positioned within “black ops,” “black sites,” and the “dark sides” of war must be understood as the essential but redacted and thus (un)known implements of US imperial power at home and abroad.

The need for such an optic becomes all the more apparent when considering just a few of the black spaces that have recently emerged within the US interior. In early 2015, journalist Spencer Ackerman began to report on Homan Square, an obscure Chicago police facility brought to his attention following the arrest of a man named Brian Jacob Church. Chicago police had arrested Church in May 2012 under “suspicion of terrorism” because of his involvement in protests of the NATO Summit. Following his arrest and detention at Homan Square, Church’s whereabouts were unknown to friends and family, during which time he alleges that he was “never booked” and “never processed” and that only after some 17 hours handcuffed to a bench was he permitted to speak with an attorney. Describing his terror, Church said he “figured they disappeared us, so we’re probably never going to see the light of day” (Batta et al., 2015; emphasis added). When Church’s attorneys were finally permitted access, they spoke with their client through a 12 x 12-foot metal cage (Ackerman, 2015a). Later, in a series of articles for the Guardian, Ackerman documented misconduct and abuses committed by police at Homan Square, ranging from not booking prisoners and denial of counsel to beatings, torture, and rape (Ackerman, 2015b, 2015c). And with that, descriptions of Homan Square as Chicago’s own black site ensued. In Church’s words, “Homan Square is definitely an unusual place. It brings to mind the interrogation facilities that they use in the Middle East—that’s essentially what this place, Homan Square, is; it’s a- it’s a domestic black site” (Batta et al., 2015; emphasis added).

Clearly, there are similarities between Homan Square and what is known to have taken place at US military prisons. It is our contention here, however, that the designation of Homan Square as a black site invariably positions it as an exceptional case and thus an aberration of what should be understood as the always lawful practices of American criminal justice. In his commentary on Homan Square, Tracy Siska, a civil rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project argued:

The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects. They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago. (Ackerman, 2015b)

Here, Siska endorses both the view of the war on terror’s black practices as exceptional and the equally problematic understanding of how such practices are thought to have carried over to US police. Invoking the Foucauldian (Foucault et al., 2003) boomerang, Siska frames Homan Square as the product of the war on terror, abhorrent practices that would not have materialized otherwise. By severing the abuses of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib from Homan Square, Siska obliterates the always already together unity of the state’s war and police power (Neocleous, 2014). As such, instead of recognizing torture and off the books detention facilities as routine practices of both the military and the police, this mistake in thinking sets the standards of exceptionality, thereby normalizing or hiding the everyday violence of police “order maintenance patrol,” “stop and frisk,” and “less than lethal technologies” in plain view (Linnemann, 2017).

The view of domestic policing as corrupted, whether by war or drug war, is not all that novel and takes precedent in much of the scholarly writing on police militarization and “deviance” (see Howell, 2018). In their widely read volume Forces of Deviance: Understanding the Dark Side of Policing (1998), criminologists Victor Kappeler, Richard Sluder, and Geoffrey Alpert set out to build a theoretical understanding of police deviance and a means for stopping it. Despite their critical posture, Kappeler and colleagues’ commitment to a liberal/reformist agenda is betrayed by their understanding of “police deviance” as a departure from a system of external, internal, and informal norms from which police agents decide courses of action and which the public uses to pass judgments on the appropriateness of those decisions (Kappeler et al., 1998: 19). As the title of their book suggests, from this position routine police violence is invariably framed as non-normative—instances in which individual officers haphazardly slip into the “dark side.” The problem with this sort of critique is that it shields the institution of policing from scrutiny and fosters the myth that under some utopian system there are police who do not actively invoke the violence and coercion of the police mandate as routine practice. Just as Cheney’s gesture to the “dark side” of the intelligence world invokes the exceptional nature of the post 9/11 war on terror, Kappeler and colleagues’ “dark side” situates police violence as the exception not the rule. In attempting to come to terms with how instances like the “senseless beating of Rodney King” “could flourish and even become accepted,” the authors blame LAPD Chief Daryl Gates for cultivating a racist, sexist, homophobic, and militarized “police subculture” (Kappeler et al., 1998: 146–154). “It was within this subculture of prejudice and violence,” according to the authors, that the officers who brutalized King “formulated their beliefs, values and attitudes, and learned how to police the ‘City of Angels.’” Yet the responsibility for the racist foundations, coercion, violence, and murder of the LAPD or policing more broadly cannot be Gates’ alone to shoulder (Davis, 2006). Not unlike the official explanations for the torture at Abu Ghraib, which found fault in the lack of internal controls and ultimately only punished a few low ranking soldiers, such a framework of understanding can and will only ever offer facile outage and a compendium of minor reforms in response to the “deviance” of individual actors (Vitale, 2017).

Even a cursory review of the history of police violence in the US holds the shortcomings of the reformist position in stunning relief (Correia and Wall, 2018). For instance, in the summer of 1930, an 18 year-old Cleveland man, Tony Colletti, arrested for the murder of his wife, was brutalized by five Cleveland detectives who, for 26 hours, ruthlessly administered policing’s “Third Degree.” Deprived of sleep, food, and water, stripped naked, forced to stand for hours, beaten with fists and rubber hoses, threatened and lied to, Colletti eventually caved, signing a confession that he neither wrote or read (Leo, 2004). Important here is that the techniques used by Cleveland police in 1930 are the same as those employed by police at Homan Square and by US personnel at CIA black sites. Colletti’s case is also worth mentioning as it was a centerpiece of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission), one of the first public efforts to reform police violence and its administration of torture. Despite the promises of Wickersham police, abuses of course continued. In Kemper County, Mississippi, in March 1934, three black tenant farmers were arrested for the murder of a white man, a crime to which one of the men confessed. The criminal trial of the three commenced a few days later on April 5 and concluded on April 6 with a conviction and a sentence of death for each of the accused. Other than the confession, no evidence was presented by the state to the jury, and upon appeal the three accused police of mercilessly whipping, beating, and hanging them by the neck in order to secure the confession. The subsequent landmark ruling set out in Brown v. Mississippi (1936) found the same sort of brutality supposedly addressed by Wickersham a few years prior. In his ruling, Chief Justice Charles Hughes famously remarked that account of the torture administered by police “reads more like pages torn from some medieval account than a record made within the confines of a modern civilization which aspires to an enlightened constitutional government” (Brown v. Mississippi, 1936). Again, such remarks betray the sort of problematic thinking about police violence that persists today. That is, the brutality of direct corporeal violence is thought to be a vestige of the past and not something common to the stewards of a modern civilized society. ³ In fact, even violence of the most stomach turning variety, such as police dogs set loose to maul and maim children and peaceful protestors, is always at the disposal of police—as Tyler Wall (2016: 861) puts it, “for the very existence of civilization.” This is a fact celebrated by police themselves, who eagerly invoke the political theology of the “Thin Blue Line” in order to reaffirm the notion that it is they, the keepers and arbiters of legal/lethal violence, who ensure civilization’s survival (Linnemann and Medley, 2017).

With new training and education requirements imposed in the years following Wickersham and Brown, police agencies moved toward supposedly scientific interrogation techniques and many openly denounced torture as inefficient, immoral, and illegal (Leo, 2004). For instance, in 1940, WR Kidd, a Berkeley (CA) police administrator, published the first interrogation manual for US police, which his former colleague and mentor, the famed reformer August Vollmer, called a “truly epochal contribution to the police literature” (Kidd, 1940: v). In his treatise, Kidd openly denounced torture, warning it would invariably produce false confessions, inadmissible evidence, and erosion of the public’s trust (Kidd, 1940: 46). Despite the theatrics, these early moves toward reform failed to put a stop to police violence and likely ratified and normalized other forms of violence under the auspice of professionalism and science (Welch, 2009). It is here that the violence of liberalism and reform comes into full view. As Mark Neocleous argued, the bedrock of liberalism is the ability to threaten violence, while denying or masking the violence it actually inflicts. This is why the ideology of the rule of law is integral to liberalism; it “works by rendering certain kinds of violence illegitimate and illegal and other kinds of violence legitimate and legal” (Neocleous, 2014: 46).

The open and ugly record of US police aside, the brutal history of the Chicago Police Department itself should provide a critical perspective for the supposed revelations of Homan Square. From its inception, the CPD has stood in violent opposition to working class movements and in defense of capital (Mitrani, 2013). As meticulously documented by Frank Donner (1990), for a half-century the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad” surveilled, infiltrated, and harassed all manner of political groups deemed a threat to order (Vermeule, 2007). Of course, the CPD’s history of class and political repression is not apart from its history of racist terror. In her case study of the arrest, conviction, and execution of Robert Nixon—the inspiration for Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son—historian Elizabeth Dale sketches an unbroken record of torture and murder of (predominately) black men by Chicago police back to at least 1871 (Dale, 2016). And of course there is the 1969 assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton, which was backed by the FBI and executed by the CPD (Haas, 2011).

Despite its nearly 150-year history of brutal class-based repression and racist assassinations, it is Jon Burge who some see as the CPD’s most notorious member and the “face of a dark chapter in Chicago’s history” (Fletcher and Loughlin, 2015; emphasis added). A native of Chicago’s South Side, Burge joined the CPD in 1969 following a stint as a military police officer during the Vietnam War. By 1972, Burge was a detective working the midnight shift in CPD Area 2, a 60 square mile tract of Chicago’s south side (Taylor, 2013: 330). It is here as a ranking member of the “midnight crew” that Burge earned his reputation for brutality, routinely beating prisoners, using plastic bags to simulate suffocation, and employing numerous devices to administer painful electric shocks (Taylor, 2013: 330; emphasis added). Burge, who called his interrogations the “Vietnam Special” and “fun time,” used cattle prods and a modified hand crank telephone that he called the “nigger box” to torture suspects (Conroy, 2005; Ralph, 2013; Taylor, 2013). Taking its name from Tucker State Prison Farm in Arkansas (Lancaster, 2011), Burge used his “Tucker Telephone” to electrify prisoners’ mouths and genitals, a technique he likely picked up during his time in the military police in Vietnam (Conroy, 2005). Employed in the 1950s by CIA-directed agents of USAID OPS in Central and South America, by US military personnel in Vietnam, and of course by American interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison (Blum, 2003; Langguth, 1978; Rejali, 2009), the history of this particular logic, technique, and technology usefully maps the insidious and often disavowed unity of war and police power. From a southern prison farm, to South America, Southeast Asia, Chicago’s South Side, Abu Ghraib, and unknowable stops in between and since, the telephone hand crank—a police technology of torture—demonstrates the boundless fluidity of American imperial violence.

By 1982, Burge was decorated Lieutenant, commanding the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit (Conroy, 2000). It was then, following the killing of two gang-unit officers, that Burge led the largest manhunt in the city’s history. For five days, Burge and his midnight crew terrorized the South Side, kicking in doors and threatening, beating, and smothering with plastic bags several innocent young “suspect witnesses” (Taylor, 2013). Burge’s crew eventually tracked down Andrew and Jackie Wilson, beating, suffocating, burning, and electrocuting the brothers, until both confessed to the murders. Yet, when the brothers were sent to the Cook County Jail, their injuries were so pronounced that an administrator refused to accept them. Of the two, it was Andrew, the presumed shooter, who suffered the greatest injury. Chained to a scalding radiator while he received Burge’s “shock treatment,” Andrew’s face, chest, and legs were seriously burned and his head was gashed open in two spots. Even though a medical examiner presented visual evidence and written testimony to CPD command and the state’s attorney, instead of conducting an investigation the CPD awarded Burge a meritorious performance commendation for his handling of the case. The coerced confessions eventually led to convictions, with Jackie receiving life and Andrew death. Upon direct appeal, the record of Andrew’s injuries and the testimony of medical staff helped to reverse the conviction and upon re-trial he received two natural life sentences (Taylor, 2013: 334).

In the following years, Burge and some of the midnight crew faced intermittent departmental professional standards reviews, but all managed to retain their positions and escape criminal penalty. It wasn’t until 1990, 18 years after the first allegations were made against Burge, that the CPD moved to terminate his employment, finally doing so in 1993. In all, some 120 victims of Burge’s reign, nearly all of them African-American men, have been identified. And though the “torture scandal” was a catalyst for the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, Burge largely escaped penalty, with a 2010 conviction for obstruction and perjury resulting in a four and a half years stint in federal prison. Now a free man, Burge is retired on a CPD pension, while the City of Chicago has paid at least US$64 million in settlements to his victims.

In 2015, another expert torturer emerged from the ranks of the Chicago police. Because of his skills honed as a homicide detective, Richard Zuley, a 37-year CPD veteran and Navy reservist, was placed in charge of the interrogation of Mohamedou Ould Slahi at Guantanamo Bay. In his bestselling book Guantanamo Diary, Slahi (2015) describes how Zuley employed stress positions, prolonged shackling, and threats to his family—precisely the same techniques that numerous Chicagoans have alleged that Zuley used on them. Again reporting for the Guardian, Ackerman wrote that Zuley’s police work, “particularly when visited on Chicago’s minority communities, contains a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture” (Ackerman, 2015a; emphasis added). As deplorable as Burge, Zuley, and their kind are, we should not assume, as Ackerman does, that they represent a slip into torture, or a corruption of police by the war on terror. Indeed, we must recall that while Burge brought his trade home from Vietnam, Zuley honed his interrogation skills as a Chicago detective and then put them to work at Guantanamo Bay. As with the Tucker Telephone, these two expert torturers provide powerful evidence of the terrible unity of war and police power that moves freely across boundaries of all kinds (Neocleous, 2014). Nevertheless, journalists and academics continue to see domestic policing as somehow corrupted by war. Journalist Ryan Cooper, for instance, writes:

That work [of Wickersham] is right now being undone. American police are re-embracing torture in just the way that experts like Rejali said we would. Torture has a long history in American police departments, and if vigilance is not maintained, it will crop up again and again. The Obama administration’s cowardly unwillingness to pursue any accountability at all for CIA torturers during the Bush era has all but ensured that fact. Though most routine police torture was gone by the 1950s or so, there were some important exceptions. In Chicago, for example, torture has likely never been fully expelled from the police department. The infamous torturer Jon Burge, recently released from prison, was part of a systematic torture ring in the city’s Area 2. (Cooper, 2015)

Given the history we have outlined here, however brief and incomplete, it is an error of hopeful liberalism to suggest that torture was ever expunged from American policing. Yet those who refuse to see the crimes of Burge, Zuley, and Homan Square as routine rather than deviant, non-normative, or exceptional reproduce this view in perpetuity. Indeed, as longstanding Chicago anti-violence activist Mariame Kaba insists, allegations of illegal detention and torture at Homan Square and other Chicago police facilities have been ongoing for years:

In this respect, some of the local media who have characterized Homan as standard CPD practice are not wrong. People’s rights in this city have been and continue to be violated on a daily basis. It has led to apathy when it should be leading to an uprising. (Hudson, 2015)

This sentiment is echoed by Pugliese, who argues against fetishizing the exceptional “as it functions to erase the serial practices of violence actually constitutive of the internal operations of the state and their very normalization precisely through law” (Pugliese, 2013: 18). While codifying superficial outrage, law, policy, and procedure erected in contest with the exceptional also work to secret violence under cover of formality. Recall that Stacey Koon, the supervising officer who participated in and presided over the brutal beating of Rodney King, insisted under oath that the more than 50 baton blows administered by LAPD officers was a “managed and controlled use of force that followed the (LAPD’s) policy, and did so to the book” (Mitchell, 1994). Here we should not misread Koon’s testimony as an attempt to manipulate or hide behind departmental policy; instead we must take Koon at his word and recognize the violence of police as encoded in formal policy and the force of law. This fact was also acknowledged, without irony, by the presiding judge in the civil suit brought by Andrew Wilson against Burge and the City of Chicago. Ruling on behalf of Wilson, the judge found that the city had indeed authorized Burge’s conduct. The judge stated that “Burge was not pursuing a frolic of his own … He was, as it were, too loyal an employee. He was acting squarely within the scope of his employment” (Taylor, 2013: 342). The recognition of Burge as part and parcel of the history of policing’s legal terror still does not quite satisfy the question of shock and outrage posed at the outset. In his testimony in one of the civil cases brought against the CPD, Walter Young, a black police officer who worked under Burge’s command in Area 2, offered powerful insight into how the terror of the midnight crew continued unabated for decades. Young explained that when witness to the torture of fellow black men, he would “vanish,” “bury [his] head in the sand,” and that he would “see and not see” (Ralph, 2013: 107; emphasis added). Revealing the antagonisms between routine police power and basic human decency, to “see and not see” is redaction par excellence and productive of the black spaces that negate the irreversible entwinements of war and police.