'Torture Team' Mystery: Who OK'd US Terrorism Interrogation Tactics?
A new book by attorney Philippe Sands is written in the style of a mystery novel. In fact, it is even recommended by John Le Carré, the well-known author of numerous best-selling spy thrillers.
But Torture Team is nonfiction. Its topic: Who in the U.S. government was primarily responsible for endorsing, in a single groundbreaking Dec. 2, 2002 memo (PDF provided by Bill Moyers Journal), controversial enhanced interrogation tactics in terrorism cases that he and a number of others consider to be tantamount to torture? Sands himself, in an American Lawyer interview that is excerpted today in Legal Week, says it was senior government officials in Washington, D.C., who pushed for the new no-holds-barred regime, but are now unwilling to take responsibility for what they did.
“It’s a book about a crime and a cover-up,” he tells the legal magazine. “The crime is the authorization of interrogation techniques that violate international laws against torture. And the cover-up is the attempt to pass the buck.”
Sands also describes the scenario discussed in the book as a “deplorable example of poor lawyering” in an interview with the London Times.
“In December, 2002 it became the policy of the U.S. Government to torture certain Guantanamo Bay detainees to prize information from them. The policy was supported by legal advice, but was abandoned in 2006 when the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful,” the London Times writes in a separate book review. “Philippe Sands argues that the lawyers who gave this advice are war criminals, no less than the politicians they served.”
American Lawyer reported in another article last week that those—including attorneys—who are responsible for what Sands characterizes as criminal conduct may be unlikely to face prosecution in the U.S. However, they should be wary about traveling abroad, where prosecution is a real possibility, the author contends.
Sands is a British lawyer who has helped defend some of his countrymen held at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
However, as one who was in New York City, teaching at New York University School of Law, at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Sands says, he is well aware of their impact. His own 1-year-old daughter was lost and returned by students, after her nanny collapsed from the shock of seeing the first plane crash.
“But that doesn’t excuse blaming others for what happened. That really got me,” he tells the magazine. “If the guys at the top had said to me, ‘Those were the circumstances then. We did what we thought was right. With the benefit of hindsight, we realize that we fell into error and we made a mistake. We take responsibility for that, now let’s move on and get it right’—there wouldn’t be a book here. But they’re not willing to do that.”
Additional coverage:
Bill Moyers Journal: “Philippe Sands”
BBC: “Torture Team by Philippe Sands”
