Free and open to the public



Introduction

Organizer

Sponsors

During the first two and a half years after 9/11, the Bush administration proved to be highly skilled in the production, manipulation, and control of public images, and were especially effective in controlling images of the war in Iraq. This changed abruptly on April 28, 2004, when the Abu Ghraib images first appeared in public. Why did these images have such an immediate and profound effect? Writer David Levi Strauss will examine these images closely, in the context of other recent and historical public images, to try to determine their meaning and understand their effects.

Sept 20
Julia A. Hall & Claude Welch: International Human Rights Law

An alumnus of the University at Buffalo Law School, Julia A. Hall is an attorney at Human Rights Watch, where she conducts research and advocacy on counter-terrorism measures post-September 11, 2001; post-March 11, 2004 (Madrid); and post-July 1, 2005 (London) in North America and Europe with respect to their impact on human rights and civil liberties. Her work has a particular focus on the erosion of the prohibition against torture, the nonrefoulement obligation, and the use of diplomatic assurances in the context of transfers (“renditions”) of terrorism suspects to countries where they are at risk of torture. (http://www.hrw.org/)

From the vantage point of a former interrogator and informed by contemporary human rights abuses, Guy Stern examines boundaries between information gathering and torture.

Guy Stern is Distinguished Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University, and is the author of numerous books and articles on 19th and 20th Century English and German Literature. At 14, he fled Germany for the United States, where in 1942 he enlisted in the Army and entered Camp Ritchie in Maryland for training in psychological warfare—becoming a “Ritchie Boy.” As a Master Sergeant in the Military Intelligence Service of the US Army, he then returned to Europe to interrogate German POWs. The Ritchie Boys faced double peril for being mistaken as Nazis by the Allies and for being recognized as Jews if taken into captivity by the fascists. Guy Stern and Fred Howard received the Bronze Star for their “method of mass interrogation” of German prisoners in France and Germany. Dr. Stern sits on the boards of the Kurt Weill Foundation and of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Excerpts of Christian Bauer´s film The Ritchie Boys (2004) will be screened. (http://www.ritchieboys.com/)

My secondary education, from kindergarten through high school, had been spent at Quaker School (They preferred to be called "Friends") and I had been taught to think of war, any war, as evil, and I assumed that I would become a conscientious objector. I was graduated in 1936, and went to Columbia in New York City. Pacifism and the "Oxford oath" were powerful influences, and, as we know, my generation thought of itself as pacifistic. I was in France during Munich and Kristallnacht, and in the summer of 1939 I was in Germany, until the Russian-German treaty, when I left and went to England, where I found passage on a freighter back to the States. While we were at sea, the Germans invaded Poland, England declared war and soon thereafter a ship was sunk—the Athenia  (An eight year old girl survived and grew up to become the wife of a colleague at Buffalo. Erica Federman). We landed in a United States that generally still believed it could stay out of war.
  
I had decided to sign up for the Navy Air Corps, and everybody supported the decision except one woman, a dear family friend who was a Quaker. She urged me to become a pacifist, and by and large she out argued me, until at the very end, I was certain that we had to go to war because the German government had institutionalized torture.
  
She said, that if we went to war, and if we won, torture would spread and  become world wide and we would be doing the torturing.
   
In 2006, our son, David Sylvester, spent three months in jail for a criminal trespass of Federal property, after a protest against the Army's School of Americas where torture is allegedly taught to the South American Military.

I shall try to select private details that are representative of more general trends in history.

Bill Sylvester has been a navigator for the Naval Air Transport System, an editor of technical publications and for many years a professor of Comparative Literature and English at UB. During the 60's he directed an Electronic Poetry Workshop mainly to experiment with words using a variety of electronic techniques. He has published criticism and poetry in publications such as Earth's Daughters and House Organ, and is greatly inspired by the astonishing careers of his students.

Oct 4
Diane Christian: Spiritual and Sexual Torture in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan & Guantanamo: Menstrual Blood, Defilement, & Pollution of and by Women

The torture tactics used by the US against Islamic prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo included not only sexual violation by rape and genital torture, but specific spiritual sexual defilement meant to destroy religious integrity and thereby ‘break' the prisoners' religious identity and morale.

         “The tactic reveals the religious heart of war—the object is to kill the culture not simply the carrier. As the Greeks slaughtered a pig on the altar of the temple in Jerusalem, and the French revolutionaries installed a whore on the altar of Notre Dame, so the Americans smear menstrual blood on captives and show them their wives naked with Osama Bin Laden.”*

I want to consider these spiritual/sexual tortures particularly as they involve and define women—both the female officers who smeared menstrual blood and fondled or rubbed prisoners sexually to defile them, and the prisoners' wives who were shown in constructed sexual photographs with Osama Bin Laden. Women become a torture weapon that can pollute and be polluted, and thereby emasculate men warriors.

* http://www.counterpunch.org/christian02242005.html

Diane Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Buffalo and author of Blood Sacrifice. A filmmaker and poet, she is co-author with Bruce Jackson of the film and the book Death Row interviewing convicted men waiting to be executed in Texas. She is now finishing a book for Counterpunch titled The Priesthood of Death, which examines religious, political, and artistic manipulation of death. Her essays on torture appeared in Counterpunch.

Robert Knox Dentan: Christian Child Rearing

This talk explicates an American subculture of evangelical Christians led by the No Greater Joy Ministries that believes corporal punishment to be “essential to the Christian world view.” On their website, Michael and Debi Pearl give a step-by-step guide to “Biblical chastisement,” including even the purchase of instruments: “The rod we speak of is a plumbing supply line that can be bought at any hardware store or large department store. It is a slim, flexible, plastic tubing that supplies water to sinks, and toilets. Ask for 1/4 inch supply line. They cost less than one dollar. I always give myself one swat before I swat the child….” (www.nogreaterjoy.org)

Occupation: Dreamland (co-directed with the late Garrett Scott, 2005, 78 min) records a squad of American soldiers deployed in the doomed Iraq city of Falluja during the winter of 2004 as they patrol an environment of low-intensity conflict creeping steadily towards catastrophe. Through the squad's activities the film documents Falluja's waning stability before a final series of military assaults began in the spring of 2004 that effectively destroyed it. Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds lived with the Army's 82nd Airborne unit 24/7, giving voice to soldiers held under a strict code of authority as they cope with an ambiguous, often lethal environment. The result is a revealing, sometimes surprising look at Army life, operations and the complexity of American war in the 21st century. Occupation: Dreamland has received several awards including a 2006 Independent Spirit Award for emerging documentary directors.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argues that torture is permissible if it is done in the right way by the right people for the right reasons. President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld say Americans don't do torture, so anything that looks like torture is being done by aberrants or, if it is done deliberately, isn't really torture but something that has another name and is therefore permissible. Torture is not new in American life—there are many well-documented stories about police beating confessions out of hapless prisoners—but it has always taken place behind closed doors and been treated as criminal when exposed. Dershowitz's argument that torture is morally justifiable and Bush's and Rumsfeld's insistence that torture is not torture if it is given a different name are techniques that would remove the onus of illegality from torture.

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo. He has received grants from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published 23 books, including Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard 1972, Georgia 2000), Law and Disorder: Criminal Justice in America (Illinois 1985), and Death Row (with Diane Christian; Beacon 1980). His documentary films (co-produced with Diane Christian) have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and various international film festivals, and have been broadcast in the United States, France, and Germany.   In 2002, the French government appointed him Chevalier of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, its highest award in the arts and humanities.

Newton Garver: Equality, Humanity and Torture

Torture, like justice and violence, is a contestable concept, so there can be no definition of it. Torture is one of the things that you don't do to a human being, that is to a person you recognize as capable of entering into civil relations with you, or of being a member of your moral community. The terms that I have just used again express contestable concepts, undefinable; but they are far from meaningless and indeed contribute powerfully to our moral discourse and our moral life. The problem is that politics begins, as Carl Schmitt points out, with a dichotomy between friends and foes, and in practice (although this was not Schmitt's idea) foes are often treated as sub-human. So when they are captured they are “legitimate” targets of things that you don't do to a human being. Dehumanization and demonization, common tactics in contemporary politics, open the door to torture. This is the political instance of what Kierkegaard advocated as “teleological suspension of the ethical.”

About her book Truth, Torture, and the American Way (Beacon Press, 2005), Howard Zinn writes:

“The word ‘torture' has always brought to mind the Gestapo, or the gulag. Jennifer Harbury shocks us as she confronts us with our own nation's record of torture and brutality, from Latin America to Vietnam to Iraq. She tells the story of her husband's disappearance, torture, and murder in Guatemala, but also presents the testimonies of other torture victims, with the C.I.A. a shadowy, ominous presence. Their stories make us feel shame at the betrayal of our most cherished values, but Harbury is undaunted, believing we must expose the truth and demand that our government not respond to the terrorism of 9/11 with the terrorism of the secret torture chamber.”

Jennifer Harbury is a human rights attorney who took her law degree from Harvard. She has lived and worked with human rights activists, peasants, and Mayan villagers in Guatemala. Harbury also worked with members of the US Congress and the Organization of American States to locate her husband and thirty-five other members of the Guatemalan resistance believed to be held by the military. She recently left the directorship of the STOP (Stop Torture Permanently) Campaign at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee in order to join Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC) International, a nonprofit founded by Sister Dianna Ortiz “on the belief that survivors of torture had a right to speak publicly for themselves, about torture, that crime which they know from the inside out.” (http://www.tassc.org/)

Ezat Mossallanejad: The Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture

I hold a Ph.D. degree in political economy. I have escaped persecution three times in my life as a result of my struggle against tyranny and for social justice in Iran. Finding myself in India after my second escape from Iran, I began giving a series of lectures about my book, the Political Economy of Oil in Iran. As a result, I was targeted by the local Indian fundamentalists as well as Iranian agents. Eventually, I escaped India for Canada in early 1985. In Montreal, I chose to be a founding member of the following agencies: Iranian Cultural and Community Centre, Institut Educatif pour les Jeunne Iranienns, and the Montreal Democratic Forum (originally in defense of Salman Rushdie). In Toronto, I worked as a Youth Counsellor with St. Christopher House, and a Refugee Policy Analyst and later the Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service-Canada. At present, I work as a full-time Policy Analyst with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture (CCVT). I am a member of the Editorial Board of Refugee Update, a journal of refugee protection and advocacy in Canada. I have been a Board member of the Inter-Church Committee for Refugees and the Canadian Refugee and Immigrant Counselling Services. I am presently on the board of the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ). I have published 4 books and more than 150 articles in Persian as well as 2 books and around 35 articles in English. I have worked with several UN bodies in connection with refugee protection and eradication of torture. In my mission to protect refugees and survivors of torture, I have travelled to different countries including United States, Mexico, Rwanda, Switzerland, Austria and Nigeria. My most recent book is Torture in the Age of Fear. I have also contributed the following chapter in a book published in 2006: “Islam and Consecrated Tortures.”

The Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture aids survivors in overcoming the lasting effects of torture and war. In partnership with the community, the Centre supports survivors in the process of successful integration into Canadian society, works for their protection and integrity, and raises awareness of the continuing effects of torture and war on survivors and their families. The CCVT gives hope after the horror. (http://www.ccvt.org/)