Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Say Anything: The DOJ Comes Clean on Retribution

For government lawyers, truth can be a contingent, situational, and highly malleable idea. And today we have new evidence of that fact. 

Three years ago, when Boston College filed a motion in a federal court to quash subpoenas of Belfast Project interviews, Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. McNeil flatly rejected the idea that the release of those interviews from a protected academic archive might endanger people involved in the project. You can read McNeil's July 1, 2011 brief here. But here's the relevant passage, from pg. 2:
While the Respondents make other equitable and factual claims, including the claims that the researchers will face retribution and that the disclosure of the materials will threaten the political stability in Northern Ireland, those claims falter in the face of close scrutiny. The researchers themselves, and the subject of the interviews, widely publicized their involvement in this oral history project long before the subpoenas in this case were issued. Moreover, the Respondents’ decision to publicize the issuance of the subpoenas – which had been kept under seal by the United States – belies any claim of such risk. If there were a substantial risk of retribution, the Respondents’ efforts to publicize the subpoenas would compound the purported problem, rather than mitigate it.
So the release of Belfast Project interviews would be no big deal: no risk to the political stability of Northern Ireland, no risk of retribution for people involved in the project. No good reason not to pry open the archive, your honor. No danger at all. They made this claim often and loudly; see also this example.

This week, Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. McNeil filed two documents with the same court -- a brief, and a supporting declaration -- to argue against a federal judge's proposal to publicly release documents filed under seal in the matter of the Belfast Project subpoenas. Why? Because, ladies and gentlemen, the release of material related to the Belfast Project endangers witnesses and might subject people to retribution.

Same prosecutor, same case. The material should be released, because warnings about retribution are silly; the material must not be released, because it's dangerous and people will get hurt.

Here's a link to the brief; the relevant language is on pg. 2, where McNeil writes that British officials "continue to seek that the materials remain impounded to ensure that evidence (both testimonial and documentary) is not destroyed or altered, and to ensure that witnesses and investigators are not subject to harassment, reprisals or tampering."

And here's a link to the supporting declaration, where McNeil writes that "the release of such information could unfairly impugn the reputation of those witnesses and suspects, or subject them to retribution."

Suddenly, three years later, the Department of Justice says the release of documentary material related to the Belfast Project threatens to subject people to retribution.  

So what does that say about the decision to pry the interviews out of the archive in the first place?

Thursday, September 4, 2014

A Parody of a Satire of a Farce

Ivor Bell was back in court this week, where his lawyer asked the judge to throw out the increasingly weak and stale charges against him. Here's how the Belfast Telegraph explains the judge's response:

"But after being told prosecutors want another eight weeks to consult with police, District Judge Fiona Bagnall indicated that the defence application should wait until full papers are served."

Ivor Bell was arrested in March. Now, in September, prosecutors in Northern Ireland can't make a decision about whether or not to pursue his prosecution, because they need some time to consult with the police on the case.



If six months of consultation hasn't been enough, another two isn't going to help. Give it up, folks.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

The Urgent Search for Justice in a 1972 Murder, Cont.


Ivor Bell was arrested in March. It's now September, and his prosecution has not gone forward. When, if ever, will he brought back into court? Six months, no action, dead silence.

Gerry Adams was arrested at the end of April. It's now September, and no decision has been announced regarding the possibility he'll be charged in Jean McConville's 1972 kidnapping and murder.

At about the same time, Helen McKendry said publicly that she knew who had kidnapped her mother, and said she would go to the police to name names. It is now September, and we have no public indication that the PSNI has acted upon, or even received, the information that McKendry said she was about to bring to them.

Someone at the PSNI leaked the news, back in May, that the police would be returning to the archives at Boston College for new subpoenas of the entire Belfast Project. It's now September, and there are no publicly available signs that those subpoenas were ever served.

The investigation into the murder of Jean McConville has stalled or evaporated. It's time for the PSNI and the PPS to either take action or provide some explanation. What has been the point of all this?

Do it or give it up, publicly and explicitly. It's time.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Astoundingly Obtuse U.S. Policy Vision

Several news sources covered the July 15 confirmation hearing of St. Louis lawyer Kevin O'Malley, who was recently appointed by President Barack Obama to be the new U.S. ambassador to Ireland. But none fully caught the implications of his unfortunate answer to a question from Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, regarding the ongoing PSNI effort to seek subpoenas of confidential Belfast Project interviews archived at Boston College.

Kaine asked if the PSNI was "re-litigating" the Good Friday Agreement. O'Malley's answer can be seen on video here (fast forward to 1:20:00). Here's what O'Malley said about further subpoenas:

"The Boston College study, which was a totally private, academic interest, here, the release of any more of the data in that I don't believe will affect the peace process. I think that the accords are strong, I think there's been now sixteen years of experience with them. So that the truth, or whatever is found in the Boston College study, will not cause anyone to repudiate the accords or go backwards."

O'Malley went on to say that the arrest of Gerry Adams shows the need for the adoption of the Haass proposals, but the willful blindness of the first part of his answer negates any sense or value that the second part might have offered. The Boston College archives contain more than a hundred interviews with dozens of people who participated in loyalist and republican paramilitary organizations. Those interviews will necessarily contain detailed descriptions of serious violent action on both sides of the Troubles. And the State Department, represented here in the person of the soon-to-be-ambassador to Ireland, takes the position that the wholesale dumping of all of that sensitive material into the politics of Northern Ireland will have no affect on the peace process, because the peace is a virtually ancient and wholly secure sixteen years old. And then the second part of his answer acknowledges that no political framework has been established in Northern Ireland for managing questions about the past.

Compare the current view of this person nominated for a senior position in the State Department to the recent -- and apparently repudiated -- view once held by his soon-to-be-boss. John Kerry was certain in 2012 that a set of initial and relatively limited Boston College subpoenas were a threat to the peace process; now, apparently, not so much. Magic!

Ambassador-nominees are prepared for their confirmation hearings with a review of policy and a discussion of talking points. If Kevin O'Malley is telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the full release of all Belfast Project materials will have no effect on the peace process in Northern Ireland, he's telling us the policy position of the U.S. government.

They are not paying attention.

Friday, July 11, 2014

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

The Police Service of Northern Ireland

In October 2012, news stories announced that the Police Service of Northern Ireland would be pursuing subpoenas of tapes and notes from interviews with former IRA member Dolours Price. The PSNI had already gone after Dolours Price interviews archived at Boston College, but this new effort was to be directed at the newspaper and TV journalists who had interviewed Price about the BC subpoenas. In the crosshairs: CBS News and the Sunday Telegraph.

More than a year and a half later, there is no evidence that those subpoenas ever arrived. When Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams emerged from his four-day interrogation at the PSNI's Antrim station, he said that police had confronted him with material from the Boston College interviews; he made no mention of CBS or Telegraph materials. And my own tedious search of Pacer, the federal court case management website, turns up no evidence of subpoenas served on CBS News headquarters in New York. 

To be sure, we can't see very far into the underlying events, and it's not clear what kind of contest may have taken place over this threat of subpoenas directed against journalists. I've been asking journalists and public affairs staff at CBS News and the Telegraph if they received subpoenas, or discussed the possibility of subpoenas with the PSNI, but those questions have gone entirely unanswered. Liz Young, the public affairs director at the PSNI, offered this careful non-answer to my questions: "Given that investigations are ongoing we are not in the position to either deny or confirm that a subpoena was sought and no inference should be taken from this." So the conclusion has to balance the likely with the wholly unknown: It appears that the PSNI threatened journalists with subpoenas, but then didn't follow through, and it's not possible at this point to know why the threatened subpoenas apparently didn't arrive.

Now: Spot the pattern. In May of this year, a new round of news stories announced that the PSNI would be seeking new subpoenas to secure every Belfast Project interview archived at Boston College. Again, no one is answering questions, but there's no sign that those subpoenas have arrived.

Meanwhile, the high-profile arrest of Gerry Adams resulted in nothing more than the four-day-long collapse of the PSNI's souffle. Three years after the Grand Inquisition began, Adams is a free man, and would not seem to have much reason to worry. The other big event in the PSNI's supposed murder investigation was the March arrest of former IRA leader Ivor Bell, long purported to have been chief of staff to Adams in the 1970s IRA in Belfast. Bell was charged with aiding and abetting McConville's murder, not with committing it; as yet, the PSNI hasn't charged a single person with actually kidnapping McConville or actually killing her. And Bell is also a free man, released on bail as the Public Prosecution Service tries to decide whether or not to bother taking the charges to trial. They do not seem to be in any particular hurry.

So the PSNI's "investigation" into the 1972 murder of Jean McConville -- an investigation opened 39 years after the event -- has made more noise than progress: some arrests that led to the release of those arrested; an arrest, with weak and likely to be abandoned charges, of someone who isn't alleged to have killed McConville; and a storm of threats and promises that have mostly seemed to evaporate. 

The available evidence continues to support the argument that I've now been making for more than three years: The PSNI is putting on a show, not a murder investigation.

But then spot the other pattern: Many news stories reported the PSNI's claim that it would subpoena CBS News and the Telegraph; none reported that the subpoenas didn't arrive. Many news stories reported that the PSNI would be pursuing the whole Belfast Project archive at Boston College; no news stories have reported that those new subpoenas haven't been served. Many news stories reported the dramatic arrests of Adams and Bell; few journalists appear to have noticed that the air has leaked out of those arrests.

In Indonesia, puppeteers perform Wayang Kulit, a theater of shadows in which images are projected on a screen by performers who stand behind it. The PSNI is the Dalang, the puppeteer, in the shadow play of the Jean McConville "investigation." And the news media continues to treat the play as real life.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Urgent Murder Investigation (cont.)

On May 22, BBC News reported that detectives in the Police Service of Northern Ireland had decided to pursue new and very broad subpoenas of the Belfast Project archives at Boston College. The BBC reported that news in the present tense, writing that the PSNI "is seeking" all of that archival material.

Today is June 23, and more than a month has passed. Neither the Department of Justice nor Boston College will answer questions from me, anymore, and the PSNI never did in the first place. It's possible that the PSNI is actively pursuing subpoenas, and it's possible that the DOJ is actively preparing those subpoenas. But I searched Pacer, today -- that's the case management system for the federal courts, where case documentation can be accessed and downloaded -- and I can find no sign that new subpoenas have been prepared or served.

Time will tell, but I wondered last month if the PSNI was wagging its dick at critics, in a fit of pique, with a piece of public theater that was designed to produce fear and worry rather than real investigative gains. How often do you see police departments announcing in the newspaper who they're going to raid next week?

In any event, the other shoe does not appear to have dropped, or at least not yet. Let us hope that some politicians and criminal justice bureaucrats have come to their senses.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Thing Discovered to Be What It Is

The legal justice system in Northern Ireland is now discovering something that they might always have known, if they had ever bothered to ask.

Lawyers for Ivor Bell, who stands accused of long-ago IRA membership and complicity in the events leading to the 1972 murder of Belfast widow Jean McConville, have argued before a judge that the oral history interviews being used against their client are subjective and unreliable. They are. Indeed, they must necessarily be all of the things Bell's lawyers say they are. Oral history interviews are valuable to historians precisely because they are entirely subjective, the personally framed stories that people tell about themselves. Subjectivity and unreliable narration aren't a failure of the form; they're an inevitable feature.

In Los Angeles, locked in the archives at the University of California, researchers can find the massive transcript of a long series of interviews conducted with Jack Tenney, a California state legislator during the communist-hunting years of the McCarthy era in the United States. For years, Tenney chaired a committee that found communists under every rock in Hollywood, and nearly every rock everywhere else. "You can no more coexist with communism," Tenney said, "than you can coexist with a nest of rattlesnakes."

There was just one problem for California's leading slayer of far-left monsters: He had been a well-known and longtime activist on the political left. He spent the rest of his life trying to forget that inconvenient past.

The oral history interviews archived at UCLA endlessly reveal the depth of Tenney's later self-deception, as the interviewer leads him through a series of events and asks for his explanation. His membership in the leftist National Lawyers Guild? Well, see, he was sitting in his office when this young man came by and asked for two dollars for some new organization, and Tenney was distracted, so he fumbled for his wallet and paid the initiation fee, not knowing what he was joining. He was later spotted at an NLG convention, wearing a delegate's ribbon on his lapel, because he had checked into the hotel on business without knowing the Guild was meeting there. Then he bumped into some very, very distant acquaintances, who insisted on giving him a ribbon as a friendly gesture, and he didn't want to offend them, so....

Tenney's interviews go on like this for hundreds of pages, revealing a man at war with his own life and trying to talk his way out of his past. The interviews are, in other words, oral history: True in parts, false in parts, often deeply revealing in both. The way a person lies about his own life tells you as much about who he is as the parts that are factually accurate.

The Belfast Project, the oral history interviews of Northern Ireland paramilitary fighters conducted under the aegis of Boston College, could have been a project of enormous value for historians. It would not have been valuable because every word in every interview was true, and no historian would have approached the interviews on those terms. The richness of the project would have been found in its collisions between verifiable fact and proven deception, in the way people told their own stories about the politics of a violent past. The collection would have been an extraordinary resource, but will now be taken apart and destroyed, piece by piece.

That needless act of destruction is taking place because of the breathtaking naivete and laziness of the PSNI's hapless and self-interested detectives, who believed they could make up for a forty-year investigative failure by going to the Burns Library and checking out a set of interviews that someone else bothered to conduct. Police in Northern Ireland apparently believed they could seize a set of academic interviews, type a few pieces into a report for prosecutors, and deliver some justice on the cheap.

Few authorities have ever been more wrong, or more avoidably foolish. Oral history interviews are not police documents. It was stupid to believe they could be.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Yeah, It's Casual, We Don't Need to Protect All That, Like, Murder Investigation Stuff


At the bottom of this post, consolidated into one PDF file, are legal briefs filed today with the U.S. District Court in Boston regarding the request from NBC News to make public the Belfast Project interviews turned over by the Department of Justice to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The government's brief is just plain odd, and seems to undercut the narrative about the PSNI pursuing a serious murder investigation rather than a political effort against the head of Sinn Fein.

But first, BC. The Boston College brief starts with a critical procedural point that the government somehow doesn't bother to make: "On May 20, 2014, a letter dated May 6, 2014, from NBC News to the Court was entered on the docket in this matter. That letter is not a motion, was not signed by a lawyer admitted to practice before this Court, and the Trustees of Boston College (Boston College) were not served with the letter but only became aware of it when counsel received notice that it had been entered on the docket."

And, I mean, yes: NBC News wants to unseal federal court records, so it dropped the judge a line. They don't have lawyers at NBC?

BC's outside lawyer, Jeffrey Swope, goes on to say exactly what you would hope and expect a university to say about confidential archival material, objecting to the release of Belfast Project interviews and interviewee identities.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston, on the other hand, doesn't object to the unsealing of some of the Belfast Project interviews handed over to the PSNI, all of which are supposedly evidence in an ongoing murder investigation:

"The government has no objection to the unsealing of D.10 (7/5/11)1, D.28 (10/3/11), and D.36 (12/27/11). In addition, the government does not object to the unsealing of the sealed sidebar transcript from the hearing on February 1, 2012, except that the names of those persons identified during that sidebar conference should remain under seal. [Sealed Tr. 2/1/12 at pg. 15]. The government opposes the unsealing of D.15 (8/25/11), as it contains interview materials and other documents which were produced by Boston College in response to the MLAT subpoenas but are not otherwise publicly available."

So these are materials subpoenaed as evidence of a deadly serious murder investigation, and the investigation is ongoing, but go ahead and put a bunch of the material (that apparently damns Gerry Adams, cough cough) out on the street?

The government does oppose the unsealing of "certain pleadings filed by the United States which outline the nature and scope of the investigation which gave rise to the MLAT subpoenas," but they object to revealing the nature and scope of the investigation directly over a sentence that says the investigation "involves credible allegations of murder and kidnapping." Don't tell anyone what I'm doing, but I'm investigating a murder. That's a secret, though, so I'm not going to mention it.

The second set of subpoenas delivered back in 2011 were for every interview that mentioned the murder of Jean McConville, and then the PSNI arrested Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell over the murder of Jean McConville and interrogated them -- as Adams said when he was released -- using the Belfast Project interviews. The nature and scope of the investigation would not seem to be terribly secret, at this point, though it would be awfully interesting to see precisely how the British government framed the PSNI's request.

A hearing is scheduled for the courtroom of Judge William Young tomorrow. Here are the BC and DOJ briefs:

Friday, May 30, 2014

The PSNI Arrives on Tuesday for a Monday Lunch


They're too late.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland recently announced that they intended to make a broader MLAT request for every interview from the Boston College oral history collection they first began to mine in 2011. But Boston College also announced that it intended to return interviews to the former members of Northern Ireland paramilitary organizations interviewed for the university's Belfast Project. For a while, it appeared that the PSNI's announcement trumped BC's announcement: The news that more subpoenas were on the way would prevent the return of interviews.

For at least one Belfast Project interviewee, however, that's not what happened. Whether or not the PSNI gets the U.S. Department of Justice to subpoena the Boston College archives again, some of the interviews are out of their hands forever. They have already gone home.

Take a look at this remarkable set of documents that was posted on Pacer, the federal court system's document website, on Thursday:



Of particular interest are pages 3 and 4 of the PDF file, a May 1, 2014 letter from Jeffrey Swope, Boston College's outside lawyer for matters involving the Belfast Project, to Kevin Winters, the Belfast-based solicitor who represents former IRA member and Belfast Project interviewee Richard O'Rawe. Swope details a long list of documents and audiotapes that he is returning to O'Rawe through the offices of KRW Law, Winters' Belfast law firm. They are all of O'Rawe's interviews -- tapes and transcripts -- except the ones that the PSNI already received on account of the 2011 subpoenas. Also returned: O'Rawe's complete correspondence with the Belfast Project. There's nothing left but the material that police already have.

I don't know if material from other interviewees has already been sent back to them. Boston College and Jeffrey Swope have long since stopped responding to questions from me, and other people who would know about the return of interviews are either not responding to messages or not saying. (And I wouldn't respond to the questions I'm asking them, either, if our positions were reversed.) But if Boston College began returning interviews, there's no reason for them to have returned interviews to Richard O'Rawe but not to other interviewees, some of whom have been asking for the return of their interview material since shortly after the 2011 subpoenas arrived.

Bottom line: At least one interviewee has beat the PSNI to the archive, and maybe more. (Interviews that are unlikely to have been returned, and that are unlikely to ever be returned, are those for which Boston College has lost identifying material. So the PSNI may still be able to get its hands on interviews with unidentifiable research subjects, the legal value of which will be limited.)

Meanwhile, the political floor is beginning to give way beneath the PSNI's effort to treat the Troubles as ordinary crime.

The likelihood of a successful PSNI / DOJ return to the Belfast Project archives is rapidly fading.

Confirmed, and Still Ignored


A news story on the website of RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster, confirms that Gerry Adams discussed his arrest with American officials during his visit to Washington. While the PSNI pursues new subpoenas, the RTE headline tells the whole story: "Adams arrest discussed at Washington briefing."

An email to Adams' office this morning produced a list of officials who met with Adams: In addition to a sizable group of Congressmen -- gendered term intended, because he somehow only met with men -- Adams met with some moderately well-placed officials at the State Department. The White House took relatively little notice of the meeting, sticking Adams with an official from the Office of the Vice-President. Imagine flying four thousand miles and then finding yourself in a meeting with the vice-president's staff.

In any event, yes: Gerry Adams was in a foot race with the PSNI, talking to U.S. government officials about his arrest and the foolishness of the police investigation at exactly the moment the police are trying to get new subpoenas of the Boston College archival material that they hope to use against him.

Besides RTE, which news organizations noticed the presence in the capital of a foreign official engaged in a lobbying effort against a criminal investigation that the United States is helping with? Take a look:

When I picture the American news media, I imagine a little ring of saliva around the spot on the desk where they put their heads during nap time.


Thursday, May 29, 2014

Blackout


Gerry Adams is in Washington, D.C. today, "briefing senior political figures and the Obama administration on the current difficulties within the peace process." He is, in other words, lobbying one of the governments that's supposedly trying to put him in prison. Taking the mutual legal assistance treaty process and the PSNI investigation at face value, Adams is trying to talk a murder investigation off the rails -- to use politics against the police. Of course, taking that investigation at face value is...problematic, and the more likely reality is that an Irish politician is employing diplomacy this morning against a nasty piece of British politics.

Still, the drama in the moment is extraordinary: The same month he walked away from four days of police interrogation over a murder, a prominent politician is in the country where the supposed evidence against him was found, publicly announcing his intent to meet with officials in the government that helped to get him arrested. It's as if a murder suspect in New York City walked out of the interrogation room, smiled, buttoned up the cuffs of his shirt, and sauntered over to City Hall to have coffee with the mayor, patting a detective on the head as he left the precinct.

But then here's the fucking incredible part: The American news media isn't covering the visit at all. As I write this on Thursday morning, Adams has been in the country for about 24 hours, and no American news source that I can find has even mentioned his presence. He got to D.C. last night: nothing. Silence. Try your own search terms, but here are the results of a Google News search for "Gerry Adams Washington DC," narrowed to the last 24 hours:

Why is this not news? Adams is here to kill the PSNI's new request for subpoenas, full stop. He's here to prevent the complete disclosure of an entire archive full of detailed and extensive interviews about paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The stakes are plainly very high, for both Adams and Northern Ireland as a whole, and Adams will be urging the U.S. government to take a step that will put it sharply at odds with one of its closest allies. It's a dramatic narrative and an important piece of policy news at the same time, crossing multiple beats: diplomacy, law enforcement, Irish politics, the state of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Reporters, who is Gerry Adams meeting with? Does he have a meeting at the Department of Justice?

How is it that this aggressive piece of high stakes diplomacy is drawing no attention at all?
 briefing senior political figures and the Obama administration on the current difficulties within the peace process. - See more at: http://leargas.blogspot.com/2014/05/we-will-use-our-mandate-wisely.html#sthash.Owrexvzk.dpuf
briefing senior political figures and the Obama administration on the current difficulties within the peace process. - See more at: http://leargas.blogspot.com/2014/05/we-will-use-our-mandate-wisely.html#sthash.Owrexvzk.dpuf
briefing senior political figures and the Obama administration on the current difficulties within the peace process. - See more at: http://leargas.blogspot.com/2014/05/we-will-use-our-mandate-wisely.html#sthash.Owrexvzk.dpuf

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Maybe Grab a Beer with Carmen Ortiz

Gerry Adams is in the United States for the next two days, meeting with federal government officials. I can't imagine what they might be discussing. Reporting on the visit is curiously thin in American news media, though that might change over the next 24 hours.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Have You Seen This Man?


Three years after the arrival of the first Belfast Project subpoenas, the president of Boston College hasn't given a single interview or held a general meeting with faculty to discuss his views of the project or the legal effort to bend it to police use. I've asked around: Reporters and Boston College professors have tried to ask him what he thinks, but he has nothing to say to them. My theory is that William P. Leahy, SJ is a well-executed (but slightly dull) hologram. But was the hologram aware of the Belfast Project before it began? Did the hologram approve the project? If some brave soul in Chestnut Hill personally sees the hologram floating across the campus, please whisper a question or three in its direction and let us know how it responds, because we really do wonder.



To be sure, public silence on major institutional controversies is the hallmark of contemporary leadership, and Leahy is far from being alone. Two and a half years ago, Senator John Kerry wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to call for a vigorous State Department campaign against the obvious recklessness of the Belfast Project subpoenas; today, Secretary of State John Kerry has nothing to say about the very project he urged his predecessor to oppose. Does Secretary Kerry agree with Senator Kerry's proposition that the secretary of state should fight against the Boston College subpoenas? Reader, we may never know. Speaking of pale apparitions floating around the Boston area and giving dull commencement speeches.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has now bothered to offer his carefully critical view of the subpoenas, and of the subsequent arrest of Gerry Adams. Will any American leader bother to wander out onto the same limb? Or will they remain silently in character?

Monday, May 26, 2014

Hand, Hot Stove, Repeat


Do institutions learn?

In an extraordinary letter to the Boston Globe this weekend, Professor Emeritus Peter Weiler warns of a "crisis of governance" at Boston College. The crisis Weiler identifies relates to the university's Belfast Project, oral history interviews with former IRA and UVF members that are now subject to federal subpoenas.

"To date," Weiler writes, "nobody at the university has accepted responsibility for a project that has badly damaged the school’s reputation and harmed its prized relationship to both Ireland and Northern Ireland. Is nobody going to be held accountable? That seems a necessary first step to repairing the flawed administrative structures that allowed this train wreck to happen."

Those flawed administrative structures are neatly elucidated in a May 5 public letter from several Boston College History Department chairs, past and present (including Peter Weiler). The department chairs reported that, with regard to the Belfast Project, they "had not been informed of the project, nor had they or the department been consulted on the merits of the effort or the appropriate procedures to be followed in carrying out such a fraught and potentially controversial venture."

So the Belfast Project, conducted from 2001 to 2006, recklessly wandered into dangerous territory because it was sealed off from the institution that housed it, managed within the boundaries of isolated fiefdoms and run without formal oversight or informal professional advice. No one will tell this story better than Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Beth McMurtrie, whose long Jan. 26 report on the Belfast Project carefully documents a long series of institutional failures.

Today, eight years after the conclusion of the Belfast Project, and three years into an international legal and political battle over the project that shows no sign of ending in the foreseeable future, Boston College has had ample time to learn the lessons of its original failures. The project ran into danger because most faculty had no involvement in it and could offer no advice or oversight, and because the few critics who were given a look into the project were ignored when they expressed concerns. So the path to the least-bad potential outcome is a path that runs through the institution and its faculty. The cure for the failure of a project badly run in isolated fiefdoms is to bring it out of its isolated fiefdoms, integrating History Department and Irish Studies faculty into an institutional discussion about responses and solutions. The cure to a problem caused by not talking to faculty is to talk to faculty.

This medicine is not being applied at Boston College. No faculty committee has been established to examine and discuss the present crisis in the Belfast Project, formally or casually. Meetings on the possibility of new subpoenas are taking place in administrative enclaves, with lawyers and managers, behind doors that are closed even to senior faculty. If Boston College has a soul, it's not being searched. The handful of people managing the crisis continue to do so in rigid isolation, institutionally and intellectually, pushing away their own internal critics. Having damaged the university by not listening to its faculty, they are not listening to their faculty.

This story of isolation and obstinacy is not simply the story of the Belfast Project; the limits of faculty governance at Boston College are well known, and a sore subject there.

William Leahy lives behind a moat, and he has drawn the Belfast Project inside the gates, with the flagrantly unhealthy Jack Dunn guarding all avenues of approach. Three years later, it's clear that he's not coming out to hold court with the rest of the institution.

The university's trustees need to go in and drag him out.