In her April 22 lecture in Gamble Auditorium, investigative journalist Jane Mayer focused on the tension between democratic ideals and security, elaborating on America’s journey “to the dark side” over the course of the war on terror.
The final speaker in the Weissman Center for Leadership’s Limits of the Law series, Mayer said that she finds it especially important to inform college students about policies that violate America’s foundational beliefs. “It is in your heads that the political future of this country is going to be made or broken,” she said.
Mayer discussed the period shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a time when “justice department lawyers carved a loophole for the CIA.” The loophole, she said, allowed the CIA to gather intelligence through means such as torture in American prisons and secret prisons in other countries.
Researching her book on the topic, The Dark Side, Mayer met with the family members of innocent civilians detained by the U.S. government, including some who had died as a result of their treatment, which included waterboarding and long periods spent shackled or enclosed in small cages.
“Rather than stopping a ticking time bomb,” Mayer said, these actions compromised the nation’s security by “handing a propaganda coup to our worst enemies.” As photos of tortured detainees were circulated by extremist recruiters, anti-American sentiment abroad grew.
By creating “the most sophisticated torture program the world has ever seen,” Mayer said, the government not only betrayed long-held American values regarding the treatment of civilians and rights of the accused, but gathered faulty intelligence that provided the impetus for invading Iraq.
“What began as a battle for the nation’s security has become a battle for its soul,” Mayer said at the conclusion of her talk, while commending the employees of the federal government and the CIA who had resisted torture policies.
“[The Lecture] certainly opened my eyes to what the Bush administration was doing in terms of torture and violating human rights,” said Zenya Molnar ’13.
The lecture was also well attended by members of the surrounding community, including Nancy Talanian, director of the Pioneer Valley chapter of No More Guantanamos.
“[The Lecture] gave a lot of great background on how things like Guantanamo happened,” said Talanian.
She agreed with Mayer that humanizing detainees was important in securing their just treatment, and said her organization works to reverse the idea that detainees are “guilty until proven innocent,” a characteristic of what Mayer termed the “continuous combatant” view of suspects.
James Harold, Director of the Weissman Center, noted that the placement of Mayer’s lecture at the end of the series “worked out wonderfully,” completing the progression of the topics from more specific legal issues, such as wrongful conviction, to the global issue of intelligence gathering in the face of terrorism.
Next semester’s Weissman Center series on food, mounted with collaboration by the McCulloch Center, the Center for the Environment, the library, the Art Museum and science departments, will focus on local and global challenges.
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