Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
There's a little more Crispus Attucks for you there on the show today.
I think we're doing an all Crispus Attucks show today on Anti-War Radio.
Okay, our first guest on the show is Spencer Thayer.
He is part of a group called the Chicago Cop Watch, and is also got something to do with, he's part of the committee, the Jail John Burge committee.
Scott Horton has somebody on the show promoting the jailing of someone, that's pretty strange for an anarchist.
I wonder who this guy John Burge is.
Hey, welcome to the show, Spencer, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good, excited to be on.
Now, why would a libertarian activist such as yourself be for putting someone in jail?
Well, as an anarchist, I do believe that jails and the police may or may not be an illegitimate force, but as long as we are forced in our society to conform to the norms and the laws that everyone so far has agreed to, I believe that those who are responsible for upholding the law, police officers, for example, should be subject to the law with maybe even more scrutiny than anyone else, since it is their responsibility to uphold the law.
Now, this individual John Burge, from the year of 1972 to 1991, is charged with torturing some 135 to 200 people of color here in the city of Chicago.
Now, the torture is excruciatingly bad.
We're talking about as bad as your worst nightmare, as bad as salt pit dungeons, as bad as anything in Guantanamo, torturing children, electrocutions, sodomy, rape, these kind of things that just are almost impossible to imagine.
And that is why he needs to face jail.
And now this guy John Burge, he was what, the chief of police in Chicago, or what?
Oh, he was the police commander for Area 2, which is the far south side of Chicago.
But the torture wasn't, his influence was beyond nearly Area 2.
There was a group called the Midnight Crew, who were more or less his followers in the torture scandal, and his group of right-hand men.
And they functioned out of Area 3 and 5, 3 being the far north side, and 5 being the far west side.
Area 2, 3, and 5 were really the most hit for about 20 years, and they just terrorized the community.
And everyone knew about it.
And now, so who finally put this guy on trial, the heroic local district attorney?
Well, yeah, not exactly.
Inside of Chicago, there has been a lot of passing, you know, playing hot potato with the John Burge case.
Actually, the reason he's going to trial is because he lied in a 1993 civil suit to this man named Madison Hobley.
Hobley was forced to confess to the murder of his wife and children and neighbors when a fire burnt down a building.
Burge hooked him up to what is known as the black box, a black box that was used primarily in Vietnam for just charging phones.
But often, the prisoners of the American forces would be forced to confess to certain things or give information by attaching alligator clips to the genitals or ears of these prisoners.
And Burge took that lesson of torture from Vietnam and brought it home to Chicago.
So he, on the stand, deliberately lied and said that he never tortured anyone.
And for that, he is going to trial for perjury, not actually for torture.
Statute of limitations is up on his torture.
So the only thing that can be done is to get him for lying about torture.
Well, geez, I didn't even realize there was a statute of limitations on torture.
I guess murder is the only one without a statute of limitations, huh?
Yeah, it's a little shocking, right?
I mean, this is the kind of thing that if other countries did it, we would make an extreme deal over it.
Judge Wood found that the practice of torture in Area 2 violated the UN Convention against torture.
And yet, somehow, in the United States, we can let someone get away with this, you know, for 20 years.
And just because of the technicality, we are forced to play a legal game, a dance, a limbo, just trying to have him see some minimal amount of justice.
And the chances of getting a conviction with John Burge is pretty low because we have to prove in court that he lied.
And now that's going to be very difficult, just because you have to prove intent and you have to prove that the evidence against him is solid.
And there's just so many things that are standing in our way that the victims of torture don't even think that they'll see justice in even this small, incremental manner.
Okay, now I just want to be clear on this detail.
It is a local prosecutor who has gone ahead and indicted this guy and put him on trial?
Or it's federal civil rights stuff?
This is federal.
This is federal.
Okay, so that's where the special prosecutor comes from is the Department of Justice?
Correct.
Well, you know, I'm not exactly sure, you know, where I'm going with this, but it seems like kind of apropos of all the recent discussion about the Civil Rights Act, you know, the way liberty is supposed to work, supposedly, is that, well, you know, the people of Chicago would make sure that they elected a council, a mayor, a prosecutor who would make sure that things like this just don't happen.
And that when they do, if they do happen, that the people responsible for such things are held to account.
And because the people of Chicago either can't or won't do that, their only hope then is that they'll have somebody really nice at the Department of Justice who will come and check into things, you know, basically asking the boss's boss to put him in check.
And, you know, I think for the most part, that's a bad way to go about it.
I mean, in a lot of ways, it's easy to understand how people just can't do anything about their district attorney.
I mean, we had a guy named Ronnie Earl in Austin, Texas for, I don't know, more than a generation or something.
And basically, he would give a medal to any cop who killed an unarmed black guy.
And he could not be unelected.
I mean, it was there was nothing that could be done.
I think he finally moved on because he wanted to hire office or something.
But there is just nothing that the people of Austin could do to replace that guy.
So the best that they could do is go on their hands and knees and ask Janet Reno or John Ashcroft to please come and put their local cops in check.
And then how's that work out for you?
Not very well.
As you said, you know, in this case, this guy may get convicted of perjury.
But even then, they won't put him in the general population with the people who he put in there.
Oh, of course not.
No.
I mean, he's also suffering from cancer at the moment.
Oh, that's that.
Yeah.
So that makes the chances of him seeing anyone in a regular prison almost zero.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's amazing to me that in this day and age, he doesn't just tell the judge, hey, I have sovereign immunity.
I'm the king.
I can torture whoever I want.
No law can apply to me.
And that the judge wouldn't just say, yeah, of course, you're right, and bang the gavel and let him go.
It's almost been that bad.
I mean, well, for for the entirety of the 80s, our current mayor, Mayor Richard Daley, was the Cook County space attorney.
And he received a minimum of 30, but maybe more than 50 incidents of torture, obvious torture where a doctor had put into the case.
These are the signs of torture.
These are the things that have happened.
And he just passed it on.
He just got to his desk and he just let it drop.
I mean, that's essentially telling the Chicago police that you are immune.
We accept torture.
This is the norm in this city.
And you just have to get the job done.
That's what Mayor Daley was telling the Chicago police.
And then in 2003, when Lisa Madigan was elected, who is our state attorney, she has refused consistently to even look at new cases where it's obvious that torture has been involved to force a confession.
I mean, what she's essentially saying is that she believes that our constitutional right to a fair trial and due process are, you know, they're fine, but not when torture is involved.
Torture is OK.
And that's just the message that everyone gets.
And it's no surprise that our culture, you know, we glorify torture today.
It's not like this is something new.
We have been glorifying torture for a very long time.
California in the 60s had torture problems with their police.
It's just this is a part of American law enforcement.
And so to expect to expect to prosecute George Bush or Colin Powell or, you know, John, you or any of these other these other guys who are the underlings of, quote, unquote, the leader of the free world is absurd.
If we can't even prosecute some fat cop from the south side of Chicago, it just it's very depressing.
Well, you know, I mean, that's the whole thing.
I mean, all of history is depressing.
Everything, you know, happened the wrong way.
But, you know, we got the future ahead of us that, you know, the point is to try to get these things right and abandon.
I mean, you're I couldn't agree with you more that, you know, even though it's a contradictory thing, you know, on one hand, we're the land of liberty and all that stuff and nobody would ever countenance torture as Shepard Smith or whatever.
On the other hand, this is the land of John Wayne.
And as Bianca Oblivion, Chaos Radio likes to point out, John Wayne's thing was he grabbed you by the back of the head and he dunked you in the horse trough until you were ready to tell him what he wanted to know.
And that's what it means to be a man.
That's what it means to be an American is I will kick your ass until you do what I say.
And in fact, I'll go ahead as long as I'm going off.
I saw this thing on TV about a year ago, Spencer, where it was about how all movies in American history from the teens on always portrayed the cops as lowlife scumbag, corrupt and at best, Keystone idiots running into each other, doing everything wrong.
And the heroes were always the antiheroes.
And that basically was an uninterrupted trend until The French Connection and then Dirty Harry in the 1970s.
And what the cops realize in the whole TV show I'm watching here, it was like a documentary all about this.
And it was all from the point of view of the police.
And it was all about how, man, there was nothing better that ever happened to them than The French Connection and Dirty Harry.
Because now not only were they the heroes, because that's how easy it was to change the mind of a couple of hundred million Americans to show them a stupid movie.
Not only were they heroes then, but now the more brutal and the more outside the law they went a la Dirty Harry, the better and the more heroic they were.
And the people just internalize that.
And the cops deliberately set about, created organizations whose entire purpose is to make cops look good on TV.
And they've just done nothing but follow that path and spend all their extra police union PR dollars on trying to not just show cops as heroes, but show cops who disregard the law because it's really necessary this time as heroes like, you know, Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of that crap is just the latest incarnation of it.
It's all about the normalization, right?
It's all about getting you to internalize the argument and think that it's yours.
Yeah, torture's fine.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, when the people accept torture as the norm, well, first of all, it degrades society and it makes everyone a little more unsafe.
But beyond that, it just makes a mockery of justice.
But look, I mean, here's the reason why this is such a big deal, right?
Is because the song, the songs we sing and everything, the pledges that we take are that this is what we're about, right?
We don't all speak the exact same language.
Oh, maybe at all.
We don't all have the same religious beliefs.
All of our grandparents all aren't from the same place.
We don't share a history that goes back 2000 years or whatever, 3000 or more places in the old world.
What we have in common is that we believe in liberty and justice for all.
That's what makes us Americans.
So it's not just that, you know, we got nothing left without that.
Other than that, we're just a bunch of people in a place, which, you know, maybe that's better, too.
Only I would rather have, like, the fair trials and stuff.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, the way to combat this is by raising public awareness and the consciousness of the people.
I mean, I think a lot of people accept torture and accept the brutality of the police and encroaching police state simply because they don't feel like they have options, that they don't have the power to challenge it, and they're scared.
You know, everyone's scared all the time in our culture, and by terrorizing communities of color, that ensures those communities are even more afraid and that, you know, when a community is afraid, community feels that there's no such thing as justice, I mean, crime only gets worse.
And so that only makes everyone else more afraid.
And it's just a repeating cycle of the psychological problems that our culture has.
Yeah.
And we're trying to—I mean, here in Chicago, we do have—well, we're trying to create alternative policing models.
And that's what Chicago Cop Watch is sort of about.
We understand that before you can have an alternative police or a just society, we have to first look directly and focus our lens on the arm of the state that is enforcing the law.
And what Cop Watch does is we go around and we monitor the police to make sure that they are not violating people's civil rights while being arrested or while interacting with the police.
And while we're doing that, while we're in the neighborhood, we pass out the rights flyers, we try and get communities grouped together so we can meet with them, teach them their rights, tell them exactly what they are allowed to say and not say according to the Constitution.
And it's shocking.
It's absolutely shocking, the amount of ignorance the general public has about their own rights.
And when the general public has zero idea of what really the Constitution affords them, the creeping police state and the idea that torture exists, it's not really as shocking as you would think.
There's just this giant hole in the public consciousness, and the police in the state are exploiting that hole and filling it with whatever tactics work to control it.
Yeah, boy, you nailed it.
And that really is the thing, too.
And you know what's really frustrating about it is it'll take you, you know, 10 minutes to read the whole Bill of Rights and understand it all.
I mean, it'd take you one minute to read the whole thing, but to memorize it would take you 10, you know, and that's the thing that kills me.
Anyway, so look, everybody, I'm talking with Spencer Thayer here, and he's a member of Chicago Cop Watch and also Jail John Burge, the torturer.
It's Jail John Burge.
It's J-O-N-B-U-R-G-E, JailJohnBurge.org.
And now in the last few minutes here, can you please tell us the stories of some of these individuals that suffered at the hands of this Chicago police commander, John Burge, who now are hoping to see him perhaps convicted on a perjury charge here?
Well, the most famous case is the one Andrew Wilson that broke the torture scandal.
He was convicted of murdering an officer, and during the 72-hour period of the manhunt for this individual, there were a lot of people arrested.
However, Burge was the first through the gate with Andrew Wilson, and he managed to somehow in this small period of time get Andrew Wilson to completely confess to the murder by use of electrocution to the genitals, to his lips, to his fingers.
They tied a noose around his neck.
They put a black typewriter bag over him, over his head, so that he suffocated.
He would pass out.
Much worse than waterboarding, the feeling that you're drowning, this is actually true suffocation until he passed out, then they would revive him and then do it again.
And with that level of brutality with just beatings and tying you up to a red-hot radiator and burning you, those things happen to him, obviously you're going to confess to anything at that point.
And that case actually broke because one brave doctor, Dr. John Raba, released the medical evidence about it and sent it to Daily, and that's when people started to get a little suspicious.
But there were other people, too.
One of the primary organizers of the jail John Birch Committee, Mark Clement, he was tortured when he was 16.
His torture wasn't nearly as terrible as...
Pardon me, he was tortured when he was what, teen?
He was 16.
16.
Yes, he was 16, and he was molested when he was 16.
They tortured his genitalia, and he confessed to an arson, and he went to jail for 24 years.
So that's very terrible.
There was also a 13-year-old boy who was tortured.
He was electrocuted.
They put alligator clips and hook and muscle socks up to his lips, and his teeth were so...
He was grinding so hard that he still has medical problems with his jaw to this day.
I mean, the list is absurd.
In fact, today we're posting a comprehensive list of every tortured victim on jailjohnbirch.org, but it generally comes down to a specific meticulous pattern of torture, where first they beat you, then they electrocute you, then they suffocate you, and then they tie you up to a hot radiator.
That was typically what happened when you were refusing to confess.
And then in between that, there was racist slurs, threatening loved ones.
They even would bring in loved ones and actually bring them into the station and threaten to torture them in front of the suspect.
The loved one did not know this was going on, but they could see the loved one was in the precinct.
And obviously, if you've been tortured yourself very brutally, you would believe that they would do that to anyone else.
Yeah, and now, listen, I want to stop you just right here, because this is the same kind of thing we've heard about in the wars, too.
And I think, I guess I'm just criticizing the worst part of my own mind here, which is, yeah, yeah, yeah, you make a bunch of threats to people.
You dry fire a gun near their head.
It's not quite actually shooting them in the head, right?
It's not quite actually torturing their mom or whatever, but you just nailed it right there.
They've been torturing you, and it's a credible threat.
And then you're there locked up in shackles, and they promise they're going to do this to your wife, your daughter, your sister, your son, your father, and that you will be helpless to do anything about it.
And that, in and of itself, is torture.
Period.
Absolutely.
Yeah, without a doubt.
I mean, I don't know which is worse, the physical pain or the threat of a loved one being hurt like you're currently being hurt.
A lot of people I know, or a lot of people I've met who have had this experience would typically say that they were more afraid of their mom.
Usually it was the mother who was being threatened.
Well, you know, it seems to me, Spencer, like maybe it's just the internet and the YouTube have changed everything where every case, well, and everybody's got a video camera on their telephone now, too.
And so, you know, I guess there are probably a few places here and there, you know, compiling them all.
But it's just sort of a common meme now on the internet.
Latest YouTube of a cop completely going insane on some innocent person in the middle of the street in front of God and everybody and a guy with a video camera.
And so it just I don't know if things have actually gotten worse at all.
Maybe things haven't gotten worse at all, but it but more and more and more, you know, each little isolated local police abuse case that gets documented on video somehow.
These seem to really be piling up and creating what's in my mind a real crisis here.
I wonder where the rest of the people of this country are.
In fact, as long as I'm at it, I'll go back to the original point about, you know, if the theory is that every man is born free and that we're the ones responsible for protecting our rights, all of this check and balance and comeuppance has got to come from the people.
And if it's within the rule of law and whatever, fine.
And that means that Spencer's got to run for D.A.
And he's got to win.
And then he's got to go to war against the police department and put them in prison.
This is the responsibility of the people of this country.
When we wait around for Eric Holder, who is an accessory to the murder of Kenneth Trenadue, to come in and take care of us in a prison cell, to come and take care of us and protect us from the torturers, we find ourselves stuck out.
This has got to be bottom up.
We're going about this all wrong, going to the Department of Justice for this.
But but then again, look back in history.
Why do we have to go to the Department of Justice for it?
Because the people of the country, particularly of the South, would not live up to their own goddamn creed.
That's why.
Yeah, well, that's true.
But I mean, there's there's the other reason, too.
We can look at the Black Panther here in Chicago.
They tried to do alternatives to the police.
They tried to intimidate the police to behave according to the oath that they swore.
They would drive around with back.
Back then in Illinois, it was legal to drive around with weapons as long as there was nothing in the chamber.
And so they would drive around with weapons wherever police would go.
And they tried to enforce the law for the police.
And then I don't know if the listening audience is aware of what has happened to the what happened to the Black Panthers back then, but it was there was systematic assassination of members of the Black Panther Party.
And COINTELPRO tactics were just broken apart.
So there's a there's an added level of complication in that if you try to create an alternative to the police or try, at the very least, to force the police to behave when the police are so rampantly corrupt, you're actually facing the violence of the state, the very arm of the brutal arm of the state.
And that's a very, very difficult thing to convince people to stand up to, you know, up to that.
Not many people want to experience the brutality that the police can dish out.
Yeah, well, no doubt, especially since they all carry M-16s now.
Well, the short barrel version.
But here in Chicago, they're carrying M4 carbine rifles.
Yeah, the yeah, the special operations section was broken up.
And now we have two counter gang units and they're now armed with full on military weapons.
Well, like you said, it's a vicious cycle.
You know, the more they act like this, the more we hate them, the more they don't go away.
They just become more afraid of us.
And then they just act crazier.
You know, there was an article in the paper the other day about, according to the government's version of events here, the guy hated cops and he was fed up.
He was a technicalitarian and got caught up in all this stuff and and whatever.
And he and his son both like killed a couple of cops or one cop.
And then there was a shootout, whatever.
And the whole article in The Times was about how these people were cop hating anti-government extremists, et cetera, et cetera.
And look, I'm not trying to justify anything they did or like, you know, threaten.
There's more of that where that came from or nothing like that.
But I'm just saying it seemed kind of just to not even occur to the people writing the news analysis of this story.
Why any American would hate cops, why any American would think that if they're pulled over on the side of the road at any given time, that their life was in the hands of people that they can't trust.
This is not the people in your neighborhood on the Mr. Rogers show.
These people are dangerous.
And it's you know, I'm not again, I'm not justifying what this guy did, but I'm just saying, you know, here this has been a week or two of news, not that it was on TV, but for people reading the Internet, where cops are killing a seven year old girl, killing dogs in front of a seven year old boy and arresting his dad over a little bit of resin in a pipe.
Innocent bystanders shot in the court says, yeah, but he was wearing the same color shirt as a as a robber.
And so no big deal.
And there's there's a list of 10 police abuse, 15 police abuse cases in a week leading up to this thing.
And then they go, oh, my God, this guy's got some terrible ideological hatred of government for no reason.
And and all that does is reinforce in the minds of the cops that thin blue line gets thicker and thicker and thicker.
And here we are on the other side of it.
There's two kinds of people in this world, suspects and victims.
And now, you know, there ain't no victims anymore.
It's at the cops themselves.
All the rest of us are, you know, on their list.
Right.
Yeah.
And recently, I mean, actually today, the journal released the article stating that crime has actually dropped in big, large cities, six point nine percent and crimes on a steady decrease.
And there's no analysis yet of exactly why crime has gone down.
But there is the indication that the four billion dollars that the Obama administration gave to local law enforcement to beef up their tactics and increase their numbers probably has reduced it to some extent.
But at what cost?
There's this website called Injustice Everywhere.
And I'm not even sure I buy that.
I think probably they're all just fudging their numbers like the like wire, like the wire in order to get that money.
Right now, that's a good point.
And there's also the counter argument that crime increases as drug sales spike or increase and drug sales are going on are actually diminishing at the moment.
So that would correlate to the fact that crime is also diminishing.
So that's because the CIA's drug of choice right now is opiates instead of cocaine.
So everybody's getting high and chilling instead of shooting each other.
And so like I was saying, at what cost?
We have police enforcement everywhere is ramping up their tactics.
We're seeing security cameras pop up everywhere.
Everyone's being monitored.
The police are getting away with far more.
And though we have the technology to monitor them and put the injustice on YouTube, I just don't see much happening.
Like I was saying, the website Injustice Everywhere or the Twitter newsfeed Injustice News, every day you'll see roughly six posts about something that cops are doing.
I mean, it's an absurd number of violations of our civil rights happening every day.
But these are localized.
Then they very rarely ever go beyond, like you said, international news.
And the reason the I mean, my opinion, the reason for this is because the media has a invested interest in the state and the state is represented by most people as the police.
So the only alternative we have is through the means like YouTube or the Internet of exposing this.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and that's why it's so important what you guys are doing there at Copwatch and again at Jail John Burge.
Dot org is J.O.
N.B.
U.R.
G.E.
Dot org.
Because you're right, the media won't do their job.
Well, actually, they do their job and their job is to be the ombudsman for the state.
And that's from top to bottom, left to right, coast to coast and everywhere in between.
You know, if you just think for us tonight, seven on your side, if it's a dispute against a private business that ripped somebody off, they'll go and just bust their chops from here to there until everything's OK.
But if it's a cop or any government department did anything to anyone, the seven on your side is always about how, yeah, well, they know better than you.
They have your best interests at heart.
And yeah, it's tough for you.
But stop whining because the government is great.
And I mean, it's so obvious.
It's obvious to everybody except the people who are putting it on.
Right.
You can't criticize them about it.
They'll be like, huh?
They don't even realize what they're doing, but they sure are good at it.
That's true.
And the people, I think that there's a general consensus that the police are corrupt in our society.
I mean, I have a lot of there's a lot of detractors that are like, you know, Copwatch and Joe Jumper's committee.
But when you talk to them, almost all of them will admit to, on some level, massive corruption.
But they just justify it as necessary.
And I think I think the people in power, the statesmen and elected officials, they acknowledge internally.
They would have to.
They're not stupid that that they are part of a corrupt system.
But I think I think they're just kind of cynical about it.
Yeah.
You know, I heard a former cop call in a radio show in Austin, Texas, years and years ago, the old Shannon Burke show.
And he said that he was a Williamson County sheriff deputy, which means one of the worst people on earth.
Those guys.
But he was apparently a pretty decent guy.
And he was an old guy.
And he said his job was whenever there was a new trainee, he would drive around with them the first few days and make sure they were cool and that kind of thing before setting them off on their own.
And how he would always ask them, why did you become a cop?
And they would all give the same answer about, well, I just like helping people and whatever.
And, you know, he was he was used to that, but he always asked.
But one of these guys who I'm sure to this day is a Williamson County sheriff's deputy right now.
He asked, why did you become a cop?
And he said, well, the way I see it, things are getting more and more Gestapo around here.
And I just want to make sure I'm wearing a brown shirt.
And that's really that is the deal, too, right?
Is once your system is that corrupt, man, you better go ahead and get in on it or else how are you going to protect yourself?
And that becomes the the value judgment that people are left to make, you know?
Yeah, but that actually is a problem in the South Side, an area in Area 5 or an area, too, of Chicago.
I hear that a lot from family members.
They'll say that this or that member of their family joined the police because they didn't want to be harassed anymore, but they were they were sick of it and they wanted out.
So that is certainly, you know, join the club if you want to be exempt from the brutality.
All right, Spencer, tell him some websites.
The most important website to go to is jailjohnbirge.org because we are still trying, even though Birge is going to trial today or yesterday, we still need to put on pressure and we still need help and we still need people to get the word out about Birge so that justice may happen.
The other website is chicagocopwatch.org, and as soon as the Birge trial is over, we'll be changing our organization from jailjohnbirge.org to takestandagainsttorture.org and we're going to focus on police torture all over the nation.
Hell yeah, good for you, man.
Thank you.
No problem.
What we do.
All right, everybody, that is Spencer Thayer.
He's from Chicago Cop Watch and Jail.
The Jail John Birge Committee.
That's jailjohnbirge.org.
Again, that's J-O-N-B-U-R-G-E.
Jailjohnbirge.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, man.
Thank you.
All right, we'll be back.
