Sociologist and human rights expert Lisa Hajjar will speak next Tuesday, February 25th at 7pm in Monroe 116 on the topic of the military commission trial for Khaled Sheikh Muhammad and four other men accused of responsibilityfor the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a case often referred to as “the trial of the century.”
In this talk, entitled ““Let’s Go to Guantanamo! An On-the-Ground Perspective on the 9/11 Trial,” Dr. Hajjar will offer a first-hand perspective on what it is like to go to Guantanamo, and will discuss the critical and contentious issues that this case raises. The government is striving to pursue accountability for 9/11, but justice is complicated by the fact that all five defendants were held for years in secret prisons and tortured by the CIA, and everything surrounding this case is shrouded in secrecy, which severely impedes the legal process. Hajjar will discuss how the military commission system is struggling to contend with these complicated issues in a multi-defendant death penalty case.
Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at the University of California — Santa Barbara. Her research and writing focus on law and legality, war and conflict, human rights, and torture. She is the author of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) and Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge, 2012). She serves on the editorial committees of Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, and Journal of Palestine Studies. She is currently working on a book about US torture and the role of lawyers. In 2014-2015, she will be the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut.
All are welcome.