Image by Derek Goulet via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on May 1, 2021
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses police abuse and torture with civil rights attorney Flint Taylor.
Flint Taylor’s new book is The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.
With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office, Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases exposing the corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department and throughout the city’s political machine from the alderman to the mayor’s office.
The book takes the reader from the 1969 murder of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark – and the historic thirteen-year trial that followed – through the pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the Chicago Police Department that used barbaric methods, including electric shock and suffocation, to elicit false confessions from suspects – a violation of the UN Convention against Torture. Taylor and People’s Law Office gathered evidence to bring suit against the Chicago Police Department, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-ups. The legal precedent they set has since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.
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From the archives:
The Intensification of Colonial Genocide Will Blow Back, by Rainer Shea
Chris Hedges: The Nature of Resistance, White Supremacy and The Rise of a New Black Militancy
David Swanson and Greta Zarro: How to Demilitarize Police
And thus it is that, from the very beginning of the European settlement of New England, right down to the current attempts of the state to extradite and further torture Julian Assange, the will to punish designated scapegoats has invariably trumped any compensatory desire to show compassion and understanding toward those with whom one differs.
Sadly, yes.