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The Long Shadow of Torture (November 4, 2010)

Iranian-American political scientist Darius Rejali is one of the world’s leading experts on torture, and in particular on how democracies change torture and are changed by it. In the wake of Wikileaks revelations about torture in U.S.-occupied Iraq, we explore how his knowledge might deepen our public discourse about such practices and inform our collective reckoning with consequences yet to unfold. [From The Long Shadow of Torture (November 4, 2010)] torture

NYT: #torture loopholes

Op-ed about military interrogation techniques: Tomorrow will be one year since President Obama signed an executive order outlawing torture, yet our debate about interrogation methods continues. Though the president deserves praise for improving matters, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive. Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the…

Clippings

I’m a big fan of the Independent Press Association of New York. The clippings they get from smaller news outlets, especially those not in English, are phenomenal. I’ve just been catching with my reading of their site, and, perhaps because I was reading so many issues in such a short period of time, and interesting narrative emerged to me about the state of minorities in NY, particularly with respect to political involvement. There seems to be such a distinct sense of disenfranchisement, by that I mean a distance from the political process, that it’s frightening. Even the South Asian American…