Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalJon Burge, Torturer of Over 100 Black Men, is Out of Prison After Less Than Four Years
» October 2, 2014
Jon Burge, Torturer of Over 100 Black Men, is Out of Prison After Less Than Four Years
A human rights lawyer representing police torture victims on the former police commander’s release from prison.
Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been released to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.
Burge’s 2010 conviction for perjury came nearly 20 years after his reign of racist terror finally ended. From 1972 to 1991, he led a torture ring of white Chicago detectives who routinely used electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags and typewriter covers, mock executions and brutal attacks on the genitals to obtain confessions from their victims. A team of lawyers at the People’s Law Office, including myself, documented 118 such cases. But a series of police superintendents, numerous Cook County prosecutors and a cover-up that implicated former Mayor Richard M. Daley (during his time as both mayor and state’s attorney) protected Burge and his men from prosecution until well after the statute of limitations had run out on their crimes of torture.
Like Al Capone's prosecution for tax evasion, Burge could only be prosecuted for lying about what he and his men did, not for the deeds themselves. He was sentenced to the maximum term of four and a half years, and ended up serving three and a half before being released to a halfway house—a stark contrast to the fates of his victims, many of whom received death sentences or life in prison on the basis of confessions that were tortured from them.
Despite his felony conviction, Burge continued to collect his pension (now at $54,000 per year) while serving his time, and the Illinois Supreme Court recently decided four to three that he may continue to do so in the future. But the nearly $700,000 that Burge has already collected is little compared to what Chicago, Cook County, the State of Illinois and federal taxpayers have already expended as a result of the Burge torture scandal.
More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17213/jon_burge_torture_chicago_has_not_paid_for_his_crimes
Maybe it is political! After seeing your post I found this, since I had heard they were leftists....
Saw several articles mentioning the leftist politics of the disappeared students. (Old, old story in Latin America, isn't it?)
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Cartel hitmen confess to killing some of Mexico’s missing students
By Manuel Rueda @thisisfusion
Posted 10/06/2014 9:14 pm
Updated 10/06/2014 9:17 pm
~snip~
The motives for the crime are still unclear. But one hypothesis put forward by analysts following the case is that the students may have been targeted because of their radical leftist politics. Students at Ayotzinapa often block roads and hijack trucks during protests in which they demand improved conditions at their school and rally against Mexico’s education policies.
“Acts of political repression have been endemic to Guerrero for the past 40 years,” Javier Osorio, a criminologist at the City University of New York who specializes in violence in Mexico, told Fusion.
Osorio said that farmers’ groups, indigenous groups and other dissident organizations have been targeted by municipal and state officials and are frequently subjected to arbitrary arrests and monitoring.
The violence has occurred within a context of political instability in Guerrero, a southern state that has been home to three small guerrilla movements since the 1970s.
Two students from Ayotzinapa were killed in clashes with police in the city of Chilpancingo in 2011 after they blocked a highway that links Guerrero to Mexico City. At the time, the students were demanding that food subsidies be restored.
More:
http://fusion.net/story/19980/cartel-hitmen-confess-to-killing-some-of-mexicos-missing-students/
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Leftist Groups in New York Protest Student Killings in Mexico
October 9, 2014 7:00 am
~snip~
“It’s not a coincidence that this happened in the state of Guerrero,” says Moran, who remembers that 17 peasant protesters were killed in the state in 1995. According to Moran, the government is targeting leftist peasant and student organizations. “The normales [public teachers colleges that the missing students were attending] are seeds of radicalization. Students have normally been very active.” Moran also mentioned that several schoolteachers who became guerrilla leaders came from Guerrero, such as Othón Salazar, Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vásquez.
Other than protesting the education cuts, the students in Iguala sought to raise funds for a trip to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 massacre there of students by soldiers.
More:
http://latindispatch.com/2014/10/09/leftist-groups-in-new-york-protest-the-student-killings-in-mexico/
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Mystery of Missing Students in Mexico Shines Spotlight on Troubled City
Ayotzinapa Teachers College Had History of Radicalism, Run-Ins With Mayor
~snip~
The September clashes followed more than a year of tension between Mayor Abarca and the teachers college in the rural hamlet of Ayotzinapa, about 80 miles south of Iguala, officials, residents and students say.
Students seized and vandalized Iguala’s city hall in June 2013, accusing the mayor of involvement in the killing of a prominent leftist political activist, say officials, residents and students.
Federal police say they are investigating the death of the activist, Arturo Hernández.
~snip~
The all-male Ayotzinapa teachers college has about 520 students, mostly from poor farming families. It trains them to be elementary school teachers in rural communities. Its campus is festooned with murals of Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara as well as Mexican revolutionaries—including several of the school’s alumni.
Mr. Hernández shared the ideology of many of the school’s students and their penchant for protest. They are known across Mexico for highway blockades and other disruptions, officials and residents say.
Fernando Martínez, a fourth-year student at the college, said the school and Mr. Hernández were allies in the struggle for the rights of the oppressed.
“We supported each other’s causes,” Mr. Martínez said. “We shared the same leftist ideals. It was an alliance.”
More:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/mystery-of-missing-students-in-mexico-shines-spotlight-on-troubled-city-1412889032
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College of missing Mexican students vows to maintain revolutionary zeal
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Foreign StaffOctober 9, 2014
The teachers college here, known as the Raul Isidro Burgos Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa, is one of 16 institutions around Mexico that arose following Mexico’s revolution nearly a century ago with the aim of training teachers to raise literacy and standards of living among the rural poor.
In more recent decades, the rural teachers colleges became bastions of ardent leftist politics, instilling in students self-reliance, a deep suspicion of the government and a sense that politicians were eager to take away their resources.
Two of the most famous alumni of Ayotzinapa are Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vazquez, who joined a guerrilla movement in Guerrero state that emerged in the late 1960s. Both died after confrontations with Mexican authorities. An artistic rendering of their faces adorns one side of the basketball court, alongside that of Che Guevara.
The more than 100 students who headed to Iguala Sept. 26 hoped to raise money for a delegation to travel to Mexico City to take part in an annual march that commemorates the Oct. 2, 1968, Tlatelolco massacre, when government security forces opened fire on student protesters, killing perhaps as many as 300.
More:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/09/242906/college-of-missing-mexican-students.html?#storylink=cpy
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I'm glad you mentioned it. Looks as if we are moving closer to seeing what's behind this, doesn't it? Thank you.
US Blockade Of Cuba Intensified Under Pres Obama
US Blockade Of Cuba Intensified Under Pres Obama
HAVANA, Oct 9 (BERNAMA-NNN-Prensa Latina) -- The US blockade against Cuba was intensified during president Barack Obama's administration with the increased persecution of financial institutions which have business relations with the island.
Andres Zaldivar, a researcher of the Center for the Study of Global Economy said in a video conference on the topic that the measures were part of the implementation of Obama's "smart power" policy.
From 2010 to 2014, out of the 130 extraterritorial actions carried out against the island, 81 were in the financial sector and 38 institutions were fined with the astronomical amount of more than US$11.4 billion, he added.
He stressed that sanctions are imposed even to US allies, like the recent US$8.9 billion fine to the French bank BNP Paribas.
Obama's strategy includes financing the USAID in order to implement subversive programs through the use of the new information and communication technologies, like the Cuban Meanwhile Washington keeps alive the philosophy of punishment, the policy of not forgiving Cuba for having taken the reins of its destiny, Josefina Vidal, Director General of United States department in the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
More:
http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v7/wn/newsworld.php?id=1074974
Fred Grimm: Two more added to Florida prisons’ sadistic legacy
Fred Grimm: Two more added to Florida prisons’ sadistic legacy
10/09/2014 9:38 AM
| Updated: 10/09/2014 10:16 AM
What a ghastly continuum we’ve countenanced in our state penal institutions.
Just this week came news of two more highly suspicious killings in Florida lock-ups – 89 years apart. Two more unsettling deaths to be added to a long and sadistic legacy: a 15-year-old inmate at the Dozier School for Boys whose skull was bashed back in 1925 and a 36-year-old mother, who died with signs of “blunt force trauma” in her cell Oct. 1 at Lowell Correctional Institution.
For more than a century, it has been as if beatings, torture, rape, terror, killings, cover-ups were official state policy, ignored by law enforcement and shrugged off by politicians. For the last few months, the Herald and the Tampa Bay Times have been writing about two disparate outrages along these lines.
But maybe not. Maybe these recurring injustices are all part of the same, long festering scandal.
My colleague Julie Brown has written about the brutal deaths of several prisoners in the state system over the last few years, including that of Darren Rainey, a 50-year-old mentally ill inmate who died after he was locked in a scalding shower at Dade Correctional Institution in 2012 and Randall Jordan-Aparo, 27, who died after he was doused in aerosol chemicals at Franklin Correctional Institution in 2010.
More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article2632733.html#storylink=cpy
Mexico’s Drug War is Killing Children
October 09, 2014
There's Little Mystery to This Mass Grave
Mexico’s Drug War is Killing Children
by LAURA CARLSEN
Many countries prohibit deploying their military for domestic law enforcement: it’s a recipe for violent authoritarian abuse.
But the Obama administration’s prohibitionist drug war is funding and encouraging abuse and brutal, corrupt, mass-grave-level murders throughout Mexico and Central America – enough that even drug-war apologists admit that the appalling increase in human-rights abuses are a result of sending the military and police into communities in the name of anti-trafficking.
In just nine years, the drug war waged by the US and Mexico has created a climate of violence that has claimed more than 100,000 lives throughout the country, many young people – including two horrific massacres and a mass disappearance in the last six months connected to law enforcement nominally tasked with battling the spread of drugs.
An ambush on 26 September, begun by uniformed local police and finished off by an armed commando, left six young people dead and 43 students missing, nearly half of whom were last seen in police custody. Others are battling for their lives in local hospitals (where the possibility of a new attack is considered so high that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered precautionary measures for the wounded and the missing). This week, 28 semi-burned bodies were discovered in a mass grave, which authorities say could be the bodies of th e missing students. Politicians allied with cartels are blamed for the atrocity.
The mayor of Iguala, Guerrero, where the attacks took place, has gone into hiding, and the city’s head of security is charged with ordering the ambush. A state judge has charged 22 policemen with the crime and accused them of being hit men for the “Guerreros Unidos” gang.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/09/mexicos-drug-war-is-killing-children/
Paraguay’s Supreme Court issues ‘historic’ land ruling
Paraguay’s Supreme Court issues ‘historic’ land ruling
Cattle-ranchers’ legal action versus expropriation of 1,000s of hectares in favour of the indigenous Enxet people is rejected
Posted by
David Hill
Tuesday 7 October 2014 08.13 EDT
theguardian.com
Imagine being forced to leave your home to make way for cattle-ranching and live alongside a highway for years and years, dreaming, say, of one day returning to cultivate your grandparents’ garden plot, or remembering all the animals you raised there, or having to sneak back in to bury your dead. That’s been the experience for the indigenous Enxet people, from a community called Sawhoyamaxa in Paraguay’s Chaco forest, since the 1990s.
Last Thursday, though, the Enxet received some sensational news. The Supreme Court of Justice unanimously rejected ranchers’ claims that a landmark government decision made earlier this year to expropriate 14,404 hectares and give them back to Sawhoyamaxa was “unconstitutional.”
“We’re very happy to be able to recover our territories,” Sawhoyamaxa’s vice-leader Leonardo González told the Guardian. “We’ve been victims of the government and ranchers.”
“Justice has been done,” said Basilio Garcia, another community member, in a statement released by Paraguayan NGO Tierraviva, which supports the Enxet and calls the ruling “historic.” “We want to live better after so many years of suffering.”
“This demonstrates that Paraguayan justice is starting to compensate Paraguay’s historic debt to indigenous peoples, whose rights have always been violated,” said Eriberto Ayala, another Enxet man, in the same statement.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2014/oct/07/paraguay-supreme-court-historic-land-ruling
US official downplays Cuba's invitation to summit
Source: Associated Press
US official downplays Cuba's invitation to summit
By KATHIA MARTINEZ, Associated Press | October 8, 2014 | Updated: October 8, 2014 8:13pm
PANAMA CITY (AP) — A senior State Department official said Wednesday that the U.S. is prepared to welcome Cuba for the first time to a region-wide summit but wants heads of state to focus attention on the communist government's human rights record.
At the urging of Latin American leaders, host country Panama plans to invite Cuban President Raul Castro to the Summit of the Americas in April. Cuba was excluded from six previous summits because Washington said it didn't meet the region's standards for democracy and U.S. lawmakers, led by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, are urging Panama to reconsider its invitation this time around.
The deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America, John Feeley, played down the significance of Cuba's likely participation. Speaking to journalists in Spanish during a stop in Panama on Wednesday, Feeley said that "it's not so important the guests at the table but the meal that's served."
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa boycotted the last summit in Cartagena, Colombia, over Cuba's exclusion and several of his leftist allies have threatened to sit out the next gathering of 34 regional heads of state if Cuba isn't invited to attend.
The Washington-based Organization of American States, which organizes the summits, suspended Cuba shortly after Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/US-official-downplays-Cuba-s-invitation-to-summit-5810429.php
Will Hollywood Give Him Last Word Against the CIA’s Media Apologists? The Resurrection of Gary Webb
October 07, 2014
Will Hollywood Give Him Last Word Against the CIA’s Media Apologists?
The Resurrection of Gary Webb
by JEFF COHEN
It’s been almost a decade since once-luminous investigative journalist Gary Webb extinguished his own life.
It’s been 18 years since Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News exploded across a new medium – the Internet – and definitively linked crack cocaine in Los Angeles and elsewhere to drug traffickers allied with the CIA’s rightwing Contra army in Nicaragua. Webb’s revelations sparked anger across the country, especially in black communities.
But the 1996 series (which was accompanied by unprecedented online documentation) also sparked one of the most ferocious media assaults ever on an individual reporter – a less-than-honest backlash against Webb by elite newspapers that had long ignored or suppressed evidence of CIA/Contra/cocaine connections.
The assault by the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times drove Webb out of the newspaper business, and ultimately to his death.
Beginning this Friday, the ghost of Gary Webb will haunt his tormenters from movie screens across the country, with the opening of the dramatic film “Kill the Messenger” – based partly on Webb’s 1998 “Dark Alliance” book.
The movie dramatizes Webb’s investigation of Contra-allied Nicaraguan cocaine traffickers Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon (whose drug activities were apparently protected for reasons of U.S. “national security”) and their connection to L.A.’s biggest crack dealer, “Freeway” Ricky Ross.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/07/the-resurrection-of-gary-webb/
Terrorism and Assassinations in Venezuela
October 08, 2014
Silence From the Media as the Paramilitaries Go Rogue
Terrorism and Assassinations in Venezuela
by MARIA PAEZ VICTOR
Last Friday, the centre of Caracas was filled with thousands of mourning citizens as they accompanied two flag draped coffins loaded with flowers they had cast upon it in homage.
If a Member of Parliament representing the Venezuelan opposition had been brutally tortured and stabbed to death in his own home, the Western press –including Canada’s- would have splashed the news in headlines around the world.
Yet this has just happened to a Member of Parliament from the governing party of Venezuela, but the international press is mostly silent. International politicians have not wrung their hands with indignation or regret, as they have about the lawful incarceration of opposition leader Leopoldo López who publicly and repeatedly incited mobs to violence and caused has at least 47 deaths.
On Wednesday, October 1, 2014, Robert Serra, 27 years old, a lawyer and legislator from the governing party PSUV, the youngest Member of Parliament of Venezuela, and his partner Maria Herrera, were assassinated in their own home in a central area of Caracas. It was an outrageous and deliberate act of terror. Robert Serra and María Herrera were tortured, stabbed and then bled to death. He specialized in criminology, and was engaged in the task of helping to curb crime in the country. María Herrera assisted him in this vital work. Robert Serra came from a poor family; his mother worked as a street hawker to help him go to law school. He was famous for his insightful interventions in parliament and was much beloved, some referred to him as “ a future Chávez”.
Their deaths were carried out systematically. Ernesto Samper, ex-president of Colombia and current president of UNASUR, said: “This crime is evidence of the infiltration of Colombian paramilitary in Venezuela.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/08/terrorism-and-assassinations-in-venezuela/
New Orleans public paid $75,000 for judges' trips to beach resorts, mountain lodges, more
Source: Times-Picayune
New Orleans public paid $75,000 for judges' trips to beach resorts, mountain lodges, more
By NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on October 08, 2014 at 11:07 AM, updated October 08, 2014 at 3:52 PM
From the white sandy beaches of Florida to a mountain top resort in Montana and even a trip abroad to Panama, most New Orleans criminal district judges spent thousands in public dollars a year jetting off to conferences and events, even as they cut the court's operating budget and faced a large backlog of cases, records reviewed by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and WVUE Fox 8 News show.
The expenses totaled more than $75,000 for legal education conferences and other out-of-town trips in an 18-month period that ended in June. In that time, the court cut spending for jury services, legal transcripts, building maintenance and other key areas. The trips also took judges away from the bench, some for periods totaling weeks, as the court grappled with hundreds of backlogged cases.
Some of the most travel-happy jurists also were among those ranked least efficient in job performance by the non-profit watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission.
Judge Arthur Hunter was the courthouse's undisputed travel champ in the 18 months analyzed, billing the court $15,347 for 10 trips, including treks to conferences in Denver, San Antonio, and twice to a resort in Destin, Fla. Hunter ranked 9th out of 12 judges in the crime commission's most recent performance evaluation, released in June.
Read more: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/10/criminal_district_court_judici.html
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