Monroe Anderson

Burge should make Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics tortuous

    Chicago is such a serious contender for the 2016 Olympics that there were reports of city officials working on a tentative schedule for events. But one civil rights group here in the Windy City says not so fast. Black People Against Police Brutality is out to hold the city's Olympic bid hostage until justice is done. The group wants Jon Graham Burge, Chicago's torture cop, prosecuted for the dirty work he did over a 20-year period. Here's a commentary I wrote for The Huffingtonpost.com about injustice in the Second City.

Monroe Anderson
Jon Burge, The Olympics and Torture in Chicago

Richard M. Daley, Chicago's Mayor-for-Life, was duty bound to be in Beijing for the opening ceremony to the Summer Olympics: He had some elbow rubbing and glad-handing to do.

Chicago is an international finalist to be the host city for the 2016 Olympics so the face time and a check on Beijing's newly-minted public transit system, before being awed by China's spectacular coming out party, was a must for the Second City's mayor. The word is that Chicago may own the inside track with the International Olympic Committee's 115 voting members against the three other competing cities--Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.

That may not continue to be the case, especially if the Black People Against Police Torture gets its way. In a quixotic quest for justice, the civil rights group is out to expose America's third-largest city as, charges Atty. Standish Willis, "the torture capital of the world."

Since the last millennium, Willis and other Chicago civil rights attorneys and activists have been seeking to get a now-retired police commander, Jon Graham Burge, held responsible for hideous crimes he committed, that have been hidden behind a gray-flannel and blue wall of silence.
Cmdr. Burge and his midnight crew at the city's Area 2 police station tortured more than 137 African American men over a two-decade span. In many cases, Burge and his medieval sect of detectives tortured the old-fashioned way, using nightsticks, flashlights, black jacks and telephone books. At other times they went above and beyond the call of cruelty by hand cranking a telephone box that generated an electrical current, then putting it to the genitals and rectums of the black suspects they were interrogating. Other cruel and unusual practices by Burge's "A Team" included cattle prods to the bodies and plastic bags placed over the heads.

Chicago's torture cop is old news that Willis and his group are attempting to make current again. Accusations that Lt. Burge and officers under him were torturing prisoners into confessions have been an open secret for nearly three decades throughout much of the city and county's criminal justice system. The rumors ran rampant in the early 1980s when Mayor Daley was the Cook County state's attorney.

Two years ago, the Report of the Special State's Attorney was released, dashing any doubts that the rumors were unmerited. Special Prosecutor Edward Egan, who led the four-year, $6.2 million investigation, found that in the '70s and '80s former Cmdr. Burge and his men tortured suspects into making confessions.

Fired fifteen years ago, Burge is livin la vida loca in Florida, still drawing his pension of $3,403.71 a month. In the meantime, 24 black men who were set up by Burge and his subordinates are still doing hard time. The report also claimed that the statute of limitations has expired, making it too late to file charges against the bad cops.

Willis and the other civil rights attorneys have argued that since there was an ongoing cover-up on the Burge tortures, both in the Chicago police department and in the Cook County Court system during and for years afterwards, that the statutes of limitations don't apply. Willis, the Chicago chairman of the National Council of Black Lawyers, has also presented his case on police torture in the U.S. before the U.N.'s Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination Conference in Geneva, Switzerland earlier this year.

Shortly after the Egan report, Willis and Patricia Hill, president of the African American Police League, founded the Black People Against Police Torture they contacted the OIC, attempting to get it to disqualify Chicago as a host city. Nearly two years later, Willis and his group are still awaiting an answer.

So this Thursday night Black People Against Police Torture will meet again to review its efforts to hold the Summer Olympics hostage until the unjustly convicted men are given a retrial and the torturers are put on trial.

Considering the OIC's indifference to Beijing's support of the genocidal Darfur government and its human rights violations in Tibet and at home, my guess is that Willis and his group have a Chinaman's chance of appealing to its 115 members' sense of social justice and civil rights.

            

   

Civil Rights

 

           

Olympic protests are not for sport

                                                                                                                                                                                   

   

    Hillary Clinton has it right on China. George W. Bush should skip the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. The president’s presence will only serve to aid and abet China’s dispassionate behavior in Tibet—and more importantly in Sudan.
    "The violent clashes in Tibet and the failure of the Chinese government to use its full leverage with Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur are opportunities for presidential leadership," she said, charging the Bush administration "has been wrong to downplay human rights in its policy towards China."
    Three years ago, Bush officially declared that genocide was taking place in Darfur, and then promptly did nothing about it. This summer, the man who feverishly wanted to get rid of the dictator, Saddam Hussein, is apparently unfazed by the murderous tactics of the dictator, Sudanese President Omar al Basir.
    Changing course on his Olympic journey should not be that difficult a choice for Bush. Protesters in England and France today has demonstrated so fervently that organizers have been forced to play hide and seek with the Olympic torch and ended up cancelling the final leg of the run in Paris.
Bush says he will attend the Olympics because it is a sporting event, not a political event. Will somebody please explain to the president that the protests are political, not for sport?
And will somebody explain to Barack Obama that he can’t play this one two ways. China’s backing of al Basir has left women raped, children maimed and hundreds of thousands dead.
    "On the one hand, I think that what has happened in Tibet, China's support for the Sudanese government in Darfur, is a real problem," he said, before adding: "I am hesitant to make the Olympics a site of political protest because I think it's partly about bringing the world together."
    Do we really want the world to come together behind this atrocious behavior?
    If Bush and Obama won’t take a stand, let's hope the black athletes will. (Less than 24 hours after this  post went up, Barack got off the fence, also calling for Bush to boycott the opening ceremony. Obama's statement wasn't as strong as Clinton's but he did manage to put himself on the right side of this issue.)

    Here’s a commentary I wrote for ebonyjet.com last summer.

Passing The Torch

If China wants to hedge bets around its involvement in darfur, let’s change the rules of the game

08/13/2007
By Monroe Anderson

Communist China's rush to become a world-class capitalist power has gone gangsta in more ways than one. Beijing has been pirating goods, dabbling in state-sponsored gunrunning and short-changing the yuan. Earlier this week, nearly a million made-in-China Mattel toys were recalled because they were covered in lead paint. We have recently learned that Beijing has been exporting melamine-laced pet food and tainted toothpaste.

Although thousands of American cats and dogs fell deathly ill or died from eating China's tainted pet food, it could have been worse: Ten Chinese citizens are known to have died from fake medicine after the former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration accepted $990,000 in bribes in exchange for approving the drugs.

But neither bad medicine nor poisonous products have taken the toll that China's adventures in Africa can claim: In a four-year genocidal offensive in Sudan, more than 200,000 blacks have been killed by marauding bands of the Janjaweed militia, the Arab soldiers of misfortune hired by and backed up with the air support of Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir's government. Entire African villages have been pillaged and burned, driving 2 million black Darfurians into refugee camps where women and children are routinely raped and starved. The bulk of the arms used to kill and maim the black Africans, according to Amnesty International, are being imported from Beijing. China says that's not so.

While it is true that China -- reluctantly and belatedly -- has coaxed Khartoum into finally agreeing to admit U. N. peacekeepers into the troubled region, it is also true that in April China agreed "to boost military exchanges and cooperation" with Bashir's government. And it is fact that China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil and has signed a 20-year agreement with that country to help it develop offshore oil–a resource China naturally covets and desperately needs to propel its development into a First World nation.

It is in China's quest to compete with the other major players on the world stage that we might stop the madness–and the mass murdering. Next year the 2008 games will take place in Beijing. China sees the Olympics as an excellent propaganda ploy–a way and means of wowing the world as it hosts its first event viewed by the other four-fifths of the earth's population. When next year's Olympic flame is extinguished, China's rulers are counting on brandishing a bunch of shiny medals and a ton of glowing media–all highlighting their coming out party. But, as the old '60s saying asks, "what if you gave a party and nobody came?" I say we shouldn't go unless China exerts real pressure on Khartoum to stop the killing.

I say we boycott the Olympics. I am not alone in this notion that the games are a good way to get to China's conscience. Mia Farrow, the American actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador, has designated the Beijing games as the "genocide Olympics" while proposing an Olympic-style torch relay through countries with histories of mass murders. Steven Spielberg, the movie producer, is threatening to drop out as the artistic adviser for the spectacular 2008 Olympics opening ceremony.

The party line from the Chinese government is that the 2008 Olympics should be games for games' sake–with no political competition. "We are absolutely opposed to politicization of the Olympics," said Jiang Xiaoyu, one of the committee's executive vice presidents. "This is against the Olympic spirit and against the Olympic charter."

Well, yes and no. The charter and spirit dictate one thing but reality and history has dictated another. Adolph Hitler tried to use the Berlin Olympics as a political and propaganda platform for Aryan supremacy in 1936. An African American, sprinter Jesse Owens, vanquished that big lie on Hitler's own turf by breaking three world records and tying another. Thirty-six years later, again in Germany, 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists after demands that 200 Palestinians held in Israeli jails be released went unheeded.

Three unrelated but successive boycotts followed the Munich Olympics. Twenty-eight African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics in the summer of 1976 because New Zealand's national rugby team continued to compete against South Africa's rugby team although the South Africans had been banned from the Olympics in 1964 because of its apartheid policies. The 1980 Moscow Olympics were boycotted by the United States after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a year earlier. Four years later, the Soviet Union retaliated with its own boycott of the Los Angeles Games.

As the world prepares for next year's fun and games in Beijing, there are Darfurian women and children starving in terrible, teeming refugee camps. They are not responsible for their plight but who is? In an era where "taking responsibility" is the catch phrase of the moment, why won't China? Why doesn't the Bush administration do something substantive to stop the killing? Shouldn't the Congressional Black Caucus act more effectively? And, if no foreign or national responsibility takes hold, what about personal responsibility?

Let the African-American Olympians (who will be responsible for making the games worth watching) choose to watch the 2008 competition from the comfort and safety of their homes in the good old U.S. of A.

Monroe Anderson is a frequent contributor to ebonyjet.com