This was my comment following Dr. Miles' MinnPost article:
University of St. Thomas School of Law Dean Thomas Mengler has inexplicably and repeatedly insisted in his defense of Professor Delahunty that he (Delahunty) only wrote one of the legal memos drafted by the Office of Legal Counsel. How can the Dean not know of Delahunty's much greater involvement in writing these other cornerstone memos? And how can the Dean not know that other government officials (i.e. State Dept. lawyers, FBI and military officials) vigorously opposed Delahunty's legal opinions supporting torture? The FBI even opened a "war crimes file" on the abuses agents witnessed as a result of Yoo-Delahunty's legal reasoning that the Geneva Conventions did not apply.
The Dean also attempts to distance Delahunty from the later, more explicit "torture memos" authored by Yoo and Bybee, but the St. Thomas "Distinguished Chair" Michael Stokes Paulsen (who is Delahunty's mentor and who St. Thomas hired for some reason at about the same time as Delahunty) does just the opposite in his defense of the authors of the "torture memos". Paulsen has written and testified in May of this year about "The Lawfulness of the Interrogation Memos" by relying on Delahunty's mistaken notion that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Bush's "war on terror". Unless I'm not reading his opinion correctly, Paulsen seems to be defending ALL of the later more explicit torture memos by relying on the initial Yoo-Delahunty faulty reasoning.
What's most disconcerting is that these professors currently teach constitutional law and ethics at St. Thomas. The hypocrisy is breathtaking when Dean Mengler welcomes students to the St. Thomas Law School by boasting that "we have a reputation as an academically excellent law school firmly ground in our Catholic intellectual and social tradition. Our unique mission of 'integrating faith and reason in the search for truth through a focus on morality and social justice' is the foundation on which we build a community that emphasizes professional excellence and servant leadership."
Maybe I'm missing some key legal artifice, but I would challenge St. Thomas Dean Mengler, Associate Professor Robert Delahunty and "Distinguished Chair" Michael Stokes Paulsen to explain how their support of the torture memos squares with "a focus on morality and social justice".
Has Associate Professor Delahunty already gained tenure at the UST Law School? Does anyone else find it odd that a law professor would not accept to debate this huge national issue, an issue that the professor had first hand, personal involvement with? When I went to law school, that's all the law professors did was debate! (And I should add that the law professors I know tend to be very good at it since they practice so much.) So I think the silence of Delahunty and the Dean of the St. Thomas law school is just very telling.
Just as new details emerged on Monday, August 24 of CIA interrogators' abuse of prisoners involving mock executions, threatening prisoners with power drills, and choking them to the point of passing out, Associate Law Professor Robert Delahunty quietly resumed teaching fall classes on constitutional law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. Delahunty along with co-author John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) laid the cornerstone legal memo that gave the green light to "go to the dark side" as Dick Cheney was urging. The 2004 CIA Inspector General report is heavily redacted but it's apparently so disturbing that it led Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on this very same day to appoint a prosecutor-the same one looking at the destruction of the CIA torture tapes-to review the abuses, setting the stage for a probe that could lead to criminal charges of CIA personnel.
In connection with Monday's rally (click here) at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis to "Deter Delahunty", I need to assign some reading of the excellent and relevant academic discussion in today's NY Times: "Torture and Academic Freedom". I would highly recommend that everyone, including lawyers and non-lawyers, all opponents and proponents of torture, rally participants and the Dean and faculty of the University of St. Thomas read these five carefully considered and written academic opinions. The legal opinions actually show, that although there are nuances of disagreement on some points, there is a great deal of consensus that John Yoo's (and his early memo co-author Robert Delahunty's) actions enabling the Cheney-Bush Administration to subvert law and conduct torture were very, very wrong and not within the range of "academic freedom".
