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Book Cover
Book
Author Sands, Philippe, 1960-

Title Torture team : deception, cruelty and the compromise of law / Philippe Sands
Published London ; New York : Allen Lane, 2008

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  KC 218 T6 San/Trd  AVAILABLE
 WATERFT LAW  KC 218 T6 San/Trd  AVAILABLE
Description xx, 315 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Contents Kick-Off -- The Path -- Comeback -- Responsibility
Summary "Few pieces of paper have the power to change the course of history. On Tuesday 2 December 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signed one that did. With a signature and a few scrawled words he wantonly discarded principles dating back to President Lincoln's famous edict of 1863 that 'military necessity does not admit of cruelty'. Drafted a few days earlier by the Defense Department's lawyer, William J. Haynes, the aptly named Action Memo was entitled 'Counter-Resistance Techniques', and attached to it was a request for approval of eighteen new techniques for interrogating detainees at Guantanamo - techniques which disregarded the US Army Manual's instructions on interrogation and violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions." "Torture Team reveals the story of how the Action Memo and its four apparently innocuous attachments came to be legal documents, the cover-up by the Defense Department to hide their origins, the whistleblowers who forced the rescinding of Rumsfeld's approval and the human consequences of the new techniques for one detainee at Guantanamo, and their migration to Abu Ghraib and Basra." "In this forensic investigation of deception at the highest levels, international lawyer Philippe Sands questions the role of lawyers who are required to give legal opinions on sensitive political matters, and asks what responsibility they bear. The answers to these questions will be of concern to all those who care about human rights and the rule of law in our world."--BOOK JACKET
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-[300]) and index
Subject Torture (International law)
Human rights.
ISBN 9781846140082 (hbk.)
1846140080 (hbk.)