The Scholars’ Circle & Insighters Radio- Jan. 27th, 2013

Much of the mass media has fixated on whether the film Zero Dark Thirty glorified torture. Academy Award-winning director Katherine Bigelow has been forced by critics to explain her use of graphic, detailed torture scenes in her new film, which dramatizes the hunt and assassination of Osama Bin Laden. But while headlines and talk shows focus on Bigelow and her film, less has been said about two new reports detailing extensive torture, or about the realities of torture.

We are joined by filmmaker Murad Aldin Amayreh discussing his most recent documentary, “The Tortured: Stories of Survival.” And, Hector Aristizabal, one of the interviewees in the film who was tortured in Colombia. Also joining the conversation: Pamela Merchant is Executive Director of the Center for Justice and Accountability. Gerald Gray is a social worker and psychotherapist who works with torture victims and who has initiated numerous institutes to assist them (including the Center for Justice and Accountability). Pamela Merchant is Executive Director of the Center for Justice and Accountability. Stephen Rohde is a constitutional lawyer, founder and Chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and a Vice President of Death Penalty Focus, and author of AMERICAN WORDS OF FREEDOM, and FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY. [ dur. 29 mins. ]

Then, on the Scholars’ Circle, President Obama has announced that a decade of war is now ending, our panel argues that warring is a relatively new phenomenon in human societies and that human beings are not warlike by nature. [ dur. 27 mins. ]

Douglas P. Fry, Dir of Peace, Mediation & Conflict Research at Abo Akademi Univ. Finland.  Author of Beyond War : The Human Potential for Peace.

Darcia Narvaez, Prof. of Phycology, Univ. of Minnesota. Co-author of Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development: From Research to Practice and Policy.

Brian Ferguson, Prof. of  Anthropology , Rutgers Univ. .  Co-author of  War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare.

Visit our Store [ lists books written by each on this panel ]

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