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Lecture Series – Fall 2007

By Aaron Solle on August 20, 2007

Devon Chaffee and Jennifer Daskal

22 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM.
“With and Without Law: A Panel on Detentions at Guantanamo Bay.”

As the Kroll Family Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights First, Devon Chaffee advocates for U.S. counter-terrorism and national security policies that respect human rights. Prior to her work at Human Rights First, she interned with the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown’s Center for Applied Legal Studies Asylum Clinic, and Amnesty International USA. Devon Chaffee received her J.D. magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar, and her B.A. from Hampshire College.

Jennifer Daskal was named senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch in June 2007. From October 2005 until June, she was the advocacy director for the U.S. program. Jennifer Daskal currently focuses on U.S. counterterrorism policy in the wake of 9/11. She provided analysis and commentary for congressional staff and others on the range of legislative initiatives, including efforts to restore habeas corpus, put an end to the CIA program of incommunicado detention, and stop renditions to torture. In the spring 2007, she served as an official observer at the military commission hearings in Guantanamo Bay. Her published commentary on these commission proceedings has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Salon.com, and The Huffington Post. In July 2007, she traveled to Tunisia to track the fate of two Guantanamo detainees recently returned there, and published a commentary and short report on her findings. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, holds an MA in Economics from Cambridge University – where she was a Marshall Scholar – and is a Brown University graduate.

Peter Kornbluh

5 November/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
“Operation Condor: Pinochet’s Secret “Rendition” Program and its Contemporary Relevance.”

Peter Kornbluh is Senior Analyst and Director of the Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects at the National Security Archive. From 1990-1999, he taught at Columbia University from 1990-1999, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs. Peter Kornbluh is the author of numerous books, most notably The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, which was published in September 2003 on the 30th anniversary of the Chilean military coup. The Pinochet File was selected as a “best book” of the year by the Los Angeles Times and has been translated into Spanish. In addition, Peter Kornbluh’s articles have been published in Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently a weekly columnist for the Chilean newspaper, Diario Siete.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idcYQvzPYhE&w=550]

Andrew Norris

26 November/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
“On Arbitrary Detention”

Andrew Norris is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Duke University Press, 2005) and The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2006). His recent publications include “Sovereignty, Exception, and Norm” in the Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1 (March 2007), “Cynicism, Skepticism, and the Politics of Truth,” in Theory & Event 9, no. 4, and “Ernesto Laclau and the Logic of ‘the Political,’” in Philosophy & Social Criticism 32, no. 1 (January 2006).


Film Series – Fall 2007

By Aaron Solle on August 20, 2007

Films screen on Mondays at 7 pm

Total Denial

16 September/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed by Milena Kaneva, 74 min., 2006.

For almost twenty years, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and now the re-named State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has enforced a brutal, repressive military dictatorship in Burma. Total Denial is the story of how fifteen villagers from rural Burma brought, and won, a suit in U.S. courts against oil giant UNOCAL for collaborating with the SLORC and SPDC to commit human-rights abuses in Burma. We will join hundreds of communities across the U.S. and world who will all be watching the film simultaneously with support from Earth Rights International.

The Road to Guantanamo

1 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed by Matt Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, 95 min., 2006

This film is the story of the Tipton Three — Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul – who were three young British men from Tipton who were captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained at Guantánamo Bay, without charge or legal representation, until 2004. The documentary footage is juxtaposed with dramatizations of their experiences by actors, raising questions about how to represent violence and detention in the present moment. “… a wrenching and dismaying account of cruelty and bureaucratic indifference” – A.O. Scott, New York Times

S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

8 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed by Rithy Panh, 101 min., 2003.

During the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), approximately 1.7 million people were killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. In S-21, two survivors and a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters return to Tuol Sleng, one of the most notorious Khmer Rouge interrogation centers and today a genocide museum, to revisit the past. “Cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary” – Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

Chicken Run

29 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed Peter Lord and Nick Park, 84 min., 2000.

Back in the PCON film series by popular demand and with support from PETA (liberation begins at the dinner table), Chicken Run is an animated tale of arbitrary detention and resistance on a chicken farm in England. Led by the plucky hen Ginger, the chickens plot to escape their coop-prison. Chicken Run asks us to confront the un-exceptional nature of arbitrary detention.

Death and the Maiden

12 November/27 Persson Hall /7:00 PM
Directed by Roman Polanski, 103 min., 1994.

In an unnamed Latin American country following a transition from a military dictatorship to democracy, fate brings a torture survivor and her torturer together one evening. The survivor interrogates her former torturer and tries to discover “the truth” about what took place under the military regime. Death and the Maiden forces us to confront the legacies of arbitrary detention and how it wreaks havoc with justice.

Films screen on Mondays at 7 pm