Rating  - A carefully researched and argued work
As befits a QC, Mr. Sands runs a careful, well-researched, well-buttressed, step-by-step argument that political appointees in top legal positions deliberately ignored their ethical obligations, established government processes, international laws of war and peace as well as domestic law in order to craft policies and actions that the US, in the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, unequivocally established as being war crimes.
His references to Nazi Germany require more elaboration (though this is clearly outside the scope of his book). Legal academia in Germany, beginning around the turn of the 19th/20th Century, created an academic climate and constitutional argument that denied the existence of substantive rights (i.e. human rights) or rights emanating from supranational law. It is this climate that enabled lawyers like Altstötter to think as pure legal technocrats: So long as a law or policy had been enacted in a formally correct manner, they applied it, regardless of the horrendous consequences. It is extremely distressing to see these exact arguments repeated in the dissenting Supreme Court opinions of Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas in Hamdan, Hamdi and Boumediene.
Rating - Psychopaths run this country.
This book left me so riled I didn't know what to do. I felt anger that was exacerbated by a feeling of helplessness. But this book is precisely what this country needs. We have to get educated about the horrors this country's leaders have visited upon the world.
Button pushing wedge issues need to be discarded for our own sanity.
Some researchers say that 6% of the general population are psychopaths, though most are sub-clinical. How this gang of virulent psychopaths gained office was through a deliberate plan of misdirection, fraud, and a simplistic black or white world view. To say nothing about hubris, greed, and a lack of conscience. If we remain ignorant or passive regarding this criminal behavior it will only continue to spread.
Please read this book and pass it on. Consider also Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side".
Rating - THE DEFINITIVE TEXT
Philippe Sands, a respected barrister and Queen's Counsel in the Matrix Chambers in England, as well as a Professor of International Law at University College London, writes a comprehensive and well-researched book that permits the reader to understand the process whereby torture became an accepted part of the fabric of the Global War on Terror. By interviewing many of the major players, and having access to many of the principal documents and memoranda, Philippe Sands takes us on a ride through the labyrinth of the Department of Defense that led to the harsh and brutal treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo. The research is factual and surprisingly forceful, and the ability to get many of the architects to open up and give their views makes the book both informative and eminently readable. And yet, despite a walk down a difficult road that leaves the reader with no doubts as to the current Administration's views of the benefits of torture, the author manages to keep the book dispassionate and focused..and the author finds heroes in the Armed Forces who stand out for their courage and commitment to legality. One senses that this book will become required reading for those lawyers who will specialize in human rights whether in the United States of America or in the Europe. Research such as this will form the fabric on which future historians will judge current events and make legal judgments. It should be required reading for all those interested in the study of human rights and its application today.
Rating - Useful study of how the US state reintroduced torture
Philippe Sands QC, Professor of Law at University College London, wrote the acclaimed Lawless World. In this new book he investigates how the US state introduced aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
He interviewed key figures in the US Department of Defense, including Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Major General Michael Dunlavey, Commanding Officer of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo until 8 November 2002, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General James Hill, Commander of US Southern Command.
Sands shows that the highest US authorities authorised criminal acts. As Abraham Lincoln said in 1863, "military necessity does not admit of cruelty ... nor of torture to extract confessions." Aggressive interrogation techniques, as well as being immoral, are unnecessary because they are unreliable, and they are also counter-productive because they discredit the user, undermine the user side's war effort and increase the risks to the user side's POWs. A National Defense Intelligence College study of 2006 concluded that there was almost no scientific evidence to support their use.
Yet in February 2002, President George W. Bush ruled that none of the Guantanamo detainees could rely on any of the protections granted by the Geneva Conventions. This ruling was intended to remove all constraints on interrogation, as Douglas Feith confirmed to Sands. On 2 December 2002 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed an `Action Memo' one of whose four attachments authorised the use of eighteen interrogation techniques. These all contravened US Army Field Manual 34-52, the rule book for military interrogation, and broke Common Article 3 of the Conventions, which prohibits cruel or inhumane treatment and `outrages upon personal dignity', without exceptions for `necessity' or national security.
Further, as former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger concluded in his report, "the augmented techniques for Guantanamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded." US pressure also led British forces in Iraq to adopt more aggressive interrogation techniques, as Brigadier Ewan Duncan, responsible for British HUMINT operations, acknowledged to Sands.
In June 2006 the US Supreme Court ruled that Bush's decision was unlawful and that Common Article 3 applied to all Guantanamo detainees. As Justice Anthony Kennedy said, "violations of Common Article 3 are considered `war crimes'." All acts of torture and all acts of complicity or participation in torture are criminal offences.
Rating - The Truth... If Anyone Cares
As it turns out, what Philippe Sands has exposed in Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values is the well-documented truth, reinforced by the power of Internet access, of how the Bush Administration's political agenda poisoned the fundamentals of this Nation's long-held leadership in human rights. A Professor of Law at University College in London and Academic Member of the prestigious Matrix Chambers where he specializes in international law, this Queen's Counsel is an unlikely but welcomed chronicler of what has happened to the rule of law in this country during the past seven years.
Building upon a few fundamental documents that first came to light in response to the scandal at Abu Ghraib, he pulled together an impressive list of first-person interviews of those legally involved and turned the most commonly thought perceptions of the cause of the abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib on their head! Sands narrative takes us through an entangled chronology of events more in the manner of a storyteller rather than a legal scholar with refreshing results. His analysis is quite clear. While some may insist that these actions were merely part of a process that first stretched the boundaries of our laws and then later corrected itself, others believe that binding international laws and treaties were either ignored or deliberately overlooked by those involved.
Although the author offers great praise for America's legal professionals both within the military and the Government, the fact that we as a Nation have collectively acted in this manner should be very sobering for all of us. Be you zealot, patriot or cynic, America's abhorrence of inhumane treatment dates back to the days of Lincoln. Cruelty, humiliation and the use of torture were prohibited by international law with the Geneva Convention and reinforced by the Convention Against Torture in 1984, which criminalized such acts. Additionally, Sands discussion of the actual trials of lawyers at Nuremberg, watching Stanley Kramer's classic Judgment at Nuremberg again, pondering the underlying principles and the parallels raised and the popularizing of the myth 'that torture works' by Jack Bauer and the Emmy-winning '24 - Season One' television series that began in 2002 adds a contemporary twist to this book.
While its revelations and his conclusions may never be echoed in any global forums or international halls of justice, Sands words will hopefully resonate within each of us and inspire some old-fashioned American soul searching for all of us.
Bob Magnant is the author of The Last Transition... - a fact-based novel about Iran, Iraq and the Middle East.
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