Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
By Philippe Sands


Product Description

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.

The Torture Team delves deep into the Bush administration to reveal:
· How the policy of abuse originated with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and was promoted by their most senior lawyers
· Personal accounts, through interview, of those most closely involved in the decisions
· How the Joint Chiefs and normal military decision-making processes were circumvented
· How Fox TV’s 24 contributed to torture planning
· How interrogation techniques were approved for use
· How the new techniques were used on Mohammed Al Qahtani, alleged to be “the 20th highjacker”
· How the senior lawyers who crafted the policy of abuse exposed themselves to the risk of war crimes charges


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #3855 in Books
Published on: 2008-05-13
Released on: 2008-05-13
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
272 pages

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editorial Reviews
Review


"Rigorous, honest, devastating; I couldn't put it down." -- Vanessa Redgrave

"Gripping, furious and very serious indeed". -- John le Carré

"Sands has written a page-turning investigation into one of the darkest mysteries in American history: how a country that has led the world on human rights came to embrace a policy of barbaric abuse. One by one, he corners the suspects and sifts the clues, shedding new light at each step along the way." -- Jane Mayer, staff writer, The New Yorker Magazine "Philippe Sands has uncovered the proper assignment of responsibility for torture and cruel and unusual punishment administered by the U.S. in the so-called Global War on Terror. Read this book to learn who made these decisions. More importantly, read it to learn how under George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney America abandoned its strongest pillar of power--its own integrity." --Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell "A remorseless, shocking, forensic narrative, Torture Team leads us from Rumsfeld's office in the Pentagon, via a score of eager-to-please lawyers and bureaucrats, and shows us the brutal consequences for one detainee. The parallel with Nazi Germany's descent into immorality is impossible to escape. This may well be the most important book to emerge since 9/11."
-- Robert Harris, journalist and bestselling author of Pompeii, Imperium and The Ghost "Sands's...book put[s] "the torture team" - the group of more than a half dozen Bush Administration lawyers who gave the green light for the introduction of torture - into sharp focus." - Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine "Torture Team, Sands’s book...may well be the best bit of contemporary investigative journalism you will read: it is right up there with Woodward and Bernstein, a tour de force of relentlessly dogged pursuit, of interviews with guilty men acquired against all the odds, a beautifully told and humane narrative that follows a paper trail and nails the truth." -- The Sunday Times (London)

About the Author


Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and a professor of law at University College London. He is the author of Lawless World and is frequently a commentator on news and current affairs programs including CNN, MSNBC, and BBC World Service. He has been involved in many leading international cases, including those involving the treatment of British detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He lives in London, England.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Customer Reviews
Tortured memos
A remarkable synthesis of legal scholarship and investigative reporting by a British international lawyer that lays out the origins of the Bush Administration's infamous torture memos and makes the case that senior officials and lawyers in the US Government are parties to the commission of war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

Insightful, dispassionate and based on unprecedented access to key players throughout the entire chain of command, Phillipe Sands' book is essential to understanding the horrors, disgrace and implications of 'Gitmo' and Abu Ghraib.

Logical and meticulous, Sands' disposition of the facts and reasoned analysis lays the foundation for the potential prosecution of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as well as their senior lawyers and officials,including Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, William Hayes, David Addington, John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

A critically important work, not only for policymakers, legislators, lawyers and scholars, but for anyone interested in the restoration of American values of rights, freedoms and the rule of law in the pending post-Bush world.


More pieces in the puzzle ...
We don't yet have a comprehensive account of America's descent into torture under Bush and Cheney. What we do know has to be pieced together from the declassified documents, the work of journalists like Jane Mayer, Dana Priest, and Sy Hersh, blogs like Balkinization, books like "The One-Percent Doctrine" -- and, now, this book.

Indispensable though it is, I would've preferred more analysis. Sands's approach is to follow the narrative of his own interviews, moving from one figure to another. This is effective storytelling and an understandable choice. However, I would've liked a final chapter that tied it all up.

Also, surprisingly perhaps for a book by a noted lawyer, I found the book a bit weak on its legal discussions. Again, I can see the point here -- the publisher probably feared that the legal layman's eyes would glaze over. Still, extensive endnotes or appendices could've touched on these issues in greater detail.

None of this should dissuade anyone from reading the book, but just remember that this is not "THE book" on American torture post 9/11. That book remains to be written -- and whoever writes it, will cite heavily to Philippe Sands among others.

A Successful Exercise in Connecting the Dots
Phillipe Sands book brings together a lot that was already known with some new information provided by interviews. This book was valuable in that it places the information in a coherent narrative. Sands lets his Interviewees speak for themselves and succeeds in not judging them personally, nor questioning their motives, but only points out where the International and US law may be used to judge them and their possible guilt. He interviews Jim Haynes, General Hill, Doug Feith, Diane Beaver, General Myers and others, devoting a chapter to each interview. The overall effect of these interviews is at times startling.

Sands focuses his main argument on the fact that lawyers were not guided by law in their memos and advice to the President, VP, Secretary of Defense, and others, but were subservient to the policy choices of our leaders. To use a phrase of Vice President Cheney, the Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers tried to write the law from the "dark side." We the readers are the jury who will decide if they stayed within the bounds of the rule of law.

I think Sands does show, in disagreement with Alberto Gonzalez, General Myers, and Jim Haynes that the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo was not in response to a request for guidance from below but was the premeditated, concerted effort of the lead Principals and Lawyers in the Bush Administration to bypass Army FM 34-52. The timeframe of the discussions, memos and interrogation policies of Guantanamo all support that conclusion. There can be no question of coincidental connections.

Phillipe Sands convincingly connects the dots in my opinion. President Bush and his advisors made two momentous decisions. First, they set aside the Geneva Conventions and second, they augmented FM 34-52 with 18 interrogation techniques used separately and in concert. These interrogations left Al-Qahanti, the first target of this new policy, in the words of one Army interrogator, with "eyes, black as coals."

In his interview with Dr Abigail Seltzer, psychiatrist, and medical expert who has had extensive experience with torture survivors, we learn that deciding whether techniques are torture, a lot can be gleaned from the reaction of the victim. The interview, based on the actual interrogation logs of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, Detainee 063, is chilling, to say the least.

Critics may find that Sands spends too much time on Mohammed al-Qahtani Detainee 063 and exaggerates the importance of the treatment of one detainee, but I believe he shows how the part reveals the whole. Philippe Sands is very thorough in his analysis of detainee 063's case. He speaks with lawyers and medical experts to determine whether the treatment of 063 crossed the line into torture. His concentration, primarily on one case, did not detract from his book but strengthened it in my opinion. Sands also makes the point that illegal activity in regards to violations of Geneva Art. 3 can be imputed to a defendant based on only one case.

In one interview with an International Judge and Prosecutor, Sands quotes them as saying the Administration Principals and lawyers' attempt in the Military Commissions Act to immunize themselves from prosecution in the treatment of detainees before the passage of the Act was stupid and may come back to haunt them. In rejecting U.S. courts oversight of their cases they open themselves up to judgment by International Commissions and Courts. It could lead to a tap on the shoulder if the Principles visit other countries, much in the same way that Pinochet was arrested in Spain for crimes committed while he was the leader in Argentina.

Underlining the seriousness of this book and its charges, Sands quotes Justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote that acts against Geneva Art 3 are war crimes. The Supreme Court, in Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, overturned the President's decision and OLC and Pentagon lawyers' position that Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda.

Critics are not going to like his drawing on the Nuremburg trials with inference that the US leaders and lawyers can be compared to Nazis. Sands is very careful to note that it is not his intention to make such a comparison, but only to use the legal principles derived from that era that are still applicable today. Mr. Sands does all this without swamping the average readers with a lot of legalese and jargon. Anyone with a patience and openness can follow his common sense approach.

Sadly this story is not over and much more is to come about meetings and involvement of top officials in the US government with torture. The Torture Team will provide an excellent bridge to future revelations and responses.

Postcript: On May 19th, Phillipe Sands revealed in the Manchester Guardian that the Pentagon has dropped all charges against Mohammed Al-Qahtani Detainee 063.