I disagree. BC made it very specific – as you can see from the loyalist input to the Heights article – that the material was beyond court order. How Ed Moloney or the interviewees can be blamed for that is beyond me. Of course it can now be argued that an institution clearly unworthy of trust – which Jack Dunn is the personification of – was trusted. I think you make a crucial poiont in your article – what university will allow researchers to draw up a contract in its name?

Chris, thanks for the comment. I continue to think this is an interesting sideshow, though ultimately irrelevant to the issues being litigated. And I still think that if the question is who is to blame for the fiasco, the facts show that both Ed Moloney and BC share some of the blame for the interviewees’ misunderstanding (as, in my view, do the interviewees themselves).

Always good to read your thoughts on these subpoenas, and on that food fight surrounding them. The other thing to consider about this new claim from BC — that Moloney wrote the donor contracts — is that it’s a new claim in an area that BC has discussed before. The article you’re writing about here was published on Feb. 15, but look how the same reporter summarized Dunn’s claims in an article published in the same student newspaper ten days earlier:

“Though participants signed contracts that promised them privacy ‘to the extent that American law allows,’ project supervisors Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist, and Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA member, have been harshly critical of the University’s stance in international media.”

So on Feb. 5, maintaining that Belfast Project interviewees were given a warning about the possibility of a breach of confidentiality due to legal proceedings, Dunn apparently made no mention of this claim that BC had nothing to do with interviewee contracts. The Feb. 5 story doesn’t describe a claim that Moloney wrote those contracts; the Feb. 15 story does, and does so after Dunn was forced to admit that the contracts didn’t say what he claimed they said.

And as you say, how plausible is it that BC consented to a process that bound them to a contract they hadn’t seen, created, or reviewed?

Very strange stuff.