David Cole to Speak on Torture and Accountability in the “War on Terror”
David Cole, a Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a volunteer staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, will present a lecture, “Torture and Accountability in the ‘War on Terror’: What Should Be Done?” at the Institute for Advanced Study on Friday, October 23, at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute.
Cole’s talk is in the Institute’s annual series, Lectures on Public Policy, which aims to address issues relevant to contemporary politics and social conditions and scientific matters of broad import.
He will discuss how it became legal in the United States to engage in techniques such as water boarding by examining the role of lawyers in the Bush Justice Department. Addressing the once-secret memos that authorized such tactics, he will argue that the lawyers failed their constitutional and ethical responsibilities, and became accomplices to criminal conduct. Cole will consider who, if anyone, should be held accountable for the CIA “enhanced interrogation techniques”; whether we should merely “move forward,” as President Obama has suggested; and whether those who authorized these tactics should be investigated. Cole will discuss what these issues teach us about law and lawyering, and what our collective response to the experience might teach us about ourselves.
About David Cole
Cole was educated at Yale University, where he was awarded a B.A. and a J.D. Since the attacks of September 11, he has been involved in many of the nation’s most important cases involving civil liberties and national security, including challenges to rendition, preventive detention, secret trials, and restrictions on material support to groups labeled “terrorist.” Among the significant constitutional cases he has litigated are Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, both of which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning; and National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding.
The author of six books, Cole won the Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for best book on national security and civil liberties for Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror, published in 2007 and written with Jules Lobel, and the American Book Award in 2004 for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his human rights work.
In addition to his position at Georgetown University, Cole is a volunteer attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
About the Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and support curiosity-driven research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world. Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of approximately 30, and it ensures the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.
The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent academic institution located in Princeton, New Jersey. Its more than 6,000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world. Thirty-three Nobel Laureates and 40 out of 56 Fields Medalists, as well as many winners of the Wolf and MacArthur prizes, have been affiliated with the Institute.