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A scene from the British 2006 docu-drama The Road to Guantanamo
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Camden book review | Phillippe Sands | Helena Kennedy QC | Torture team: Deception, Cruelty and Compromise of Law
Philippe Sands’ challenging book
on the US use of torture asks some disturbing questions of the legal profession, says Helena Kennedy QC
TORTURE Team is probably the best piece of contemporary investigative journalism you will read. One of the surprises is that it was produced by a lawyer.
Indeed, it is probably because Philippe Sands is a barrister, a QC and eminent academic, that he secured the interviews which damn the American leadership so comprehensively. It is unlikely that any journalist would have got anywhere so close to his prey.
Ever since the Guantanamo Bay detention centre was set up in Cuba by the United States government in early 2002, there have been concerns about the creation of a legal black hole where ordinary law has no role. The treatment of the detainees soon became a scandal that probably did as much to recruit terrorists and opposition to the United States as the Iraq invasion.
The declared purpose of Guantanamo was to incarcerate detainees suspected of involvement in al-Qaeda-linked terrorism and to interrogate them so that further atrocities like 9/11 would be prevented.
However, we Brits should have explained to our American cousins that internment and ill-treatment of people accused of terrorism does not work. Our own experience in Northern Ireland taught us that. Serious interrogators will always tell you that you need to establish a rapport with a prisoner to secure valuable information. Many of us, who as lawyers have conducted similar cases over the years, watched with horror as legal standards were thrown to the winds.
On the basis that the “war on terror” is no ordinary war, the legal rules have been recast and a policy has come into being in the United States to wipe away the Geneva Conventions.
The Conventions say that prisoners of war have to be treated humanely and that even our enemies should not be subjected to torture. Why? Because we want our soldiers to have the same protections if they are captured. And because we know that torture not only dehumanises the victims, it also dehumanises those who inflict it. And on top of everything else, it doesn’t work. Under torture people confess to anything so that any evidence adduced from them is almost invariably unreliable.
When the terrible abuse of arrested people was exposed in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, its use was traced back to Guantanamo Bay and questions were raised as to whether cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners was policy. This was ferociously denied and foot-soldiers on the ground were made to carry the can for behaviour “unbecoming of military personnel”. As ever, it was the ordinary rookie who shouldered the blame.
However, Philippe Sands suspected that the US government at the highest level had approved the use of terrifying techniques – continuous interrogation over countless days, a month with almost no sleep, the use of white noise and savage dogs to invoke terror, sexual humiliation at the hands of women officers, crouching naked for hours on end, enforced shaving, waterboarding (a method which creates the sensation of drowning).
He set off on an investigative quest in the United States and being a lawyer rather than a journalist was able to engage many of the leading military brass and government lawyers in very frank conversation about what had truly happened.
The story is a shocker. His charming but persistent enquiries prove conclusively that top government lawyers at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, designed a way of bypassing the rules laid down in the Genev\a Conventions and allowed inexperienced lawyers and army personnel at Guantanamo Bay to sanction torture of prisoners.
Since Philippe Sands’s book was published he has been called to give evidence before the US Congress and one of the prisoners whose case is documented in the book has had charges against him dropped. He makes a compelling case that the people behind the policy have flouted international law and may well face criminal charges in the future.
Sands is also clear that our own government does not come out of these events well. He is confident that Blair knew what was going on in Guantanamo but did not have the guts to condemn the United States for legitimising torture.
This book is a powerful indictment of lawyers who abandon their principles to secure the approval of their political masters. Our democratic systems depend on honest lawyers acting as guardians of the law, being prepared to speak out when wrong is being done.
Philippe Sands has done a wonderful service to law, human rights and to democracy. A great book.
Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law.
By Philippe Sands. Allen Lane £20.
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