KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents:
Wednesday, June 15, 2016 7:30 PM
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley
Advance tickets: $12 : brownpapertickets.com :: T: 800-838- 3006 or Books Inc, Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs.Dalloway’s
S.F. – Modern Times. $15 door
To this day, the people of the United States have never had anything like a full accounting of all that has been done in our names as part of this seemingly endless “war on terror.” Nor has there been any credible public reckoning for the officials at the highest levels of government who are responsible for all the deeply troubling
actions undertaken by Washington since 9/11. The country has been manipulated into a stance well apart from the legal community of nations. There is a pressing need for the United States, now deeming itself “leader of the free world,” to be held accountable for its actions. Instead, the country increasingly violates international laws of war and human rights with evident impunity.
For the sake of all the victims of the “war on terror,” for the sake of our national soul, and even more for the future of humanity itself, we need a full accounting of our American war criminals. We need an American Nuremberg.
No subject is more hotly debated than the extreme measures that our government has taken after 9/11 in the name of national security: torture, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, secret detention centers (or “black sites”), massive surveillance of citizens. But while the press too rarely exposes the dark side of the war on terror and congressional investigators sometimes raise alarms about the abuses committed by U.S. intelligence agencies and armed forces, no high U.S. official has ever been prosecuted for these violations – which many legal observers around the world consider war crimes.
The United States helped establish the international principles guiding the prosecution of war crimes – starting with the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II, when Nazi officials were held accountable for their crimes against humanity. But the American government and legal system have consistently refused to apply these same principles to our own officials. Now Rebecca Gordon takes on the explosive task of “indicting” the officials who should be put on trial for war crimes.
Rebecca Gordon teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and for the university’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. Her previous publications include Letters From Nicaragua, Cruel and Usual: How Welfare “Reform” Punishes Poor People , and Mainstreaming Torture. Prior to her academic career, Gordon spent a few decades working in various movements for women’s liberation and LGBT rights; movements in solidarity with the struggles of poor people in Central America; the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and South Africa; and movements
opposing U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
DAVID TALBOT, founder and former CEO of Salon.com, was senior editor at Mother Jones magazine, and features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time and other major publications. He is also the author of the New York Times’ bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, the national bestseller Season of the Witch, and the recent “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.
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Don’t forget that one of the top candidates for prosecution is John Yoo, a prof with an endowed chair at Berkeley Law. He sits comfortably (presumably in this chair) just about a mile away from the Hillside Club.