MNs Calling Out the Torture Enablers at St. Thomas Law School. by Coleen Rowley

[annm4peace]

Roger Cuthbertson explained the terrible significance of the "torture memos" written by former Bush Attorneys Robert Delahunty (now St. Thomas Law Prof) and John Yoo to St. Thomas Director of Communications Chato Hazelbaker. Cuthbertson and St Thomas alum Bob Heberle were leading a group of citizens against torture that included Minnesotans from "Amnesty International".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/calling-out-the-torture-e_b_269240.html

(snip)

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.

Now that details of the highly unethical, illegal and ineffective waterboarding, torturing and abusing of prisoners are coming out, and the green light is no longer on, Delahunty, Yoo and other Bush Administration lawyers who served as the enablers and architects of the abuses have, of course, run for the hills, to rest on their academic laurels and hide behind the ivy-covered walls of places like the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis.


Although the legal reasoning of Yoo and Delahunty has been thoroughly repudiated telling the CIA that it needn't worry about war crimes or other international law and it's clear their faulty reasoning paved the way for these abuses and potential war crimes, you wouldn't know that from talking to St. Thomas officials or students. One student told us that Delahunty was his professor and that he was a nice guy who tells students that his advice on how to distinguish lawful combatants who wear uniforms from unlawful combatants who don't wear uniforms served to reduce civilian casualties.

In his defense of Delahunty, Thomas Mengler, the Dean of St. Thomas School of Law, goes to some length to try and distance Delahunty and Yoo's earlier January 9, 2002 OLC memo from the more explicit "torture memos" authored by John Yoo and Jay Bybee. Interestingly enough, however, another top St. Thomas law faculty member doesn't worry about that distinction but aggressively defends the "core legal analysis set forth in the OLC memoranda". Michael Stokes Paulsen, a Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas writes articles in the opposite vein, extolling the OLC authors of the torture memos. Paulsen's efforts include a recent piece entitled: "Obama's Injustice Department" for the highly political Weekly Standard (founded by William Kristol) and picked up by the "Powerline" blog.



Maybe a question that Delahunty (and the St. Thomas faculty who hired him) need to answer is this simple one: "Would Jesus Torture?"
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I did post the You Tube Video:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x360072


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[annm4peace]

1. to contact Dean Mengler at St Thomas University Law School

This past Monday, my friends protested in front of MN's St. Thomas University Law School for their continued employment of Law Professor Robert Delahunty.
Delahunty was a co-author with John Yoo of the Torture Memos.

For the past 3-4 years we have been protesting this Professor and the use of Torture.
St. Thomas, a Catholic university continues to defend him. It really sickens me.
Would Jesus torture? Is it that they have stared at a man being tortured on a cross for so long that they think torture is ok?

Please watch and hear the video. Roger is a retired teacher and Bob who isn't in the video is an alumni of St. Thomas.

and forward to others.


below is the Dean's contact.

Dean/Ryan Chair in Law
[e-mail]
Phone: [phone]
Toll Free: [phone], Ext. 2-4886
MSL 411
1000 LaSalle Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403



http://www.stthomas.edu/law/faculty/bios/menglerthomas....

[dflprincess]

2. Call the archbishop and tell him Delahunty is prochoice

that will get him fired. :sarcasm:

[annm4peace]

3. Sad isn't it? Save a fetus, torture a child.

I would be so upset if I was some one who donated to this University.

[dflprincess]

4. It is very weird

but I think most the Catholics that are still practicing tend to be wingnuts. I swear the nuns I had for Cathechism, pre-Vatican II, were more liberal. A couple of them were very big on pounding the Acts of Mercy into us (feed the hungry, heal the sick, etc).

Every so often I go over to the forums at Catholic.com to remind myself why I left the church. It's like Free Republic though I will give them credit for not bouncing you for disagreeing. Healing the sick or feeding the hungry is now considered to be "socialism" or among the more extreme "communistic". I never realized those nuns were so radical and subversive.

There's a few people who try and inject som sanity into the forums but for the most part they love George Bush and think Palin is damn near a saint for not having an abortion.