Owning Up to American Torture
Within days of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some officials in the Bush administration began contemplating the notion that captured suspects might need to be tortured in order to collect “actionable intelligence.” Over the next few months, the ground was laid–through an executive order, legal opinions, and policy directives–for what developed into the US torture program involving both the military and the CIA. Between 2006 and 2009, the program collapsed and finally was ended. However, there has been no accountability for those responsible for perpetrating or abetting the crime of torture, and this has enabled an increasingly vocal pro-torture constituency within the US. In this talk, I will explain the connections among legal accountability, empirical knowledge and analytical accuracy to make an argument about the need for a turn in domestic politics that owns up to the legacy of torture which is now a part of this nation’s history.
Lisa Hajjar, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara, has an MA in Arab Studies with a concentration in International Affairs from Georgetown University (1986) and a PhD in Sociology from The American University (1995). Her areas of expertise include sociology of law, law and society, international and global studies, and political sociology. Her research interests include human rights, international law, torture, war and conflict. She is the author of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) and Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge, 2012). She is currently working on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the United States in the post-9/11 period. She will be the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut in 2014-2015.