PEN American Center will host what promises to be an engaging, eye-opening, and interesting event (regardless of one’s political ideology) about the U.S.’s so-called war on terror.

Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror” will include Matthew Alexander, Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Auster, Ishmael Beah, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Jenny Holzer, A.M. Homes, Jameel Jaffer, Susanna Moore, Jack Rice, Amrit Singh, and Art Spiegelman. Guests are writers, artists, lawyers, a former U.S. interrogator, and others.

Co-hosted by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), the event will look at acts of abuse and torture during the war on terror. Event participants will read from the recently-released secret documents that have brought these abuses to light—memos, declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees—and respond with thoughts about how the U.S. can move forward.

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.

A new multimedia report worth taking the time to look at is GlobalPost’s “Life, Death, and the Taliban”, now on GlobalPost’s website.

“It’s an ambitious multimedia project that brings together a team of writers, photographers and videographers reporting from on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the battle against the Taliban heats up on all fronts and the Afghan election looms next week amid increased violence,” says Charles Sennott, GlobalPost founder and executive director.

Sennott returned to Pakistan and Afghanistan to work with Jean MacKenzie in Kabul and Shahan Mufti in Islamabad to find what he calls the “groundtruth” about America’s misunderstood enemy, the Taliban.

Visitors to GlobalPost’s website can join the conversation about this important issue by posting a comment.

You can  also hear Sennott talk about the project and his recent trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan on NPR.

A film not to miss–FIXER: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi–at the Asia Society in New York on Wednesday, August 12. The film is the story of the relationship between Naqshbandi and one of his clients, American journalist Christian Parenti. It has won critical acclaim, and is a rare inside look at the world of journalists halfway around the world.

Event details:

6:00 – 6:30 pm: Registration and reception
6:30 – 8:30 pm: Screening followed by Q&A with Ian Olds, director/producer and Christian Parenti, producer, journalist

725 Park Avenue, New York, NY

Read a review of Fixer here.

Go here for more information.

A event on July 15 put on by the PEN American Center provided a fascinating look inside the recent protests following elections in Iran. Iran: A Conversation About Elections, Protest, and the Future, was co-sponsored by the New York Review of Books at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in Manhattan.

Shaul  Bakash moderated the conversation between political analyst Karim Sadjadpour, writer and activist Haleh Esfandiari, and journalist Roger Cohen. Although all the event participants were heavy hitters with deep personal and professional experiences related to Iran, there was one standout: Roger Cohen.

Cohen, who writes for The New York Times, was in Iran during protests following highly suspicious presidential election results. As the protesters became targets for plainclothes police who were beating and attacking them, Cohen was there to see it first-hand. He was tear gassed, marched silently and ran side by side with Iranians calling for fair and accurate election results, and looked in the eyes of the people exercising their ability as human beings to use a massive physical presence in public to send a message to those in power.

“As a journalist, you have to be on the ground to touch, taste, smell….get the pulse of the place,” said Cohen about his time in Iran during the PEN event . According to Cohen, he was one of the last foreign journalists to be kicked out of Iran.

With the drain of foreign journalists and an internal muzzle on domestic journalists, the question now remains as to where accurate and reliable information about what’s happening in the aftermath of the protests can be found. Particularly vital is an accurate count of those killed during the protesting. According to Cohen, he got a recent phone call from a contact in Iran who said that at one hospital morgue, there were more than 20 bodies.

A lot of news about Iran so far has gotten out to the world in a flurry of activity through social networking tools like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. With an absence of a foreign press corps, this could continue to be the case. For Cohen, it is a way around the restrictions on getting information out, but lacks the filter of the professional eye.

“There’s some use in having people on the ground who have some training in gathering information,” said Cohen of the benefit of professional journalists being present and able to do their jobs.

All of the panelists speculated about what’s next for Iran; whether the “green wave” of opposition to 30 years of suppression was just a flash in the pan, or the beginning of a new era there. While the world waits and watches, opposition to the current administration is reportedly almost all locked up. Many journalists are also imprisoned, and the count of the dead is incomplete at best–at worst, inaccurate.

If Iran is any gauge of a state in the Middle East that could impact the foreign affairs of the region, things seem to be on a tipping point.

A national candlelight vigil will be held today (June 3) for jailed journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. The two women were on assignment from Al Gore’s Current TV media project in China, and were arrested by North Korean police near the border.

Rallies will be held nationwide tonight for two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea. In addition to New York, rallies will be held in Washington D.C., Birmingham, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. The New York rally will be in Washington Square Park from 6 to 8 p.m.

The journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were arrested on the North Korean border in early March of this year. They were on assignment from Contact TV reporting on refugees fleeing North Korea into China.

A local journalism organization, the Overseas Press Club of America (OPC), is an organizer of the New York event. They have been calling for Ling’s and Lee’s release since their arrest. The OPC says North Korean officials insist the women crossed the frozen border river from China, but according to the journalists they were apprehended in China after refusing to stop filming.

“Whatever the truth of that dispute, the women were certainly legitimate journalists doing their work,” said Larry Martz, Freedom of the Press Committee Co-Chair for the OPC in a letter to North Korean officials in May. “The charge that they entered illegally with “hostile” intent does not bear scrutiny.”

June 3 (June 4 in North Korea) is the first day of the journalists’ trial. They are being charged with spying and illegally crossing the China-North Korea border. They could spend up to 10 years in a North Korean boot camp if convicted.

In a letter from the families of the two women, they plead for the women’s release.

“We have been holding our breath every day as we’ve watched the political situation on the Korean Peninsula grow increasingly tense,” says the letter. “Our loved ones sit in the midst of it.”

A noteworthy group of photojournalists gathered at photo agency VII’s Brooklyn studio last week. The small group represented some of the cream of photojournalists that had gathered in NYC for the recent New York Photo Festival. Among them were Gary Knight and Ashley Gilbertson.

Photography legend Gary Knight in front of one his photographs for dispatches journal. (Genevieve Long for The Epoch Times)

Also on hand was Tim Hetherington, whose notable photo installation “Sleeping Soldiers” is causing quite a stir in the photography world. The installation is notable because of the incredibly creative way it approaches depicting the war in Afghanistan. 3 panels show images of sleeping American soldiers in Afghanistan, overlayed with video and still images. There is then an eerie related soundtrack of helicopters, gunshots, explosions, and crying men.

A recent display of Tim Hetherington's "Sleeping Soldiers" photo installation. (Brian Rose/www.brianrose.com)

“Sleeping Soldiers” is a shocking look at the war in Afghanistan and the impact it has had on American soldiers. To watch it literally feels like being in the middle of a restless, hellish nightmare.

At this point, Hetherington won’t put the installation online for viewing, but other examples of his work can be seen on his website. A launch of his new book, “Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia 2003-2007” will also be held in Brooklyn, New York on June 4. More details available here.

Just yesterday, New York City was the target of a failed terrorist plot. It’s a jarring reminder that terrorists are still out there, thinking about how to do Americans harm.

For inquiring minds who want information from an authoritative voice on terrorism, take a look at The Shadowland Journal. The blog includes postings and writings of Christopher Dickey, a veteran journalist who has authored six books, notably his most recent work, “Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterrorism Force-The NYPD”.

In light of May 20’s arrest of would-be terrorists in New York (through an FBI and NYPD sting operation), Dickey’s book is especially timely. It describes, in great detail and through painstaking research, how the NYPD is one of the world’s best weapons in the fight against terrorism.

Dickey is also Paris bureau chief of Newsweek magazine. His perspective is a valuable one in understanding how the war on terror is being fought right here in New York City.

There are few photos of the Iraq war as poignant and iconic as that of Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller. The photo, known as the “Marlboro Marine”, was taken by Los Angeles Times photojournalist Luis Sinco.

The war-weary Marine with a cigarette dangling from his mouth in  the battle of Fallujah in 2004 is more than an American face far from home. At some level, although it was taken nearly five years ago, it embodies the weariness of the American people and their military–set adrift in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, more than ever, they are two conflicts that seem to have no end, no solution, no happy road out.

Sinco’s photograph, and his personal connection with Lance Corporal Miller, gave birth to a series of engaging and at times breathtaking pictures that, when woven together, create a picture of a life after. After war, after killing, after trying to go back and realizing nothing will ever be the same.

A slideshow of Sinco’s photographs of Miller, post-Iraq, can be found here.

The Japan Society of New York will be hosting an as-advertised “sold out” event tonight, May 12 with the author of The Blue Sweater, Jacqueline Novogratz.

According to the Japan Society, the gist of the event’s focus is:

Imagine a world where everyone has access to water, housing, health services and energy. That is the goal of Jacqueline Novogratz, a member of the U.S.-Japan Innovators Network. In 2001, Novogratz started Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve global poverty. Join us in celebrating the launch of her new book The Blue Sweater, which follows her transformation from a young idealistic woman working in Africa to one of today’s most inspiring social entrepreneurs.

For more information about Novogratz, you can visit her website at www.thebluesweater.com.