Parr Center Fellow Pens Op-Ed at the News & Observer Protesting Mukasey Commencement Speech

Joseph E. Kennedy, an associate professor of law at UNC School of Law and a fellow here at the Parr Center for Ethics wrote a column explaining his decision to wear a orange arm band to protest former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey's commencement speech at the Law School.

In the Bybee memo of August 2002, a memorandum that Mukasey characterizes as a mistake, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel essentially defined torture as an interrogation technique that causes the equivalent of organ failure. He got that definition not from any legal authority defining torture but from a definition of "severe pain" found in an obscure medical benefits statute.
Such reasoning would receive an F grade if offered by a first-year law student. When offered by the head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel it must be seen for what it was: a lie about the meaning of the law, not a mistake.

Read the whole column here.