Torture Team

"This is a book about the genesis of a single memorandum authorising what I would call torture. It was called the Rumsfeld Memo and it was issued to the American military at Guantanamo in December of 2002; the draft was begun in October 2002 and Rumsfeld rescinded it in January of 2003. What is wonderful about this book is that it’s written like a detective mystery – how was this memorandum composed, how did people come to write a memorandum which authorised torture? But it also is a legal analysis that implicitly identifies and pins responsibility on different actors within the Bush administration. It is written by a very sharp member of the Queen’s Council. I can’t imagine any of the Bush administration officials he interviewed knew QCs were among the elite of the barristers in Britain and, in Sands’s case, very knowledgeable in international law. Had they, they might never have talked with him. Nevertheless, they did. Well, what happened was that he recorded all of them on tape describing their roles in the production of the memorandum, and he pieced together how the memorandum was written, identifying who the principal players were. Once the book came out it created a sensation in Congress. You had the principals implicated in drafting this memo volunteering to testify before Congress to ‘clarify’ what they had said, which is unheard of for Bush administration officials when it comes to the torture question. For me it is a very powerful book, both a really good read and a really insightful legal analysis. But, professionally speaking, and what is important for me, it is a really fine discussion about a well-known problem in the study of violence generally – which is ‘the problem of many hands’. “Torture has a slippery slope and once you authorise it, or even create the atmosphere to encourage it, it rapidly runs out of control.” Most violence today isn’t done by a single person. It is usually organised by many people and this enables them to take less responsibility for what they do. In this case we are looking at how actual agents higher up used bureaucracy to massage, intimidate, cajole and generally get lower-downs to do or say things they would not have originally set out to do. In the end the lower-downs end up taking the blame if things go wrong while the higher-ups walk away untainted. Sands’s book reverses all this, showing the complicity of the higher-ups. Another point to remember is that Rumsfeld didn’t actually write the memo. The person who, according to the book, had primary responsibility for this was General Counsel for the Defence Department, William Haynes II. The book ends with Sands meeting Haynes and explaining his conclusions after which he is informed by the GC’s office that he may not refer to the conversations they had that day. I would say this book brought Haynes’s government career to an end and it makes clear that Haynes himself realised he was deeply vulnerable to future war crimes litigation."

"I really like Professor Sands’s approach to this issue. Obviously there were several other things written about the ‘torture memos’ as they were called during the Bush administration. But Sands went ahead and interviewed the authors of those memos and tried to get to the bottom of their motivation. And I think he does, so therefore giving them a day in court, as it were. And at the same time, his book does not diminish the moral outrage that should be associated with this attempt to re-write the norms of international law regarding torture, which was done to provide a legitimising approach to definitions of torture. I think the lesson is that, in fact, the motivations are similar to the ones that the United States has criticised in many other countries that are accused of torture. They use the idea of there being exceptions to the rule and that this was needed because the US was in a state of emergency, and maybe these arguments are a little more sophisticated than what Pinochet and his minions came up with 30 years ago, but they are not all that different. The justifications can be reduced to what many people said, which is, “Well, yes, those laws are important to have, but when it comes down to serious problems such as terrorism, we should be allowed to run around the prohibition because we are seeking a higher end to eliminating terrorism against the United States – therefore we should be allowed to proceed in violation of these norms.” Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other aspect of it is also that these proponents of torture during the Bush administration say that it works, and I think that Philippe Sands’s book demonstrates that this is by no means the case. Unfortunately the debate rages on here in North America. Even after the death of Osama bin Laden you may have heard that there have been voices saying, “See? We did it. His death was thanks to us because we allowed some people to be tortured six years ago, and what they told us finally led us to where Osama bin Laden was hiding.” That is not persuasive at all but unfortunately it is still picked up and used as justification by the people who want to continue using torture, and it is also a way of taking some credit away from President Obama."