CHICAGO–He was enjoying a quiet visit with his mother when a gang of masked, plainclothes cops stormed into the house and snatched him away, threw him in the back of a car, and drove him to a warehouse to be shackled and detained on false charges without food, water or access to his family, a lawyer or the outside world.
It wasn’t Guantanamo Bay where Charles Jones, 42 was chained to a wall and tortured. It wasn’t the Abu Ghraib or Bagram detention camps in Iraq.
It was Homan Square in Chicago, Illinois.
Located at South Homan Avenue and West Fillmore Street on Chicago’s west side, Homan Square is a former Sears Roebuck warehouse now owned and operated by the city as a secret prison and torture “black ops” site.
A community activist, Jones was disappeared as one of more than 7000 victims to Homan Square between August 2004 and June 2015.
One young African, held at the warehouse for 14 hours without any public listing of his whereabouts, was just shy of his 18th birthday.
Nearly 6000 of those held at the facility were African, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population.
Over 65 percent of the arrests at Homan Square—at least 2,522 detentions—took place under the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former Chief of Staff to neocolonial U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama.
Clearly Homan Square and the ongoing police terror against African people is backed and approved by Obama and the Democratic Party that passed the Crime Bill that put 100,000 new killer cops onto our streets to gun us down.
Homan Square is counterinsurgency!
Inside the secret prison, the police threaten to arrest the Africans on false charges if they don’t provide the cops with “information” about other Africans in the community.
These tactics are part of the military occupation and containment of the African community. In Afghanistan or Occupied Palestine or Iraq these tactics are called counterinsurgency, the oppressor’s war against the just struggle of an oppressed people to rise up for our freedom.
The disappearances of Africans at the Homan Square secret torture site is only the latest in the long history of U.S. government terror against waged against us to make sure that we would never again rise up for our freedom and power over our lives!
Chicago is the city where during the “Red Summer of 1919” African people held part of the South Side of the city during an armed battle after an African youth, Eugene Williams, was stoned to death by white people as he was swimming in Lake Michigan.
For two weeks the no one including the police, white mobs and the military were able to penetrate this fortress of African resistance.
Chicago is the city where Fred Hampton at the age of 21 rose up to become one of the most important leaders of the Black Panther Party as he galvanized the African working class to join the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
Fred Hampton was gunned down as he slept after being drugged by a police agent in a pre-dawn raid of the Chicago Police Department backed up by the FBI and several intelligence agencies as part of the COINTELPRO counterinsurgency assault on our movement.
Panther leader Mark Clark was also murdered in that brutal assault and several other Panther members were wounded.
Africans catch hell in Chicago!
Over 274,000 African people in the city today live on an income that is less than half of the federal poverty line—about $12,000 a year for a family of four, according to a recent article in the Chicago Reader!
Chicago is notorious for police violence against African people—abuse that is “as routine as traffic lights,” as stated in an article in the Guardian newspaper.
From 1972 to 1991 Chicago cop Jon Burge routinely tortured thousands of Africans. Burge was never convicted for these hideous crimes and today lives out his life in Tampa, FL.
Wikipedia reports:
“Burge and other Chicago Police officers allegedly used methods of torture that left few marks. They were accused of slamming telephone books on top of suspect’s heads. There were also three separate electrical devices that Burge and his detectives were accused of using: a cattle prod, a hand cranked device, and a violet wand.
“They allegedly used a Tucker telephone, an old-style hand cranked telephone which generated electricity, and attached wires to the suspect’s genitals or face. According to veteran sergeant D. J. Lewis, this is a method of torture common in the Korean War, and usually results in a confession…The violet wand was said to be regularly placed either on the anus, into the rectum or against the victim's exposed genitals.
“They also used stun guns and adapted hair dryers. Burge and officers under his command also allegedly engaged in mock executions, in putting plastic bags over heads, cigarette burnings and severe beatings. At one point he is alleged to have supervised the electrical shocking of a 13-year-old boy, Marcus Wiggins.”
Black community control of police is the only answer!
Counterinsurgency is the military strategy of imperialism that maintains the colonial oppression of African people and attempts to undermine any struggle by oppressed peoples to free themselves from the shackles of colonial domination.
Counterinsurgency is the military component of colonialism, the system of social and economic domination of African people by white power for the benefit of the U.S. state and white oppressor nation population.
The FBI’s counterinsurgency program COINTELPRO militarily defeated the Black Revolution of the 1960s.
This is why we fight for Black Community Control of the Police: the power to hire, fire, train and discipline the armed police who operate in our communities. We cannot leave this terror to another generation of African people!
In the final analysis it will be our African Revolution that will free our people from the clutches of U.S. colonial state power and push back the white power counterinsurgency that has robbed our African nation of so many millions of our people.
