TORTURE: U.S. Law & Policy

Import event into your personal calendar

Date:

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Time:

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Event Type:

Speaker

Organizer/Author:

Lorraine Leete

Location Details:

Booth Auditorium
2778 Bancroft Way
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA

Panel Discussion
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Booth Auditorium 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.

Please join us for a rigorous panel discussion with Boalt Professors and practitioner experts on the ethics and legality of torture. Panelists will include:

• Chris Kutz, Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program at Boalt, has written about complicity, torture, emergency power, and the moral foundations of the laws of war.

• Oona Hathaway, Professor of Law at Boalt, is a scholar of international law, former recipient of the Carnegie Scholars Award, and current member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Advisor of the U.S. Department of State.

• Ben Wizner has been a staff attorney at the ACLU since 2001. He specializes in national security, human rights, and first amendment issues. He has been involved in numerous post-9/11 civil liberties cases, including a challenge to the CIA's abduction, detention, and torture of an innocent German citizen (El-Masri v. Tenet) and a suit against a private company for facilitating extraordinary rendition by the CIA (Mohamed v.
Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.).

• Moderator John Steele is Special Counsel and Director of Ethics & Conflicts for Fish & Richardson P.C., and Lecturer in Legal Ethics at Boalt.

Sponsored by the Boalt Hall National Lawyers Guild

Added to the calendar on Sun, Oct 26, 2008 1:45PM

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§Is there an action plan?

by DLi

Mon, Oct 27, 2008 3:45PM

Is there an action plan, or will this be just another academic discussion with no real-world consequence? At a minimum, there should be an action plan to confront the U.S. gov't on this issue, including but not restricted to: 1)petition and mobilization of students/faculty/community to censure John Yoo, the Boalt prof-turned-legal prostitute who helped draft the torture memos that the Bush regime relied on to justify ignoring the Geneva convention's bans on prisoner torture, and 2)organizing weekly vigils and citizens' petition-gathering in front of the local Dept. of Justice offices. Let's hear more concrete proposals to roll back the current 2-party unity program to continue the torture regime, along with their illegal spying of U.S. AND foreign citizens.

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§Action plan

by DR

Mon, Oct 27, 2008 11:14PM

The talk is mostly going to be about international law and legal ethics issues surrounding torture. As far as an action plan goes, it's not a strategy talk, but will ideally be illuminating and lay out some legal arguments for holding proponents of torture accountable. There are several community groups in the Bay Area working on the issue of torture, but the speakers likely don't have any specific knowledge to that end. I know CodePink, World Can't Wait, and others (can't remember off the top of my head) have been involved at different points and might be good resources as far as developing an action plan. The National Lawyers Guild has been working on the legal side of things (hence this talk).

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