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Phones beat drones in PCON war-game simulation

By Contributing Writer on November 24, 2014
Jacob Stoil explains the rules of engagement to the red team at a PCON war-game simulation.

Jacob Stoil explains the rules of engagement to the red team at a PCON war-game simulation. (Photo by Karen Harpp)

Professor Jacob Stoll extended learning well beyond his classroom’s four walls when his class participated in a simulated strategic battle of quick thinking versus in-depth planning and technology at the Colgate Bewkes Center.

Two teams of students, one armed with phones and the other commanding flying drones, experienced first-hand the complexities of field operations and the role and impact of planning and discipline when embroiled in a conflict. Learn more about the innovative learning experience.


Film Series – Spring 2010

By Aaron Solle on January 15, 2010

Films screen on Mondays at 7 p.m.

The Big Lebowski

22 February, Ho Tung Visualization Lab, Ho Science Center
Dir. Joel Coen, 1998, 117 min.

“The Coen Brothers and their agreeable cast make more fun than sense with this scattered farce about a pothead bowler who is mistaken for a deadbeat philanthropist and drawn into a cluster of kidnappers, nihilists, porn mobsters and Busby Berkeley beauties.” Thus did the original promo for The Big Lebowski surreptitiously convey the film’s subversive message of hope and peace. Looking back on its debut, it is hard to believe that people who first viewed Lebowski’s grotesque reflections on the rational irrationality of international capital and the military industrial complex actually…laughed. Anguish can be hard to distinguish from irony. More than ten years on, however, we think the time is ripe to reconsider the pacifist philosophy of dudeness. Don’t let us down, man.

The First World War

1 March, Golden Auditorium, Little Hall
Dirs. Marcus Kiggell, Simon Rockell and Corina Sturmer, 2003, approx. 120 min.

Based on the work of Oxford historian Hew Strachan, this landmark series places the First World War in a global military context through archival footage, diary entries, letters of soldiers, and studies of battles and participants. It explores many of the lesser-known campaigns, battles, and actions as well as the major conflicts on the Western Front. Selections from the series will be screened with an emphasis on the political conditions leading up to, and resulting from, the war.

Joyeux Noël

22 March, Golden Auditorium, Little Hall
Dir. Christian Carion, 2005, 116 min.

In 1914, World War I, then the bloodiest war in human history, was well under way. However on Christmas Eve, numerous sections of the Western Front called an informal, and unauthorized, truce where the various front-line soldiers of the conflict peacefully met each other in No Man’s Land to share a precious pause in the carnage with a fleeting brotherhood. This film dramatizes one such section as the French, Scottish and German sides partake in the unique event, even though they are aware that their superiors will not tolerate it. Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Best Foreign Film Award Nominee, and nominated for 6 César Awards.

Why We Fight

5 April, Golden Auditorium, Little Hall
Dir. Eugene Jarecki, 2005, 98 min.

Inspired by Dwight Eisenhower’s legendary farewell speech (in which he coined the phrase ‘military industrial complex’), Jarecki surveys the scorched landscape of a half-century’s military adventures, asking how – and telling why – a nation of, by, and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war. Why does America fight? What are the forces – political, economic, ideological – that drive us to do combat with an ever-changing enemy? Winner, 2005 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, 2007 Peabody Award; Nominated, 2007 Documentary Screenplay Award.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

12 April, Golden Auditorium, Little Hall
Dir. Robert Wise, 1951, 92 min.

A visitor from outer space, Klaatu, comes to earth with a warning. Having developed rocket and nuclear technologies, earth is a potential threat to the galaxy’s other civilizations. Unless war is abolished, the Earth will be destroyed in a preemptive peacekeeping operation. Can Klaatu deliver his message, and will it be heard? A period classic, and winner of a 1952 Golden Globe Award. To be screened with 3 Cold War-era shorts from the Prelinger film archives: “Duck and Cover” (1951, 9 mins.), “The House in the Middle” (1954, 12 mins.), and “Our Cities Must Fight” (1951, 9 mins.).

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

19 April, Golden Auditorium, Little Hall
Dir. Gini Reticker, 2008, 72 min.
A celebrated documentary that tells the dramatic success story of the women’s peace movement of Liberia, where Christian and Muslim women banded together to end their country’s civil war. Leymah Gbowee, the central figure in the film, and the Women of Liberia are the recipients of the 2009 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. Best documentary, Tribeca Film Festival, and awards at Silverdocs, Jackson Hole, Traverse City, Heartland, One World International Human Rights (Prague), and Movies That Matter (Netherlands) Film Festivals.

Shadow Company

26 April, 114 Little Hall
Dir. Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque, 2006, 86 min.

In the late 20th Century the distinction between soldier and mercenary became blurred. The recent use of private military companies (PMCs) in Iraq has been more extensive than at any time in modern history. The brutal killing of four PMC employees in Fallujah in April 2004 made it clear that these “contractors” are not merely workers in a foreign land. But are the lives of such men the only thing at risk when we privatize warfare? Shadow Company explores the moral and ethical issues private military solutions create for PMC employees, for the Western governments who foot the bill for their salaries, and for everyday citizens. The filmmakers traveled the globe to expose all sides of the issue, interviewing PMC staff, owners and lobbyists, former mercenaries, academics, journalists and top authors. Winner of four 2007 Leo Awards: Best Documentary, Directing, Writing and Editing.

Films screen on Mondays at 7 p.m.


Lecture Series – Spring 2010

By Aaron Solle on January 15, 2010

Professor Jorge Francisco Liernur

Monday 1 February, 7:00 pm – 105 Lawrence Hall (The Robert Ho Center)
“Villas Miseria: Urban Dysfunction and Distorted Development in Buenos Aires, Argentina”

Jorge Francisco Liernur directs the Center of Studies on Contemporary Architecture at the Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and is a Senior Researcher at the Argentine National Council for Research on Science and Technology. At the University of Buenos Aires he was director of the Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, and founder and director of the Juan O’Gorman Latin-American Architecture Chair. He acted as visiting scholar and critic at several universities in America and Europe, and his many studies on South American urbanism include The Threshold of the Metropolis. Cosponsored by the Geography Department and ALST.

Professor Richard Ned Lebow

Monday 8 February, 7:00 pm – 105 Little Hall (Golden Auditorium)
“Why We Fight”

Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent books are A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008) and The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders. The former won the Jervis-Schroeder Award for the best book in international relations and the British International Studies Award for the best book of the year. The latter garnered the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology. His Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Cosponsored by the Political Science Department.


Film Series – Fall 2009

By Aaron Solle on August 20, 2009

Films screen on Mondays at 7 p.m.

Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Study

27 September
Directed by Ken Musen, 1991, 51 minutes

In Quiet Rage Philip Zimbardo describes a prison simulation experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971 with students in the roles of prisoners and guards. This film features archival footage, flashbacks, post-experiment interviews with the prisoners and guards, and comparisons with real prisons. It documents surprise arrests by city police and shows why the two-week study was terminated after only six days. Although the experiment took place decades ago the questions raised in the film about the human capacity to inflict and endure pain are important to contemporary discussions of torture and democracy.

Death and the Maiden

5 October
Directed by Roman Polanski, 1994, 103 minutes

In Death and the Maiden a woman in South America, played by Sigourney Weaver, finds herself hosting a doctor who may have tortured her when she was held as a political prisoner during the military dictatorship. The doctor, played by Ben Kingsley, denies the accusation while her husband wrestles with the implications of this charged encounter. The fluid power dynamics between the three characters raise issues of justice and reconciliation, especially as related to the prosecution of war crimes. This Roman Polanski film is based on a play of the same name by noted author Ariel Dorfman.

Torturing Democracy

12 October
Directed by Sherry Jones, 2008, 90 minutes

The documentary Torturing Democracy explores the evolution of a United States policy that justifies the use of coercive interrogation techniques. The film written and produced by one of America’s exemplary documentary reporters, Sherry Jones, is the result of a collaborative effort by the National Security Archive (which has collected thousands of documents on counter-terrorism) and Washington Media (involved in investigative research since the Abu Ghraib scandal) to preserve an institutional memory of how torture became an accepted weapon in the United States arsenal. ** Winner, 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award **

My Country, My Country

26 October
Directed by Laura Poitras, 2006, 90 minutes

Filmmaker Laura Poitras shot the documentary My Country, My Country in the months leading up to the 2005 elections in Iraq to create an intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Through Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate she captures the passions and fears of a nation anticipating “Western-style democracy”. ** Nominated, 2007 Oscar Award **

The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court

2 November
Directed by Pamela Yates, 2009, 95 minutes

Over 120 countries have united to form the International Criminal Court (ICC) the first permanent court created to prosecute perpetrators, no matter how powerful, of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. The Reckoning follows dynamic ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and his team for three years across four continents as he issues arrest warrants for Lord’s Resistance Army leaders in Uganda, puts Congolese warlords on trial, shakes up the Colombian justice system, and charges Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur. ** An Official Selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival **

Well-Founded Fear

16 November
Directed by Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson, 2000, 119 minutes

Well-Founded Fear is a documentary about the American political asylum system that takes you into the closed corridors of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) where American ideals collide with human rights norms. Foreigners that are already in the United States, having fled their home countries, have the opportunity to apply for asylum if that person establishes a “well-founded fear” of persecution in his or her home country. Filmmakers Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson provide a close-up examination of the way that the United States decides the cases of those applying for political asylum, showing the tenuous balance between those who grant and receive protection in the world today.


Lecture Series – Fall 2009

By Aaron Solle on August 20, 2009

Gregory H. Stanton

Wed. Sept. 23, 7:30 p.m. – 105 Lawrence Hall
“Rethinking Genocide Prevention”

Gregory H. Stanton is Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. Dr. Stanton is the founder (1999) and president of Genocide Watch (website: www.genocidewatch.org), the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and is the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Campaign to End Genocide. He was the President (2007 – 2009) of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). He has served as Co-Chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court, and has been instrumental in the current Khmer Rouge Tribunal for which he drafted the internal rules of procedure and evidence. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School. Sponsored by Core, P-Con, and University Studies.

Darius Rejali

Thurs. Oct. 22, 7:00 p.m. – Love Auditorium, Olin Hall
“The Secret Histories of Modern Torture”

Darius Rejali is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Reed College. Beginning with a historical account detailing how Western democracies pioneered and exported techniques that have become the common base of modern torture, Rejali takes up the challenging question of the relation between torture and democracy in the present. In the wake of this history, Rejali asks what we can expect of the current US administration, and explores prospects for the future prevention of torture internationally. The 2009 Peter C. Schaehrer Memorial Lecture.

Khalil Shikaki

Wed. Nov. 4, 5:00 pm – Persson Hall Auditorium
“The Prospects for Arab-Israeli Peace: A Palestinian Perspective”

Khalil Shikaki is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which has conducted extensive public opinion polls in the West Bank and Gaza since the mid-1990s on a wide range of topics (the peace process, Hamas, Fatah, political Islam, etc.). He will use some of this research to illuminate how Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and Gaza view Israel, the conflict, and the prospects for peace. For further information on Professor Shikaki’s work see: http://www.pcpsr.org/about/khalilshikaki.html.


Lecture Series – Spring 2009

By Aaron Solle on January 15, 2009

Robert Hullot-Kentor

20 February /Merrill House/9:20 a.m. [faculty seminar]
115-116 Lawrence Hall The German Center/2:20 p.m. [faculty + student seminar]

“After ‘After Auschwitz’: the Primitive Aftermath.”

Victoria Sanford

2 March/Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall 5:00 p.m.
“The Land of Pale Hands: Feminicide, Social Cleansing, and Impunity in Guatemala.”

Carolyn Nordstrom

30 March/27 Persson Hall / 8:00 p.m.
“Fundamental Faultlines.”

Robert Rotberg

7 April/111 Alumni Hall/5:00 p.m.
“Transitional Justice and the Role of Truth Commissions in Conflict Resolution and Prevention.”


Film Series – Spring 2009

By Aaron Solle on January 15, 2009

Films screen on Mondays at 7 p.m.

Turtles Can Fly

26 January/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Bahman Ghobadi, 98 min., 2005.

In a war-scarred village in Kurdistan on the northern Iraq border children invent their own methods of survival and modes of society: digging up landmines to sell for food, rigging satellite radios to follow the advent of the US occupation. A.O. Scott of the New York Times hailed Turtles Can Fly as “a harsh account of war, displacement and deprivation that is saved from utter bleakness by a tough, earthy lyricism.”

The Big Lebowski

23 February/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, 98 min., 2003.

Commenting on the historical impact of ‘Lebowski,’ the cultural critic Luca Caminati has long pondered the following paradox: “The Big Lebowski is the most devastating depiction of post-conflict discombobulation ever attempted by Hollywood, yet audiences have universally refused to acknowledge it as a political indictment of war.” “Instead,” he laments: “they elect to laugh.” Join members of the Lebowski Studies Association for a screening of this rare look at the aftermath of war, and public insensitivity to it. This screening inaugurates P-CON’s “I’ve decided to become a P-CONISTA” concentration declaration event. Follow the P-CON Calendar for more info.

White Light Black Rain

23 March/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Steven Okazaki, 86 min., 2007.

Straightforward interviews with fourteen “hibakusha” —survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—are intermixed with rarely seen footage documenting the destructive power of those attacks. Steven Okazaki’s award-winning film looks directly at the effects of nuclear warfare and the significant threat posed by the enormous nuclear arsenals of today.

Bombies

13 April/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Jack Silberman, 57 min., 2002.

American bombers dropped more than two million tons of explosives on rural Laos during the Vietnam War. As many as 30 million unexploded cluster bombs still litter the country, regularly injuring people despite their cautious cultivation methods. Children are frequent victims of these bright, explosive little balls. Despite global calls for a halt to the use of cluster bombs, the USA has used them extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq. “If you want to know what Afghanistan will be like in twenty years, watch Bombies” (Jury Citation, San Francisco International Film Festival).

Agent Orange: Personal Requiem

20 April/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium 7:00 p.m.
Directed by Masako Sakata, 66 min., 2007.

The filmmaker pays homage to her deceased husband, photographer Greg Davis, an American victim of Agent Orange, by exploring the impact of the dioxin-based defoliant on the environment and children of Vietnam. “A remarkable film… Sakata’s moving film brought back to me memories of the Vietnam War, the war of my generation, with great poignancy and power” (Roger Pulvers, The Japan Times).

Long Night’s Journey Into Day

27 April/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman, 95 min., 2000.

Following four hearings from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, this prize-winning film Night’s Journey explores the challenges of truth-telling, forgiveness, and a country’s halting attempts to get beyond decades of racial domination and violence. “…justice can never really be delivered in these circumstances; the ache of racism and its violent aftermath still remain. This is an issue that the film addresses with as much integrity as the committee shows in its own efforts” (Elvis Mitchell, New York Times).

Films screen on Mondays at 7 p.m.


Lecture Series – Fall 2008

By Aaron Solle on August 20, 2008

Steven Wax

17 September/the Robert Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall/8:00PM
“Kafka Comes To America: A Public Defender’s Fight for Justice in the War on Terror from Peshawar to Portland.”

Oregon Federal Defender, Steven T. Wax, will be speaking about the threat to civil liberties, at home and abroad, from the policies of the Bush administration in the ‘war on terror.’ Based on his experiences representing U.S. citizens arrested in connection with terrorist acts in Oregon and seven men held as enemy combatants in prison in Guantanamo Bay, Wax will explore the legal justifications offered for indefinite detention and coercive interrogation and the threat we all face from the policies the administration has pursued. His talk will weave together the legal and political debate with an account of the actual experiences of defendants incarcerated under emergency powers.

Robert Vitalis

13 October/27 Persson Hall, auditorium/5:00PM
“The Hidden History of Race in American International Relations.”

In this presentation, Professor Vitalis examines the origins of the study of international relations in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that until we loosen the hold a particular idea has over our contemporary imaginations—that the subject matter of international relations is found on one side of a line between the “domestic” and the “foreign”—it will not be possible to appreciate the full significance of the fact that the scholars who wrote the first articles, papers, treatises, and textbooks in international relations all saw the “Negro problem” in the South as something to be included within the new interdisciplinary field of study. Political scientists theorizing about what they called “race development” (the title of the first journal of IR in fact) imagined two fundamentally different logics and processes at work, and thus different rules that were to be applied, across the boundary dividing Anglo-Saxons or Teutons and the inferior races found in Indian Territory, New Mexico, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania. Here was political science’s original and signal contribution to the theory and practice of hierarchy, a theory that W. E. B. Du Bois and the handful of black political scientists who followed him challenged in his continuing arguments about the global color line.

Jonathan Hyslop

22 October/the Robert Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall/5:00PM
“The Law of War and the Invention of the Concentration Camp 1896-1904.”

1899 saw the convening of the First Hague Peace conference, the most comprehensive inter-state attempt to that time to prevent war and limit its conduct. Yet the years immediately before and after the conference saw the emergence of an appalling new institution of war against civilians – the concentration camp. In his presentation, Jonathan Hyslop addresses this paradoxical conjunction. He traces the emergence of concentration camps in the Cuban Rebellion against Spain, the Boer War, the American-Filipino War and the German repression of revolts in South-west Africa, and asks why the new humanitarian law of war was unable to restrain this development. The ways in which international publics debating the laws of war were constituted around these conflicts are explored in an investigation of the different responses of European socialists, Asian nationalists, and metropolitan political leaders to such questions. The lecture critically considers explanatory frameworks for the camp phenomenon offered by major theorists such as Arendt and Bauman. The central argument is that the dynamics of war-fighting itself need to placed at the center of an analysis of the birth of the concentration camp.

Aaron David Miller

27 October/ 105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium / 5:00PM
“The Much Too Promised Land: The U.S., the Arab-Israeli Issue, and the Middle East.”

Why has the world’s greatest superpower failed to broker, or impose, a solution in the Middle East? If a solution is possible, what would it take? And why after so many years of struggle and failure, with the entire region even more unsettled than ever, should Americans even care? Is Israel/Palestine really the “much too promised land”? In attempting to answer these questions, Aaron Miller shatters many preconceived notions, tackling the complicated issues of culture, religion, domestic politics, and national security that have defined—and often derailed—a half century of diplomacy

Ian Roxborough

10 November/the Robert Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall/5:00PM
“Can the US win the next war? The return of the Third World.”

A debate divides the Pentagon: should the US military prepare for a future of messy, low-intensity conflicts in the Third World, of which Iraq and Afghanistan are merely the first campaigns in a long war, or should it focus its efforts on deterring war with an emerging peer competitor such as China or Russia? Ian Roxborough will describe the ways in which military planners have constructed future scenarios that make sense to them; paradoxically, the professional experiences and organizational locations of members of a military, Roxborough argues, help to define the strategic situations to which soldiers respond. Focusing on Army-Marine Corps manual: FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5, entitled Counterinsurgency, he examines how debates within the U.S. defense establishment concerning future wars bring to light the military’s own sociology of knowledge.


Film Series – Fall 2008

By Aaron Solle on August 20, 2008

Films screen on Mondays at 7 p.m.

Obedience

8 September/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed Stanley Milgram, 45 min., 1965.

In 1963, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, advertised for volunteers to participate in a memory experiment. The volunteers are asked to punish other subjects who remember incorrectly – by shocking them with electricity. The varied responses of the volunteers raise significant questions about legitimate authority, the responsibility to obey commands, and the capacity of human beings to hurt one another. While the experiment took place over 40 years ago, the questions raised in Obedience have become newly relevant remain important in the context of current debates about torture and human rights in the U.S.-led War on Terror.

Discovering Dominga: A Survivor’s Story

15 September/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Patricia Flynn, 60 min., 2003

In Discovering Dominga, a young Iowa mother, Denese Joy Becker, comes to understand that she is a survivor of the 1982 Rio Negro massacre in Guatemala. At the time of the massacre, Denese Becker was a nine-year-old Mayan Indian girl named Dominga Sic Ruiz. Her parents and more than 200 other residents of Rio Negro, who resisted relocation to make way for a dam, were murdered by the state. After the massacre, Dominga escaped to the mountains and was later adopted by a couple from Iowa. The film follows Dominga’s adult journey to uncover her past and work to bring the military commanders responsible for the massacre to justice.

In Rwanda We Say…The Family That Does Not Speak Dies

22 September/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed by Anne Aghion, 57 min., 2004.

In Rwanda We Say … begins as 16,000 genocide suspects are released across Rwanda, subsequent to confessing and having served the maximum sentence the Gacaca citizen-based-justice tribunals would eventually impose. The film follows the release and return of one man to his village. As villagers articulate their ideas, to Aghion and to one another, the initial presence of distrust and fear of violence among the villagers slowly changes.

Kippur

6 October/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium/7:00 p.m.
Directed Amos Gitai, 117 min., 2000

Kippur offers an account of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War through the experiences of two young Israeli soldiers, Weinraub and Ruso, who are members of a helicopter rescuing the wounded Amos Gitai, who served in the war, has created a film striking for the stark textures of violence and daily life that he offers, as well as the collapse of the space between them during war. P-CON’s screening of this film coincides with the 35th anniversary of the beginning of the Arab-Israeli War in 1973.

Taxi to the Dark Side

17 November/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium /7:00 p.m.
Directed by Alex Gibney, 106 min., 2007.

Following the life and death of an Afghan taxi driver, Dilawar, Taxi to the Dark Side explores the practices of detention and torture in U.S. interrogation centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. Viewers are challenged to consider the implications when the rule of law is abrogated in the service of the “war on terror.” The film poses an unsettling question: what happens when a few men use the wartime powers of the executive to undermine the very principles on which the United States was founded?

** Winner of the 2008 Academy Award for Documentary Feature **

Standard Operating Procedure

1 December/105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium 7:00 p.m.
Directed by Errol Morris, 116 min., 2008

In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris draws on interviews with five of the seven convicted perpetrators in the Abu Ghraib prison incident to provoke a series of questions about violence, torture, and accountability. Combined with extensive use of the photos taken by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib and recreation of some of the events which took place, the film shows the blurred lines between private/public, state/individual, and following orders/being party to human rights violations. It also raises stark questions about visual media and representation.

** Winner of the Jury Grand Prix at the Berlin International Film Festival **


Lecture Series – Spring 2008

By Aaron Solle on January 15, 2008

Global 1968 Conference

18-19 April 105 Lawrence Hall, Colgate University

Professor Alfred McCoy

28 April (Monday) Golden Auditorium, 7 p.m.
“A Short History of Psychological Torture: Its Discovery, Propagation, Perfection, and Legalization”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ZJmgWAMyk&w=550]

Professor McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, and has authored fourteen books on politics in the Philippines, the drug trade, ethnicity and power in Southeast Asia, and most recently, on histories of interrogation and torture. His most recent book is A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the the War on Terror (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2006).