In 2002, Abdul and Ahmed Rabbani were taken from their homes in Karachi, Pakistan, by Pakistani authorities on behalf of the U.S. military, on the basis of a false tip that Ahmed was a wanted terrorist named Hassan Ghul. The police tortured the brothers and then gave them to the U.S. military to be further interrogated at a CIA black site in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ahmed was a thirty-three-year-old taxi driver with a minor criminal history; he had dropped out of school at age fifteen. Hassan Ghul was separately captured in 2004, released three years later, and killed in a 2012 drone strike. In May 2021, Abdul was approved for release from Guantánamo Bay prison after nineteen years in U.S. captivity; he was never charged or convicted of a crime. Ahmed never faced a trial either, and was released in 2023. At the time of release, he weighed seventy-nine pounds, down from 170, following a 3,000-day hunger strike. Before he was released, he said that 52 percent of his body had escaped Guantánamo.
Andrew and Jackie Wilson, two of the earliest known survivors of torture at the hands of Chicago Police Department (CPD) Commander Jon Burge, shared a story similar to the Rabbanis’. They were arrested in 1982 on a tip, coerced from a tortured suspect, that they had killed CPD officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. They were tortured into confession: both brothers were connected to a hand-cranked generator and given electric shocks. Their legal fights lasted decades. Andrew ultimately died in prison in 2007. Jackie was released in 2018 and granted a certificate of innocence in December 2020.
The Wilsons and the Rabbanis were both victims of U.S. imperialism’s modes of policing. In an attempt to prove the government’s power and control after a high-profile crime—with the Wilsons, the murder of police officers; with the Rabbanis, 9/11—state actors used torture to make an enemy out of vulnerable Black and brown men, abroad and at home. With this shared logic and pattern, the distinction between the U.S. military abroad and domestic police departments is increasingly blurred.
Indeed, military service has been a stepping stone, and often a revolving door, for U.S. police departments.
This relationship was made plain in Chicago in the aftermath of the Vietnam War—which shaped the logic of Burge and his henchmen—and in the generations that followed, within the CPD and the global war on terror.
In 1968, Burge volunteered for duty in the Vietnam War after having worked as a military police officer in South Korea. In 1970 Burge joined the CPD, where he rose through the ranks to become a commander. At least seventeen of his associates were also veterans of the U.S. military, most from the Vietnam War.
Over the next two decades, Burge and his affiliates tortured more than 125 Black people. Aided and abetted by prosecutors, city officials, and the CPD, these officers routinely framed innocent Black men for crimes they had not committed. These crimes were often high-profile, with an expectation and demand on police to catch the person responsible. Police arrested or kidnapped Black men and boys as young as thirteen years old and forced them to confess, using methods like beating, suffocation, sticking a gun in their mouth and cocking it, handcuffing them and burning their bodies against radiators, and shocking their genitals with cattle prods. Infamously, Burge and his associates used a military field telephone with a hand crank as a “black box” of torture, repurposing the wires to electroshock people with nearly one hundred volts of electricity.
Since December 2023, new images have entered our near-daily consciousness, of Palestinian men—lined up naked, sitting blindfolded, transported like cattle, waiting to be tortured or killed, stripped of their personhood, Israeli soldiers standing armed behind them. I see them in an Instagram story and click past quickly; the fuzzy pixels burn an image immediately in my head. I feel a sting of something resembling shame when someone specifically points out: “This is my coworker’s brother, who stayed behind in North Gaza to care for disabled family.” “This is the editor of a Gazan newspaper.”
A friend texts, in an old group chat from college, “The resemblance to Abu Ghraib is uncanny.”
The photos released from Abu Ghraib in 2004—naked Iraqi men with bags on their heads, being forced into sexually degrading positions or acts, handcuffed to walls and threatened with dogs, or prepared for electroshock; military officers standing next to their detainees, smiling and posing with thumbs up for the photographs taken by a fellow service member—marked a core political memory in the beginnings of a public reckoning with what our military was doing in the Middle East. As an adult, I learned that there are photos far more horrendous and sexually abusive than what I had seen as a child, than what was approved for a magazine or television audience.
These images shocked Americans who witnessed them—how could the smiling U.S. soldiers imagine committing acts so horrific?—and provoked the public to question George W. Bush’s administration and the U.S. military for allowing the torture. And yet, the graphic images of torture hardly made a dent. Conservative talk show hosts at the time justified the practice of torture. The U.S. Department of Justice authorized it (see the “Torture Memos”). The U.S. stayed in Iraq for years afterward.
The images of American torture abroad bear a stark resemblance to survivors’ testimonies at the hands of domestic police departments.
Following his and his brother’s arrest, Andrew Wilson was the first publicly recognized survivor of torture at the hands of Jon Burge and his men. Wilson reported being shocked, burned by a radiator, suffocated with a plastic bag, kicked in the eye, and beaten. Photographs show burns on his thigh, chest, and back, and puncture marks on his nose and ears from the clips attached to a hand-cranked electrical device. This evidence led the Cook County chief medical examiner to write a letter to the CPD superintendent detailing Wilson’s wounds and evidence of torture, but the Cook County State’s Attorney, Richard M. Daley, declined to investigate the allegations. In both the case of the CPD and the DOJ, we see an unwillingness of state institutions to hold their actors accountable.
As I pursued journalism later in life, I realized the horror of the Abu Ghraib photos was my first lesson in understanding that unearthing information is not enough. Showing someone a photo, or an earth-shattering human rights report, does not compel the action needed to stop atrocities. I’ve seen it in my work in Chicago, where we have living survivors of police torture speak about their experiences, and we have confronted countless hours of footage of police killing Black people, and critical information and discussion overflows while the organizing necessary to change the power imbalance is stifled.
The revelations of the torture scandal in Chicago—which have since implicated at least seventy-six officers, judges, the mayor, and everyone in the state’s attorney’s office under Richard M. Daley—did not pause the city’s practices of policing and incarceration, just as the Abu Ghraib images did not bring the Iraq War to a halt.
Like the images of the U.S. prison guards torturing Iraqi men, the evidence of torture in Chicago was exceptionalized in the public consciousness: this moment of shameful history is considered uniquely horrible; these officers who tortured innocent people are individual bad actors solely responsible for the bad acts. Once they are no longer in power, the problem is deemed solved.
Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba are considered black sites of torture in American public memory of the war on terror. As the war on terror has expanded and evolved beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, the first two sites have closed; Guantánamo remains open—twenty-two years after its opening as an extralegal detention prison—with thirty men still imprisoned today. It has been about seventeen years since Barack Obama first promised that in his first 100 days in office he would close the extrajudicial detention center. Until recently, national discourse on American policing has held these histories and ongoing wars abroad at a mental and social distance. However, the summer of protests in 2020 following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor made the militarized domestic landscape more palpable to masses of protesters, as police departments around the country simultaneously deployed military tanks and tear gas, and the National Guard that had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan was called in to support urban police departments with checkpoints and traffic control.
Now U.S. protesters mobilizing for Palestinian rights are better poised to make the connections between the U.S. military actions abroad and police at home. In Chicago, protesters have taken to chanting “CPD, KKK, IOF, They’re All the Same!,” which makes the blunt argument that the local police, white supremacist organizations, and Israeli Defense (or O for Occupation) Forces are of the same ilk, with similar motivations. This connection is further illuminated by the exchange programs various police departments in the United States have with the Israeli military and intelligence forces. A 2018 report, Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of U.S.-Israel Law Enforcement Exchanges, authored by Researching the American Israeli Alliance (RAIA) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) exposes the police exchange programs in which U.S. police departments train with the Israeli military, the Shin Bet, and the Israeli police. The report found that these trainings encouraged regressive tactics among U.S. police, such as use of force against civil dissent, racial profiling, and surveillance. The growing tide of anti-militarism awareness, brought on by President Biden’s approval of an additional $1 billion in military aid to Israel despite the majority of Americans’ disapproval, is reminiscent of the rhetorical ties anti–Vietnam War protests made during the civil rights movement.
In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry defined torture as “a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation.” While the United Nations defines torture as the inflicted suffering on someone for the purpose of obtaining information or as punishment for a suspected crime, Scarry made a delicate but critical distinction: “The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.” The interrogation is framed as the motive, but ultimately the content of what is coerced is much less important than the act of confession. The interrogation itself is part of the act of torture and is predicated on fragile power, not an actual need for the information.
This assertion of insecure power is evident in the police and military’s parallel torture techniques, described in the testimonies of survivors. Willie Porch, for example, testified in Andrew Wilson’s second civil trial in 1989 that Burge and his associates tortured him by standing on his testicles, hitting him in the head with a gun, and attempting to hang him by his handcuffs to a hook on the door. The latter is reminiscent of strappado, a military torture method in which a person is hung at their wrists from a post on the ceiling, causing immense pain and eventual shoulder dislocation. The testimonies of survivors of torture who have been held at Guantánamo—along with infamous photographs and cases like the death of Manadel al-Jamadi, who was killed during interrogation at Abu Ghraib in 2003—describe being handcuffed in this position during interrogations. Al-Jamadi, for example, died while handcuffed to bars on a high window, his hands pulled behind his back until he was nearly hanging.
Scarry, in The Body in Pain, found commonalities in torture from the histories of Greece, the Philippines, Israel, Vietnam, and Korea. Like the similarities we see between the CPD and global war on terror torture stories, Scarry explained: “The world is reduced to a single room or set of rooms. … It is itself literally converted into another weapon, into an agent of pain. … So too the contents of the room, its furnishings, are converted into weapons.”
These publicized moments in our modern histories of torture by state actors are not uniquely horrible. Horrible, yes, but not unique. When the state declares there must be an enemy to punish for a crime, while valorizing the militant and dehumanizing the poor and racialized “other,” then abuse with impunity should be expected. What is unique about these moments of torture history, with CPD officers and U.S. military personnel at Guantánamo, is that there was enough attention paid by enough people to sear these horrors into our collective memory, and hopefully prevent them from occuring again.
The people who committed these acts of torture were not born uniquely evil, one can hope, nor were they the originators of the torture mechanisms. Rather, they were active and rewarded participants in an ecosystem of violence. These state actors of the CPD and the U.S. military learned this violence from the system they take pride in, from the sharing of knowledge and techniques between sites of violence. They then received promotions and contracts to promote their knowledge. Chicago figures prominently as a site in this ecosystem of violence—just as Abu Ghraib did, just as Vietnam did, just as Guantánamo continues to do today.
Khury Petersen-Smith, the Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, asserted in an interview for the 2021 book Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations, Chicago to Guantánamo, that these practices of torture in Chicago and the war on terror track with American histories of violence. He argues that these specific geographies are sites of knowledge and testing grounds for new methods of control, and these police and military actors are treated as “scholars of violence.” He called the relationships between police departments and military history not a linear or direct chronology, but “circuits of violence between the U.S. domestic regime and the extent of the U.S. empire.” Petersen-Smith continued: “The U.S. empire has been an incubator of technologies of violence and control. There are particular sites of incubation that are sort of like test cases. Chicago is a site, Vietnam was a site, Guantánamo Bay is a site, Israel is a site. … US police departments in particular are sites of knowledge and technologies, of surveillance and control and violence, that have a utility with the imperial project abroad and vice versa.”
Petersen-Smith explained that these test cases push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, and when they get away with torture techniques, other states can adopt them. In Guantánamo, the United States piloted the special legal designation of “non-legal combatants" so that detainees are not considered prisoners of war.
“[The military] holds them on U.S. territory, which Guantánamo Bay is, but not in the continental United States. And that [geography] puts them in the gray zone where basically the U.S. has the power to do what they want to these people. But those people don’t have the power to have the recourse that comes with being located in the continental United States. And so, other nation-states have then adopted that very [legal concept], of non-legal combatants.”
The shock at torture allegations stems in part from a belief that torture is archaic and does not align with American notions of modernity and civilization, which the CPD and the U.S. military promote, respectively, as inherent to their purpose in policing poor, crime-ridden areas or invading countries in the war on terror. And when that force or torture practice defies the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, then the court of public opinion contorts itself to make sense of why the violation must have been justifiable.
During Andrew Wilson’s civil trials, a recurring theme in Burge’s defense against torture claims was that Wilson was a criminal and not to be trusted. In the aftermath of the high-profile killing of two police officers, the public widely believed that the treatment Wilson received before his trial was retribution for the murder of the officers and that Burge and his associates were emotionally distressed about the loss of their colleagues. Lawyers for the city cited Burge’s military credentials as a justification for why the jury should believe the officer’s word over Wilson’s. The jury gave deference to Burge.
What leads an officer to commit torture? The public desire to call torture within the U.S. an anomaly, or the belief that it can be fixed through reform is understandable. That fantasy embodies many people’s trust and hope in the current system of policing. However, we can see that torture is necessarily a part of the mode of policing and war that American society is built on. This becomes even clearer when examining the Israeli occupation, which depends on its ongoing practice of dehumanizing Palestinians vis à vis public messaging, incarceration, and torture, all with the help of American aid, weapons, and diplomatic cover.
Sde Teiman, a detention facility at an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, has been the site of much of this abuse, and is commonly referred to as Israel’s Guantánamo. Most recently, a Palestinian detainee was subjected to sexual abuse so severe he needed to be admitted to a hospital for injuries to his anus and was left unable to walk. After nine Israeli soldiers were questioned about their involvement in the torture, 200 Israeli protesters, including Knesset members, stormed the facilities where they were held in order to free the guilty soldiers.
The defense of these soldiers, and Israeli officers regularly boasting about their torture methods on their social media, make clear that the practice isn’t an anomaly. And U.S. police and military officers who voluntarily participate in attacks on Gaza, similarly sharing their pride in photos posted online about their deployment, make clear that the U.S. and Israel are closely aligned contributors to the same ecosystem of violence. Whether or not we choose to witness this violence, or how we decide to participate or resist within this economy of destruction, are the only options we have—there is no opting out of the reality of American torture altogether.
To make sense of the horrors Burge, Zuley, and their associates participated in, Petersen-Smith pointed to the system that raised them:
I think there’s this idea that something special happened to Jon Burge in Vietnam, and that that explains why he would do something so monstrous. And obviously lots of things happen to people who are in combat and it is a wildly traumatic experience. Look at the world Jon Burge grew up in. Look at the world Richard Zuley grew up in. You grow up in the United States and you are primed to then go and commit and develop and hone forms of violence elsewhere and bring it back here. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world for the U.S. to support and incubate violence, and then not just import it, but be in a relationship to it.
I steel myself to return to the internet tomorrow, from my position in this economy, where there is a chance I will again witness, even momentarily, the horror of Palestinian men stripped naked, rounded up to face their fate. Unlike the Abu Ghraib photos, it will probably be overtaken, somehow, by the visual horrors of the next day. This is the first genocide where we are oversaturated with images of the reality in nearly real time. Unlike the Abu Ghraib photos, witnessing them will not be enough to compel the president of the United States to even acknowledge the horror, or provoke even a slight change in American foreign policy.
What comes between witnessing these horrors, and the courageous collective action necessary to disrupt the military economy that fuels the war machine? I know it starts with choosing to not merely witness or act alone; the survivors, family, and friends of the Chicago torture scandals have taught me that, from their decades of fighting for each other’s freedom. The power is in the togetherness.
Maira Khwaja is the executive editor of the Chicago Police Torture Archive, housed at the Invisible Institute, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit journalism organization based on the South Side of Chicago. Excerpts from her reporting in Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations, Chicago to Guantánamo (DePaul Art Museum, 2021) are included in this essay.
