Richard Zuley

Richard Zuley
Nationality United States
Other names Richard P. Zuley
Occupation homicide detective,
Known for Identified as the official in charge of the interrogation of Guantanamo captive Mohammedou Ould Slahi

Richard Zuley is a former American interrogator. He developed a reputation as being able to coerce confessions from suspects during his 37 years with the Chicago Police Department. Zuley was also an officer in the United States Navy Reserve, and was placed in charge of the interrogation of Guantanamo captive Mohamedou Ould Slahi.[1] Slahi was one of a small number of Guantanamo captive for whom Secretary of Defense authorized the use of extended interrogation techniques that legal scholars and human rights critics have characterized as torture.

Police career

Zuley spent 37 years as an officer in Chicago Police Department, 25 of those years as a detective.[2][3] He spent the final years of his service as an instructor at the department's training academy, where he helped found a counter-terrorism training division. Upon his retirement he accepted a position as an emergency manager at the Chicago Department of Public Health.

Zuley was wounded on June 6, 1980, when he came across a robbery in progress and tried to apprehend four burglars.[4]

On January 30, 1990, the Chicago Tribune covered Zuley's investigation of the murder of a young Asian refugee.[5]

After his retirement, multiple inquiries into overturned convictions that had relied on confessions he coerced triggered the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office to plan to subpoena Zuley's entire complaint history.[3]

Zuley faces multiple lawsuits from individuals who claim he framed them, or beat confessions from them.[3] Lathierial Boyd, who launched one lawsuit, claims Zuley framed him for a killing outside a nightclub in 1990. Anthony Garrett, who received a 100-year sentence for killing a seven-year-old boy, alleges Zuley beat his confession out of him.

Michael Homan, reporting in the Indiana Daily Student, wrote that Zuley had run covert interrogation site for the Chicago Police Department as bad as the CIA covert black site interrogation sites.[6]

Guantanamo career

On February 18, 2015, Spencer Ackerman, reporting in The Guardian, covered Zuley's alleged involvement in the torture and forced confessions of several homicide cases in Chicago and revealed additional details of the interrogation and torture of Guantanamo captive Mohamedou Ould Slahi.[7]

Jason Meisner, writing in the Chicago Tribune, reported that The Guardian characterized Zuley's use of torture as "brutal and ineffective".[3] Memos Zuley wrote, quoted in the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's use of torture, described him using "stress positions"—the shackling of interrogation subjects in painful postures for extended periods of time. Zuley currently faces lawsuits in Chicago for using these techniques against American civilians. The Senate report also described Zuley threatening to harm Slahi's family members—another technique civilians allege he used on them during his police career. Slahi's 2004 testimony before his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, and his recently published memoirs, describe Zuley threatening to bring his mother to Guantanamo, where she would be raped.[8]

Zuley wanted to blindfold Slahi, load him on a plane, take him on a long flight circling Guantanamo, but tell him, when he landed, that he was now in an Arab country allied to the USA, where even more brutal torture was routine.[3] However, funds were not made available to charter a plane, so Zuley arranged to blindfold him, and take him on a boat. During his 2004 CSR Tribunal, Slahi testified that Zuley described a dream where he saw Slahi's corpse being buried.[8]

References

  1. ↑ Jeff Kaye (2014-11-03). "Gitmo "Team Leader" in Slahi Torture Sued for Framing Innocent Chicago Man for Murder". firedoglake. Archived from the original on 2014-11-04. Retrieved 2014-11-03. Zuley was also profiled in Jess Bravin’s book, The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay. Bravin wrote that in July 2003 Zuley became the head of the Special Team that conducted “enhanced interrogations” at Guantanamo. Elsewhere in the book, Bravin quotes Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt, who testified that “Zuley was a ‘zealot’ who loved tormenting his prisoner.”
  2. ↑ "Assessing Medical Preparedness to Respond to a Terrorist Nuclear Event: Appendix D, Biographical Sketches of Committee Members, Consultant, and Staff". National Institute of Health. Retrieved 2014-11-03. Richard P. Zuley recently retired from the Chicago Police Department after almost 37 years of service. During the last 1.5 years of his police career, Detective Zuly was detailed to the Training Academy, where he became a state-certified instructor and served as the senior instructor and one of the developers of Chicago's highly regarded Terrorism Awareness and Response Academy.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Jason Meisner (2015-02-20). "Retired Chicago detective focus of British newspaper investigation". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2015-02-23. The Chicago cop's little-known role as a Guantanamo interrogator—called into duty as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve—received wide attention last week in a two-part series in The Guardian. The British newspaper interviewed several former military investigators and culled details from the Senate report as well as Slahi's recently released memoir, "Guantanamo Diary," to paint a portrait of Zuley as a brutal and ineffective interrogator.
  4. ↑ Michael McCabe, Joseph Sjostrum (1980-06-30). "Cop hit in barrage of shots at Cabrini". Chicago Tribune. p. 69. Retrieved 2014-11-03. A Chicago plainclothes policeman was shot in the leg Sunday morning after his unmarked squad car was hit by a barrage of gunfire near the Cabrini-Green Chicago Public Housing development.
  5. ↑ Anne Keegan (1990-01-30). "Witnesses To Slaying Vanish, And Few Are Surprised". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on 2014-11-04. Retrieved 2014-11-03. When Zuley drove to the apartment building where the mother and brother of the second witness lived, he arrived as the brother was getting out of a taxi. Recognizing Zuley as a detective merely by his looks, the young man initially denied knowing anything about his brother's whereabouts, then said he knew but was not talking. He finally acknowledged he had been attacked on Argyle Street because of his brother`s involvement in the case.
  6. ↑ Michael Homan (2015-03-01). "Guardian reveals Chicago 'black site'". Indiana Daily Student. Archived from the original on 2015-03-02. The Guardian broke the story of an alleged CIA-like “black site” operating secretly within the Chicago Police Department in Homan Square this past Tuesday.
  7. ↑ Spencer Ackerman (2015-02-18). "Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession". The Guardian. Retrieved 2015-02-18. A Chicago detective who led one of the most shocking acts of torture ever conducted at Guantánamo Bay was responsible for implementing a disturbingly similar, years-long regime of brutality to elicit murder confessions from minority Americans.
  8. 1 2 OARDEC (2004). "Summarized Sworn Detainee Statement". Department of Defense. Retrieved 2015-02-23.
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