Robert Delahunty | |
---|---|
Deputy General Counsel of the United States Homeland Security Council | |
In office 2002–2003 | |
President | George W. Bush |
Personal details | |
Born | New York City,New York,U.S. |
Education | Columbia University (BA) University of Oxford (MA,MPhil) Harvard University (JD) |
Robert J. Delahunty is an American legal scholar. He is a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis,Minnesota. [1] From 1989 to 2003,he worked in the Office of Legal Counsel. During his tenure there,he cowrote several legal opinions with John Yoo relating to interrogation,detention,and rendition of terror suspects.
Delahunty was born and raised in New York City,where he attended Regis High School in Manhattan. [2] He then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University,followed by a Master of Arts in Classics and another in Philosophy,both from University of Oxford. Delahunty then returned to the United States,where he earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school,he was admitted to the New York State Bar Association. [3]
Delahunty has taught at Oriel College,Oxford,Durham University,Catholic University of America,and the University of St. Thomas. He served as Deputy General Counsel at the United States Homeland Security Council in 2002 and 2003.
Key elements of the October 23, 2001, memorandum, including conclusions that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations against foreign terrorists and that First Amendment speech and press rights may be subordinated to successful prosecution of war, were deemed "not authoritative for any purpose" by the Office of Legal Counsel in 2008. [4] In 2009, the OLC also repudiated the November 15, 2001, memorandum’s assertion that Presidents have the inherent authority to suspend any provision of a treaty at any time, without notice to either Congress or our treaty partners. [5]
Delahunty and Yoo's January 9, 2002 draft Memorandum to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, "Application of Treaties and Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees" claims that al Qaeda and Taliban members are "not governed by the bulk of the Geneva Conventions, specifically those provisions concerning POWs." [6] [7] This memo promptly led on January 19, 2002 to a secret order from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to his combat commanders, repeating its conclusions, and specifically ordering that the order be transmitted to "Joint Task Force 160", which at the time was setting up the new detainee prison at Guantanamo. [8] The Supreme Court rejected this legal reasoning on June 29, 2006 in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which stated, "The conflict with al Qaeda is not, according to the Government, a conflict to which the full protections afforded detainees under the 1949 Geneva Conventions apply[...]. [T]here is at least one provision of the Geneva Conventions that applies here[...]. Common Article 3 [...] is applicable here and [...] requires that Hamdan be tried by a 'regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.'" On July 7, 2006, Gordon R. England of the Defense Department ordered that Common article three of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial –would apply to all detainees held in U.S. military custody. [9] [10]
Some prominent lawyers and ethicists have argued that the authors of this memo bear responsibility for the results of the U.S. Government's application of its legal conclusion in the field. [11] [12] Judge White identified multiple precedents for holding lawyers liable for "the foreseeable consequences of their conduct" in Jose Padilla's lawsuit against Delahunty's colleague Yoo for the imprisonment and torture of Padilla. White summarized one such case as "holding that a lawyer may be held liable for substantially assisting in the violation of the law by issuing advice in violation of the law". [7]
Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen and alleged terrorist born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
An unlawful combatant, illegal combatant or unprivileged combatant/belligerent is a person who directly engages in armed conflict in violation of the laws of war and therefore is claimed not to be protected by the Geneva Conventions. The International Committee of the Red Cross points out that the terms "unlawful combatant", "illegal combatant" or "unprivileged combatant/belligerent" are not defined in any international agreements. While the concept of an unlawful combatant is included in the Third Geneva Convention, the phrase itself does not appear in the document. Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention does describe categories under which a person may be entitled to prisoner of war status. There are other international treaties that deny lawful combatant status for mercenaries and children.
José Padilla, also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir or Muhajir Abdullah, is a United States citizen who was convicted in a federal court of aiding terrorists.
Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466 (2004), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that foreign nationals held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp could petition federal courts for writs of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention. The Court's 6–3 judgment on June 28, 2004, reversed a D.C. Circuit decision which had held that the judiciary has no jurisdiction to hear any petitions from foreign nationals held in Guantanamo Bay.
The War Crimes Act of 1996 is a United States federal statute that defines a war crime to include a "grave breach of the Geneva Conventions", specifically noting that "grave breach" should have the meaning defined in any convention to which the United States is a party. The definition of "grave breach" in some of the Geneva Conventions have text that extend additional protections, but all the Conventions share the following text in common: "... committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health."
John Choon Yoo is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoo became known for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions while serving in the George W. Bush administration, during which he was the author of the controversial "Torture Memos" in the War on Terror.
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva Conventions ratified by the U.S.
The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is an office in the United States Department of Justice that assists the Attorney General's position as legal adviser to the President and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and provides its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President, the various agencies of the Executive Branch, and other components of the Department of Justice. The Office reviews and comments on the constitutionality of pending legislation. The office reviews any executive orders and substantive proclamations for legality if the President proposes them. All proposed orders of the Attorney General and regulations that require the Attorney General's approval are reviewed. It also performs a variety of special assignments referred by the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General.
Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States, in the context of the early twenty-first century War on Terrorism, refers to foreign nationals the United States detains outside of the legal process required within United States legal jurisdiction. In this context, the U.S. government is maintaining torture centers, called black sites, operated by both known and secret intelligence agencies. Such black sites were later confirmed by reports from journalists, investigations, and from men who had been imprisoned and tortured there, and later released after being tortured until the CIA was comfortable they had done nothing wrong, and had nothing to hide.
Jay Scott Bybee is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior U.S. circuit judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has published numerous articles in law journals and has taught as a senior fellow in constitutional law at William S. Boyd School of Law. His primary research interests are in constitutional and administrative law.
Alberto José Mora is a former General Counsel of the Navy. He led an effort within the Defense Department to oppose the legal theories of John Yoo and to try to end the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison within the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Gitmo, on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. As of March 2022, of the 780 people detained there since January 2002 when the military prison first opened after the September 11 attacks, 741 had been transferred elsewhere, 30 remained there, and 9 had died while in custody.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, also known as HR-6166, was an Act of Congress signed by President George W. Bush on October 17, 2006. The Act's stated purpose was "to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes".
William James "Jim" Haynes II is an American lawyer and was General Counsel of the Department of Defense during much of 43rd President George W. Bush's administration and his war on terror. Haynes resigned as general counsel effective March 2008.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
In United States law, habeas corpus is a recourse challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's detention under color of law. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. A persistent standard of indefinite detention without trial and incidents of torture led the operations of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to be challenged internationally as an affront to international human rights, and challenged domestically as a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, including the right of petition for habeas corpus. On 19 February 2002, Guantanamo detainees petitioned in federal court for a writ of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention.
Steven Gill Bradbury is an American attorney and government official who served as the General Counsel of the United States Department of Transportation. He previously served as Acting Assistant Attorney General (AAG) from 2005 to 2007 and Principal Deputy AAG from 2004 to 2009, heading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the U.S. Department of Justice during President George W. Bush's second term.
A number of incidents stemming from the September 11 attacks have raised questions about legality.
A set of legal memoranda known as the "Torture Memos" were drafted by John Yoo as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States and signed in August 2002 by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice. They advised the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Department of Defense, and the President on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques—mental and physical torment and coercion such as prolonged sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and waterboarding—and stated that such acts, widely regarded as torture, might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority during the "War on Terror".
John Anthony Rizzo was an American attorney who worked as a lawyer in the Central Intelligence Agency for 34 years. He was the deputy counsel or acting general counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the War on Terror, during which the CIA held dozens of detainees in black site prisons around the globe.