On December 2, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, approved an “action memo” by William Haynes, the Pentagon General Counsel, called Counter-Resistance Techniques. The “resistors” were Taliban and Al-Qaeda detainees held by the US Army at Guantanamo Bay.

The memo had four appendices. One paper outlined three categories of “techniques” to be used when the usual methods of building rapport had failed. These escalated from “yelling and deception” (category I) to isolation, humiliation, sensory deprivation, dogs, stress positions, prolonged standing, and interrogation sessions of 20 hours (category II). Category III applied to the most recalcitrant: “light” physical contact - defined as poking or shoving rather than a slap or punch - as well as simulated suffocation using water. Many of these techniques derived from SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), the training American soldiers undergo to resist interrogation. Haynes recommended that Rumsfeld approve 15 of the 18 techniques. With the exception of light physical contact, approval of category III was withheld “as a matter of policy”. Approving the memo, Rumsfeld, who worked at a lectern, jotted, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”

Five days after 9/11, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, had spoken of the need to work through “the dark side” in response to the Al-Qaeda terrorists who had murdered nearly 3,000 people. Light has been shone into this dark-side activity many times since the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: extraordinary renditions, murky overseas prisons and the use of water-boarding by the CIA have all been the subjects of innumerable films and documentaries.

Now Philippe Sands, the Matrix Chambers human-rights lawyer who has represented British Guantanamo inmates, alleges that Rumsfeld and senior lawyers under his command were a “torture team”. According to Sands, they deliberately flouted Abraham Lincoln's historic maxim “military necessity does not admit cruelty”, as well as the US Army field manual for interrogators, the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment. Their licence to do this stemmed from President Bush's decision in February 2002 to exclude Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Convention, a ruling cleverly shaped by the former lawyer Douglas Feith, the number three official at the Pentagon. For six weeks in late 2002 and early 2003, the Haynes memorandum techniques were employed simultaneously on a single Guantanamo inmate (detainee 063: Mohammed al-Qahtani) despite advice from the FBI and others that building rapport would be more effective. The accounts of such interrogations do not make pleasant reading - but then nor would accounts of Al-Qaeda's mass murders, which, it's worth noting, scarcely figure in the book.

The defense department was later to claim that demands to up the tempo in the treatment of al-Qahtani came from frustrated low-level officials at Guantanamo. Sands demolishes this line. His bad guys are not low-level: Feith is the principal villain, although he gets stiff competition from attorney-general Alberto Gonzalez, Haynes and John Yoo, the Berkeley academic turned senior official, and his boss Jay Bybee. As Sands's assiduous sleuthing shows, the underlings were acting within a legal framework pre-established by their Washington-based bosses, all hired in line with the maxim: “If you want to be on our team, you've got to wear the right jersey.” The law was arranged around policy, and after 9/11, the policy was “the gloves are off”.

This willingness to contemplate “the dark side” was ambient in the wider culture after 9/11. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard celebrity lawyer, toured television studios arguing “if we are to have torture, it should be authorised by the law”, coming up with “judicial torture warrants” for the hypothetical “ticking time-bomb” scenario beloved of academic seminars. Television had discovered this, too. The most popular viewing for Guantanamo personnel was 24, in which hardly an episode passed without Jack Bauer doing the hitherto unconscionable to some fictional terrorist.

Sands can't quite leave it at that, nor does he devote much consideration to the pressures of “group-think” that his villains were under in the aftermath of 9/11. He has to up the moral ante by introducing Nazism. By way of “analogy”, he devotes a chapter to the Nuremberg trial of Josef Altstötter and other Nazi lawyers. An honorary SS officer, Altstötter was jailed for five years for his complicity in deporting German Jews east. With epic tastelessness, Sands invited Feith (who is Jewish and lost nine family members in the Holocaust) to consider the “analogy” between Alstötter and his own conduct, even asking if Feith would sanction genocide as well as torture. Sands thus manages inadvertently to make the reader sympathise with Feith, who with considerable restraint replied: “The difference between the domestic constitution of the Nazi government, which was a lawless government, and the US Constitution, there's a failure of perspective here that's really serious.” Indeed. If Sands studied his own book more closely he would surely agree: he chronicles how the FBI, NCIS and senior armed forces counsel (not to mention the US Supreme Court) all balked at the aggressive methods used at Guantanamo. Related abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib led to criminal prosecutions. This tended not to happen in Nazi Germany.

Sands concludes with a veiled warning that the US government lawyers he holds responsible for torture might be advised not to alight in various European countries, lest they find themselves subject to international arrest warrants of the sort issued against Pinochet by a Spanish magistrate. Maybe - in the interest of balance - he should have included an appendix showing just how much human-rights lawyers stand to make in fees when those warrants start flying.

Torture Team by Philippe Sands
Allen Lane £20 pp336 Buy from Books First £18.00 Buy the book

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