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. In this talk, Hajjar 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.
This event is presented by the Humanities Institute.