Sister Benita Coffey and the Coalitions she represents.
This morning, Chicago Tribune's opinion page featured another in the endless shower of Police Torture screeds. This was written by Bendictine Sister Benita Coffey and has all of the value of a Confederate $100 Bill.
Here is a taste:
Last week, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed a resolution against torture, a symbolic act, at best. Torture is inhumane, banned by the United Nations and most civilized nations, and is contrary to the core beliefs of the world's major religions.
So why are the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the Illinois Coalition Against Torture and religious communities like mine lauding this as a historic event? We shouldn't have had to ask our elected officials to pass legislation proscribing torture. It seems to be basic common sense, instinctive human behavior to abhor torture. To inflict cruel and inhuman treatment is beneath us as human beings.
While applauding our city's leaders for making Chicago the first city in the nation to condemn torture, we are certainly not seeing our goal anywhere near being accomplished. This is one deliberate and necessary step. It will indeed be a long road to raise the consciousness of the general public that torture is a reality; it is happening and likely will continue until we demand that it stop.
If memory serves, Sister, Jesus joined no Coalition. Plenty of torture going around, his cousin got himself beheaded and all, but Jesus never signed up with the Sicarri, or Zealots, in their Coalition Against The Stooge Puppet King Herod and Roman Imperialists Masters and Crucifiers. Like Free Mumia, I recall that the crowd that demanded Jesus get a tune-up by the cohort prior to crucifixion, demanded Free Barabbas! Now, those folks were committed activists, Sister.
Sister decries the fact that the media paid not enough attention to her and the various coalitions. Sister, we have more Coalitions than Mount Carmel has football championship trophies and yet kids are murdered with impunity because lawyers get fat overturning convictions on meme that police torture, lie, intimidate and use saracasm.
Sister Benita Burge's Up -
The day also presented the opportunity for us to address another type of torture — prolonged solitary confinement. In Illinois, the Tamms Correctional Center is a supermax facility that incarcerates inmates in solitary confinement, often for months or years at a time, which mental health professionals define as torture. Here in Chicago, to our shame, former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and officers under him tortured some 200 suspects to the point of confessing to crimes they did not commit. These victims were imprisoned while most of those who tortured, except Burge, who was convicted of a related crime, remain free.
Mental Health professionals? Incarceration of crazy thugs is torture - health care provided, educational opportunities abound, legal access to Lawsuit Lotto Lawyers, no to mention shelter, meals, and wardrobe; unlike the victims of these thugs, incarcerated under dirt until Judgement Day.
Sister Benita brings it home to Council and the Coalitions -This resolution declaring Chicago a torture-free city is a momentous occasion. We can be proud that our City Council can be called on to stand by its word and demand accountability if such violent treatment should ever again occur.
Sorry Sister, this is but another sanctimoniously meaningless bit of self-puffering from 50 people doing nothing meaningful, Sister.
Jon Burge was convicted of perjury after years of media bear-baiting and legal legerdemain.
G. Flint Taylor and legions of other fatuous opportunists have made fortunes by playing media, do-gooders and generations of young people completely unaquainted with the facts of the murders, arrests, convictions and subsequent judge shopping by Peoples Law Office, MacArthur Center for Justice, Loevy & Loevy.
There has been absolutely no proof of torture - hundreds of allegations and millions of dollars in payouts -but not one win in G.Flint Taylor's column.
Jon Burge was trapped in a legal maze created by time, judge shopping, media complicity and collective memory loss.
When torture appears, deal with it. That has yet to be proven. Truth is not something "We Can All Agree Upon." That is John Dewey.
There is much to pray for, Sister. Good people are up to their elbows helping young people read, write, add and subtract and somehow know that other people want to help them without lining their own pockets.
Praising a hollow and popular gesture like this means nothing and actually keeps the problems on our streets more than healthy. By the way, schools need teachers. I have not seen a nun here at Leo High School, in the heart Chicago's killing fields, in years. Facta Non Verba.
N. B. - do read Gregory Koger one of Sister Benita's Coalition Guys.
Here is Sister Benita's coalition pal's coda-“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”—Karl Marx
And his Mission Statement:
The world today cries out for radical, fundamental change. . .
But the cruelest fact of all is this: IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! For here is the glaring contradiction: in today’s world the production of things, and the distribution of the things produced, is overwhelmingly carried out by large numbers of people who work collectively and are organized in highly coordinated networks. At the foundation of this whole process is the proletariat, an international class which owns nothing, yet has created and works these massive socialized productive forces. These tremendous productive powers could enable humanity to not only meet the basic needs of every person on the planet, but to build a new society, with a whole different set of social relations and values…a society where all people could truly and fully flourish together.
—Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Here are the City Council Coalitions, Speakers and Advocates:
Speakers at the press conference and hearing included: Congressman Danny Davis; Flint Taylor, attorney with the People’s Law Office who has been instrumental in seeking justice for the men tortured by Chicago police commander John Burge; Dr. Frank Summers, psychologist who lead the fight within the APA to bar psychologists from participating in interrogations and torture in Guantanamo; Cherif Bassiouni, United Nations war crimes expert; Melinda Power and Margaret Power, Illinois Coalition Against Torture; Mary Lynn Everson, Marjorie Kovler Center; Sr. Benita Coffey, representing the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT); Laurie Jo Reynolds, activist with Tamms Year Ten; Mario Venegas, Chilean survivor of torture under Pinochet; Mark Clements, Burge torture survivor; Mary L. Johnson, mother of a Burge torture victim and inmate at Tamms Correctional Center, as well as several other mothers of Burge torture survivors; and Wallace “Gator” Bradley, who spoke to the use of torture in the federal ADX supermax prison.http://gregorykoger.com/ Charming Coalition.
