“I don’t think you can rely on American news media at present,” Graham said. “You’ll get sanitized news. All [American] news media have agreed to have its news filtered by the government.”

She urged students to look to the BBC, Le Monde and other international news sources to “get a more complicated picture, more complicated than that Fox News will give you.”

Sacks said that everyone in the room was “on the verge of war not just against Iraq, but against us.”

He said that Americans must not allow themselves to be intimidated by the Bush administration.

“Pride is driving a group of people who think this is a world that is theirs to take,” Sacks said.

Americans should not “be frightened by such terms as patriotism, a term being cynically used at this moment by people...who are greedy.”

Palmer called the teach-in “one moment of hope on an otherwise very gloomy evening.”

He criticized the Harvard culture in which students are faced with “such a stressed environment and... exhaustion by competition which dampens political discourse.”

In addition to the statements, Niles X. Lichtenstein ’05 delivered a spoken word performance against the war.

During the discussion period, one student spoke in favor of the war. But many others responded by questioning the Bush administration’s motives and by pointing to a history of imperialism in U.S. foreign policy.

According to McCarthy a series of events will take place throughout the spring to promote even more dialogue about the war.

McCarthy said he hopes in the future to incorporate the voices of those who are undecided or pro-war.

“The biggest challenge is how to sustain this conversation as war unfolds,” McCarthy said. “The key to hope for peace is to continue to have these discussions.”

—Staff writer Margaretta E. Homsey can be reached at homsey@fas.harvard.edu.