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| Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values | 
 enlarge | Author: Philippe Sands
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $15.74
You Save: $11.21 (42%)
New (38) Used (16) from $14.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 36740
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0230603904
Dewey Decimal Number: 341.48
EAN: 9780230603905
ASIN: 0230603904
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New! Older inventory showing minor shelf wear
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 16-19 of 19 | | « PREV | | |
 Psychopaths run this country. July 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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".
A carefully researched and argued work July 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 Altstoetter 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.
The trail of torture August 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Along with documents made available dating back to 2002 - the Yoo/Bybee "torture memo", the Jim Haynes memo originating in Guantanamo and approved by Rumsfeld, and the interrogation logs of prisoner 063, al Qahtani - the author conducts a series of interviews that help us point to where the authority for "enhanced interrogation techniques" came from. It's now fairly clear that the impetus of the abuse that was applied to al-Qahtani at Guantanamo or that was depicted graphically at Abu Graib did not originate with a "few bad apples" in the lower ranks but came from up high; and that those at the lower ranks such as Diane Beaver were in some sense used as scapegoats.
The author uses a measured approach throughout the book, carefully interviewing many of the players involved, careful not to jump to conclusions but alert to missing links. As an English barrister and expert in international law, he brings knowledge of the dealings of the British government with the IRA, the arrest of Pinochet, and the British government's experiences in Iraq. He is someone who does not want to see undone the past efforts of the American government to reign in the use of torture around the world.
The treatment of al-Qahtani involved a systematic attempt to break a human personality down to something below an animal. All the eighteen interrogation techniques approved by Rumsfeld fell within the Yoo/Bybee legal guidelines of not being torture (Rumsfeld even mocked one of them as being a lot less than something he did every day), but taken together over an extended period of some fifty days - solitary confinement, lack of sleep, sensory overload, dehydration, extreme temperatures, humiliation, etc - they had a combined effect that can only be seen as torture - at least torture of the human soul, if not strictly speaking the body. The body was constantly monitored by physicians. And was all this necessary? The author makes clear that the "ticking time bomb scenario" was not in play here because 9/11 was already a year old. Was anything gained? Nothing that anyone knows, and soon before this book was published al-Qahtani was released without a trial.
A signal moment in the chain of events occurred on February 7, 2002 when George W. Bush announced that the U.S was not going to abide by the Geneva Conventions. In August of 2002 the OLC of the Justice Department produced the "torture memo". The basis for the forthcoming interrogation methods was set. The author interviews up the chain of command as far as Rumsfeld's legal counsel Jim Haynes in an attempt to see how they were originated and then used on al-Qahtani. The military side of the Pentagon was at least sceptical if not outright opposed to the aggressive approach the civilians - Feith and Haynes especially - were espousing. But Haynes, in his position of legal authority at the Pentagon, managed to lock the military out the process. The question beyond the scope of this book and hidden behind the wall of national security is how he was influenced by the top of the government.
Best torture evidence to date August 25, 2008
Philippe (correct spelling) Sands' 'Torture Team' is the best summary, to date, of the intricate policies the U.S. government devised for hiding the truth about their torture policies. The Q.C's research is impeccable. Interviews with important people involved in the torture decisions are riveting. The book reads like a John le Carre novel, but is unfortunately and (disgracefully) true. It will be interesting to see if the lack of a 'paper trail' is helpful in keeping some participants from being prosecuted as war criminals. a MUST READ.
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