Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Burge Trial - The Jury Will Not End Burge Industries: Lawyers, Louts and Loudmouths


Very good people are appalled by the idea of torture. The idea of torture in Chicago by homicide detectives committed to systemtic racism has been carefully crafted and marketed over the last thirty years.

Academics, Activists and Advocacy Agendanistas have parlayed the idea of torture into a mythology that permeates what passes for Chicago's corporate news media.

Carol Marin and other iconic columnists have not tucked their snouts into the story of Area 2, but have relied completely on the work of John Conroy and the propaganda machine of G. Flint Taylor. Code of Silence, Black Box, House of Screams, Vietnam 101 Torture are part of the Burge Industries glossary developed by Sasha Abramsky, Bernardine Dohrn, G. Flint Taylor, Northwestern Law, and especially John Conroy, who can not seem to be given the contract by the corporate media that laps up his every nuanced participle. Why is he not the editor of some great metropolitan newspaper? They all redact his texts and themes.

Twelve citizens will decide for or against Jon Burge, who has been fabricated into the face of torture, by G. Flint Taylor, The MacArthur Center for Justice, Jon Loevy, Locke Bowman, Jean McLean Snyder, Berardine Dohrn, WTTW, WBEZ, NPR, and the lazy and compliant editorial boards.

I have followed this story as a citizen and as an educator who spends seven days a week in Area 2 - I live here and live with the fall-out that has evolved as the result of the erosion in faith for Law Enforcement at the hands of lawyers, louts and loudmouths. A rainforest of crime has rooted up in Chicago- not in Wicker Park, Bucktown, Lakeview, Highland Park, Winnteka, or Wilmette, but in Gresham, Englewood, Brainerd, Morgan Park, Beverly and Roseland.

I have witnessed the savagery of street thuggery and attended the funerals of too many sweet and hard working young black men slaughtered in the Thug Comfort Zone created by Burge Industries - Eric Ersery, Jason Riley, Steven Lyons,Eric and Steve Lee to name but a few. I have witnessed the police officers and detectives of Gresham District (6th) and Area 2.

I don't buy the systemic racist torture at all. Am I intellectually dishonest? I don't think so. I have followed this story very religiously since Officers Fahey and O'Brien were tortured and murdered. I know that I have found the endless chorus of charges and the endless failures to make the case for torture a compelling case for doubt. What happened? I do not know, but I do not buy for one second the charges howled by G. Flint Taylor and the murdering savages that he represents. I suspect that G. Flint Taylor and others in his cottage industry including Chicago's news media want the Burge Saga to continue.

The perjury case against Jon Burge,it seems to me, was merely another legal sop paid to G.Flint Taylor. The City of Chicago and Cook County tried tossing millions of dollars at this public pest. They would have done well to stand in court and demanded a battle royal against the charges. They did not.

The jury will decide one way or the other, but do not think for a minute that Burge Industries will be satisfied. If Jon Burge is convicted or acquitted, G. Flint Taylor and his disciples will howl for more, more, more court time and greater fees. Taylor is smelling an acquittal of Jon Burge and has already ginned up his next moves:


Whatever the outcome of the Jon Burge perjury and obstruction of justice trial, the legal battles that have swirled around him for more than 20 years, and that have cost the city millions of dollars, will drag on.

Not only legal battles, but political battles,” said Flint Taylor, who represents several men who accused Mr. Burge and others of torturing them while at Area 2 violent-crimes unit of the police department on the Far South Side in the 1970s and ’80s. “This is just one phase in the long struggle against police torture.”


Even Huffington Post has gone dark on the Burge Trial.

The only real, genuine and consistant voice calling out the media for this sense of fait accompli in the Burge Trial has been Steve Rhodes of Beachwood Reporter and we agree not a bit in this matter. Rhodes even seemed to shame the Chicago Reader, once the home of John Conroy into some sense of coverage. Rhodes is honest and sincere in his antipathy to Jon Burge, unlike the moral whack-a-mole opportunists Carol Marin, or Eric Zorn.

John Conroy will be kept busy and his story line will continue as Carol Marin and others play the Polyanna do-gooders.

More kids will be slaughtered. If it bleeds it leads.

The scent of easy money, like the taste for blood can not be sated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/us/27cncburge.html

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