Mayor Emanuel thanked a lot of people for helping bring about the Jon Burge torture settlement yesterday at City Council. But he didn’t get around to thanking the guy who, perhaps more than anyone, drove the legal battle and devoted three decades of his life to making the settlement happen. That would be Flint Taylor, who we were honored to have on today’s show.

If you have any interest in this remarkable case, please check out Taylor’s concise, fairly breathtaking verbal timeline of the Burge torture operation beginning in August, 1972 – just, as he says, a few weeks after Burge became a CPD detective.

Also hear Taylor’s description of Deep Badge, the credible insider who leaked critical information to Taylor and helped lead the way to some of Burge’s first victims. Deep Badge, who was never identified even to Taylor, played a major role in breaking the case open in its earliest days.

On this show, we also discuss the new revelations from The Guardian about  a different, but also disturbing level of abuse it claims is going on at the Homan Square facility.  The paper has done more than a dozen stories on the allegedly unconstitutional operations at Homan, and has identified a large number of credible witnesses who detail their unconstitutional interrogations and detentions at the facility.

The Beachwood Reporter’s Steve Rhodes tells us about his concerns that the Chicago media has been reluctant to take on Homan Square or do do any independent investigative work to build on (or discredit) the Guardian stories. He draws a comparison to the early days of Burge, when the Reader’s John Conroy continually wrote about it, but no other reporters would touch the story.

We ask both Rhodes and Taylor whether it might be fair to draw some sort of parallel between Burge and today’s Homan Square, and both say yes.

It’s all on today’s Chicago Newsroom.