Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib
Located a few miles outside of Baghdad, Abu Ghraib prison came to international attention in 2004 when reports and photographs of torture and prisoner abuse surfaced in The New Yorker and on the CBS news show 60 Minutes II. These disclosures, along with subsequent revelations of “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects to countries that practice torture, the ongoing detention of prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay, and persuasive evidence of a network of secret “black hole” prisons administered by the CIA, have had profound ethical, legal, and political repercussions for the United States in the world at large and for the self-conception of its citizens.
Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib is an attempt to come to terms with our government's apparent practices of torture, rendition, abusive treatment, and indefinite detention. In a variety of plenary and panel discussions we will approach these issues from a host of perspectives, including the legal, political, psychological, philosophical, and ethical. Please join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking and challenging conference which—while taking its start from the political use of torture—addresses the hopes and promises of what it means to be human today.
Friday, October 20
Tressider Union
10:00 am
Mark Danner
Mark Danner is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, writing on foreign affairs and American politics. He is the author, most recently, of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004) and The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2006). He is Professor of Journalism at UC-Berkeley.
11:30 am
David J. Luban and Jenny S. Martinez
David J. Luban is the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown Law School and Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School.
Jenny S. Martinez is Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford. She served as Associate Legal Officer for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and recently argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Jose Padilla in the case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla on the power of the President to detain American citizens without trial as enemy combatants.
2:00 pm
Philip G. Zimbardo and Gerald Gray
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford, and past president of the American Psychological Association. His work and research have addressed such issues as prisons, violence and evil, persuasion, political psychology, and terrorism. His forthcoming book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007) offers a detailed and original social psychological analysis of the dynamics underlying the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Gerald Gray, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, was Program Manager for the Center for Survivors of Torture in San Jose for five years, and is the author of Psychology and US Psychologists in Torture and War in the Middle East.
3:30 pm
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself(2005) which addresses responsibility and ethics at the personal and political level.
Please visit continuingstudies.stanford.edu for more information on presenters, titles of presentations, links to relevant sites, bibliographies, and downloadable articles.
Sponsors: Stanford Continuing Studies, and co-sponsored with financial underwriting by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Center on Ethics, the Ethics in Society Program, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Stanford School of Law.