University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 5, 2006

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

The intense scrutiny and public debate over the definition of human torture, its efficacy, consequences and the ethical basis for its use has taken place largely in the news media, but it has emerged, as well, in art exhibitions, video games, films, television, radio and dinner conversations.

Amy Goodman, moderator of the radio program "Democracy Now! War and Peace Report," will speak on Wednesday.

It's a debate that is "absolutely necessary," says Caroline Koebel, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study, "because as citizens we must formulate an educated opinion about torture in general and in particular, about our personal culpability in the government's use of human torture as a tool of interrogation.

"The problem is that there appears to be deliberate distortion and misrepresentation of law and fact at the highest levels of the U.S. government," she says, "and this level of distortion and its promulgation through the media make it difficult for many of us to get the facts necessary for educated debate."

To help address the situation, UB is presenting a free public discussion series titled "Forum on Torture" that will run from 5:30-8 p.m. on Wednesdays through Nov. 15 in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts, North Campus, unless otherwise noted. Koebel is the organizer of the series.

The forum is being presented by the Department of Media Study in cooperation with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Gender Institute and the UB Art Galleries. It also is sponsored by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the UB Law School, the Humanities Institute, the departments of History and Visual Studies, the Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture, the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and Humanities, the James H. McNulty Chair, the German and Austrian Studies Graduate Group and radio station WHLD-AM 1270.

Amy Goodman, executive producer and moderator of the public radio program "Democracy Now! War and Peace Report" will speak from 5-7:30 p.m. Wednesday in Slee Hall, North Campus. Her talk is titled "Breaking the Sound Barrier: Democracy Now! 10th Anniversary Tour Celebrating Independent Media." Admission will be free, but due to limited seating, tickets are required. Tickets are available Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the Department of Media Study, 231 Center for the Arts.

"Democracy Now!" is a national, daily, independent, award-winning radio and TV news program that airs on more than 500 radio and television stations in North America over Pacifica Radio, National Public Radio, community and college radio stations, and on public access, PBS and satellite television. In Buffalo, it airs at 7 p.m. weekdays on WHLD.

Filmmaker Ian Olds will speak at a forum titled "Operation Dreamland" on Oct. 18. Olds is co-director with the late Garrett Scott of the award-winning film "Occupation: Dreamland" (2005), which records a squad of American soldiers deployed in the doomed Iraqi city of Falluja during the winter of 2004 as they patrol an environment of low-intensity conflict creeping steadily toward catastrophe.

The forum on Oct. 25 will feature SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson, Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture, and SUNY Distinguished Professor Newton Garver, emeritus professor of philosophy.

Jackson's presentation will be titled "Dershowitz, Bush and the Normalization of Torture," and Garver, an active Quaker, will speak to "Equality, Humanity and Torture," addressing the particular ethical compromises that must be made by a human being before he or she agrees to torture another.

Israeli-born new media artist Eddo Stern will speak Nov. 1 on "New Media Artists on Pop Culture and the War on Terror." Stern is the creator of the acclaimed short film "Sheik Attack," as well as the more recent films "Vietnam Romance" and "Deathstar." He also runs a new media lab and art space where he produced the computer games "Cockfight Arena," "Waco Resurrection" and "Tekken Torture Tournament," where participants are wired into a custom fighting system that converts virtual on screen damage into bracing, non-lethal, electric shocks.

The Nov. 8 forum will feature curator Nina Felshin, whose talk is titled "Re-presenting Torture: But Is It Art?" Felshin was curator of the 2005 exhibition "The Disasters of War: From Goya to Golub," whose contemporary works examined the actions of the U.S. government in the international arena of human rights and torture from the 1960s to the present.

Her presentation will examine the ways in which torture has been visually represented by artists, documentary video makers and by the amateur photographers at Abu Ghraib prison, and how these disparate modes of visual representation challenge the viewer.

Two figures from the international news will participate in the Nov. 15 forum, both of whom have intense personal knowledge of torture, its political use and effects.

The presentation by Jennifer Harbury, wife of Guatemalan rebel leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, who was "disappeared," tortured and killed in army custody in the early 1990s, will be titled "Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition."

In addition to "Searching for Everardo," the story of Velasquez, which she brought to world attention through her public hunger strikes, Harbury is the author of "Truth, Torture and the American Way" (Beacon Press, 2005). In it, she addresses the horrors experienced by torture victims in other circumstances and exposes the ominous presence of the CIA in torture cases and the unsavory facts of America's involvement in the international political torture industry.

She will be joined by political economist and anti-torture activist Ezat Mossallanejad of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, who escaped three times from persecution as a result of his political activism and fight for social justice in Iran. He has worked with several U.N. bodies on behalf of refugee protection and eradication of torture. His latest book is "Torture in the Age of Fear."

For additional information and updates, visit http://mediastudy. buffalo.edu/torture.