Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
President Bush is showing Mayor Daley how to do it. Daley’s been haunted for years by questions about police torture–about what he knew and did or didn’t do to stop it while he was state’s attorney back in the 80s, and about what he’s done or hasn’t done as mayor to get to the bottom of it. One of these days Daley might find himself so cornered he’ll have to produce some answers. President Bush is way ahead of him. On Thursday, for example, Bush summoned reporters, told them, “We stick to U.S. law and international obligations,” and sent them on their way. The only reason Bush thought he needed to say something at all is that the day before the New York Times ran a story about a couple of secret memos from Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department in 2005 that OK’d waterboarding, head slapping, starving, freezing, and like techniques for cutting War on Terror suspects down to size. The Times pointed out that the memos contradicted the Justice Department’s public position that torture was “abhorrent,” and were sent to the White House even though Gonzales’s deputy attorney general told colleagues that one day they’d all be “ashamed” when the world found out about them.
But despite all this talent, no city lawyer has slipped Daley the kind of opinion Bush could count on. One that says that when electric prods, rubber hoses, and suffocating typewriter covers are employed by Chicago officers against suspected perpetrators they–well, they advance Daniel Burnham’s vision of a secure and vibrant city and fall well within the law. “By the way,” Daley might think to mention, “the murder rate has fallen since the 1980s, so there’s no telling how many Chicagoans owe their lives to Jon Burge’s sense of duty.” George Bush is not embarassed to make this sort of reasonable argument. Why is our mayor?
