Tanner Lectures: Mark Danner (author and Professor of Journalism, Berkeley)

"Imposing the State of Exception: Constitutional Dictatorship, Torture and Us" Mark Danner is a writer and reporter who for twenty-five years has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, among many other stories. Danner is Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. Abstract: In the days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States government imposed on Americans and on foreign citizens a "state of exception" - a state of "soft martial law" in which significant limits were imposed, through executive order, administrative procedure and legislative action, on the traditional exercise of civil liberties and legal rights. Most striking were changes in the procedures by which prisoners were detained and interrogated and intelligence was gathered. This regime echoed, in some ways at least, other periods of "constitutional dictatorship" imposed by US governments during earlier wars. In others, the "state of exception" imposed during the War on Terror was strikingly different, and nowhere more so than in the development and approval of the practice of torture - and in the response of Americans to its use. Danner will give two lectures (second lecture on 4/15). There will also be two discussion sessions (4/15 & 4/16). Mark Danner's books are availalbe for purchase at the Stanford Bookstore.