Current Events :

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BCICS Presents Torture in the Era of Democracy :: Thu 01/17 : 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, American Civil Liberties Union
Administration of Terror: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond
Ripton Room, Scott Hall, 601 University Place

The authors will give the most detailed account thus far of what took place in America's overseas detention centers, including the connection between the policies adopted by senior civilian and military officials and the torture and abuse that took place on the ground. Their research is based on hundreds of government documents—including interrogation directives, FBI e-mails, autopsy reports, and investigative files—that constitute both an important historical record and a profound indictment of the Bush administration's policies with respect to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad.  Jameel Jaffer directs the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project and has been a litigator for the ACLU since 2002. He was educated at Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School.   Amrit Singh is a Staff Attorney at the Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union and has been a litigator for the ACLU since 2002. She was educated at Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School.

BCICS Presents Torture in the Era of Democracy :: Tue 02/12 : 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Marnia Lazreg, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad
Ripton Room, Scott Hall, 601 University Place

Marnia Lazreg, professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will discuss her new book, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad, on Tuesday, February 12th.  Her book looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule.

BCICS Presents Torture in the Era of Democracy :: Thu 02/28 : 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Darius Rejali, Professor of Political Science, Reed College
Torture and the Twilight of Torture and Democracy
Ripton Room, Scott Hall, 601 University Place

Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College and an internationally recognized expert on modern torture, will discuss his new book, Torture and Democracy, on February 28th.  Rejali undertakes a genealogy of torture from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe.  Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods.

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Previous Events:

BCICS Presents :: Monday, October 22 :: Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Thomas Melville : "Guatemala and the US: A Tortured History"
BCICS Building, 1902 Sheridan Road
Lunch will be served

Thomas R. Melville served as a Catholic Maryknoll priest in Guatemala for ten years before being expelled in 1967 by Guatemalan and Church authorities for his role in planning (with other religious, both native and foreign) the formation of a Christian unit to graft onto the guerrilla movement that was fighting Guatemala's military rulers. Melville's religious training -- as a youngster in Boston and later in Maryknoll -- prompted him to ask why successive U.S. administrations financed repressive governments in Guatemala and Central America and why antigovernment guerrillas were labeled "terrorist" while U.S. advisors and their students were hailed as "freedom fighters." Melville is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America

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BCICS Presents :: Monday, October 29 :: Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Dahr Jamail : "Iraq: What's Really Happening "
BCICS Building, 1902 Sheridan Road
Lunch will be served

BCICS Debates in U.S. Foreign Policy :: Mon 04/09 : 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Salim Yaqub, Department of History, University of California at Santa Barbara
"Redrawing the Map: Shifts in U.S. Policy on Israel and Palestine"
Harris Hall 108, 1881 Sheridan Road

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BCICS Debates in U.S. Foreign Policy :: Thu 04/12 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Richard Orth, Senior Africa Epxert in the Pentagon
"The US Role In Africa: What Should It Be?"
BCICS Building
Lunch will be provided

"Should the US Withdraw from Iraq? Pros and Cons"
Juan R.I. Cole, Professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
February 19, 2007 - 4:00 pm - Harris 108, 1881 Sheridan Road

Most discussions of the future of US involvement in Iraq are conducted with reference to domestic US politics. Is the US military presence warping Iraqi politics? What do Iraqis want and why? What are the likely outcomes of a US attempt to maintain its hegemony in Iraq? What might happen if it leaves or is forced out?