The Abu Ghraib prison scandal first exploded into public light in April 2004 when reports and photographs of torture were revealed in a daring New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh. At a conference recently held at Stanford, entitled Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib, Hersh and a panel of experts came together to think through the legal, political, psychological, and ethical implications of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and also to weigh the consequences of the US government’s evolving approach to handling enemy combatants and suspects taken during the war on terror. You can now find all of the presentations on iTunes (which you can download for free). Here is the lineup:

• Seymour Hersh – "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" Listen on iTunes
  • Seymour Hersh is one of the nation’s premier investigative journalists and regular contributor to The New Yorker on military issues and security matters. He gained worldwide recognition for his exposure of the My Lai massacre and its cover up during the Vietnam War and again in 2004 for his disclosure of prison abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Mr. Hersh was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and is the author of numerous books.
• Mark Danner – "Into the Light of Day: Human Rights after Abu Ghraib" Listen
  • Mark Danner, Professor of Journalism at UC-Berkeley, is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and, most recently, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004) and The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History (2006).
• David J. Luban – "The Poisoned Chalice: Humanity at Nuremberg and Now" Listen
  • David J. Luban is the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy
    at Georgetown Law School and Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human
    Rights at Stanford Law School. In 2005 he wrote Liberalism, Torture,
    and the Ticking Bomb, which appeared in The Torture Debate in
    America, ed. Karen Greenberg (2006).
• Jenny S. Martinez – "The Law of Torture" Listen
  • Jenny S. Martinez is Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford. She served as Associate Legal Officer for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and recently argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Jose Padilla in the case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla on the power of the President to detain American citizens without trial as enemy combatants.
• Philip G. Zimbardo – "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" Listen
  • Philip G. Zimbardo is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford, and
    past president of the American Psychological Association. He is well known for leading the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971.
• Gerald Gray – "Torture Policy at Abu Ghraib: Military Use of Science for the Control of the Country" Listen
  • Gerald Gray, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, was Program Manager for the Center for Survivors of Torture in San Jose for five years, and is the author of Psychology and US Psychologists in Torture and War in the Middle East.
• Judith Butler – "Torture, Sexual Politics, and the Ethics of Photography" Listen
  • Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself(2005) which addresses responsibility and ethics at the personal and political level.

Conference Sponsors: Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib was sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies, and co-sponsored with financial underwriting by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Center on Ethics, the Ethics in Society Program, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Stanford School of Law.