By Pat JaCoby | February 6, 2006

U.S. practices at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib will be among human rights topics discussed by investigative journalist Mark Danner when he presents the annual DeWitt Higgs Memorial Lecture at 6 p.m. Feb. 15 in the Price Center Ballroom.

The lecture, Into the Light of Day: Torture, Human Rights and Bush’s State of Exception, is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a panel discussion with time for questions from the audience.

Danner has written extensively on human rights violations and American foreign policy and has earned international recognition for his skills in investigative journalism, including three Overseas Press Awards for Outstanding Reporting from Abroad, a National Magazine Award, and an Emmy.

Danner is professor of journalism as the University of California, Berkeley, and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights, Democracy and Journalism at Bard College. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East. Since 1990 Danner has been a staff writer at The New Yorker, and is a frequent contributor to New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Aperture and many other newspapers and magazines. He has co-written and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for ABC News. He is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy, and Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, as well as forthcoming books on the former Yugoslavia and Haiti.

Robert Horwitz, professor and chair of the Department of Communication at UCSD, will serve as panel moderator. The author of numerous articles on communications media and free speech law in the U.S., he currently is working on a new research project tentatively titled Utopianism on the Right: Neoconservatism, Religion, and American Foreign Policy.

Serving as panelists will be William Aceves, professor of law and director of the International Legal Studies Program at California Western School of Law, and Michael D. Ramsey of the University of San Diego School of Law. Aceves has served as counsel for Iraqi nationals tortured at Abu Ghraib and works frequently with the Center for Justice and Accountability, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union. Ramsey, whose expertise lies in constitutional law and foreign relations law, clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia before he went into practice locally with the firm of Latham & Watkins.

The DeWitt Higgs Memorial Lecture is held each year to honor the late UC Regent attorney and San Diego community leader DeWitt “Dutch” Higgs, and is focused on a contemporary legal topic. It is sponsored by UCSD’s Warren College, the Law and Society Program and California Western School of Law.