Parziale vittoria per il Boston College e la libertà accademica

A Partial Win For Boston College And Academic Freedom

By Charles P. Pierce

Here at the blog, we’ve been keeping an eye on the brawl between Boston College and the law-enforcement communities of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — and, shamefully, too many parts of our own government — over the British attempts to pry loose the oral histories gathered under the auspices of BC’s Belfast Project, an attempt to compile an authoritative account of the violence in Northern Ireland throughout the last 30 years of the 20th Century. This week, it seems, BC won at least a piece of a victory. A federal appeals court ruled that the college must hand over only 11 of the 85 documents sought by the governments of the U.S, and the U.K. in what continues to look like a fishing expedition by the latter.

In Friday’s ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed that the lower court had gone too far. “After a detailed review of the materials in question, we find that the district court abused its discretion in ordering the production of several of the interviews which, after an in detail reading of the same, do not contain any information relevant to the August 2011 subpoena,” the First Circuit panel concluded. It said that Boston College must release only 11 out of the 85 interviews originally subpoenaed.

As should be plain from the other news of the day, a lot of what we took for granted about this country goes up for grabs every time somebody yells, “terrorist,” loudly enough. A lot of what the U.K. people are about in this case appears to be an attempt by irreconcilables in law-enforcement to embarrass, among other people, Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader — and suspected IRA commander — who now sits in Parliament, to the great consternation of a lot of people who know a lot of cops. This court has just required those cops to work harder, and it has told American scholars that, for now, they can conduct their business free from government snoopery. Unless, of course, they happen to do it on their Verizon cellphones, then all bets are off.