IN DECEMBER, 2002 it became the policy of the US Government to torture certain Guantanamo Bay detainees to prise information from them. The policy was supported by legal advice, but was abandoned in 2006 when the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful. Philippe Sands argues that the lawyers who gave this advice are war criminals, no less than the politicians they served. In this respect, though not in others, they are, he argues, like the Nazi lawyers prosecuted at Nuremberg in 1947.

This book will make uncomfortable reading for these lawyers. They enjoy immunity from prosecution in the US, but not elsewhere; one probable consequence of Torture Team is to make such prosecution more likely. But the book makes uncomfortable reading in a further respect too. By quoting from the “interrogation log” of one detainee, Mohammed Aal-Quahtani, Sands impresses on us torture's abject reality.

At various times, al-Quhtani was subjected to a bogus exorcism, his hands were cuffed to prevent him from praying, water was used to keep him awake, blood was drawn, he was allowed to become severely dehydrated, he was accused of being homosexual, his mother and sister were called whores, he was treated as if he were a dog, he was stripped naked in front of women interrogators, an interrogator straddled him, pictures of swimsuit models were hung around his neck, his beard was cut, he was deprived of sleep, dogs were used to intimidate him. Though his life was never in danger, there is no doubt that he suffered intense pain, both a physical and mental.

The conviction that torture is wrong has recently come under some battering in the United States.

The principal reason for this new scepticism concerning the immorality of torture is the 9/11 atrocity - and not just 9/11, but also 7/7 and the Madrid bombings, not to mention the videoed beheading of Daniel Pearl, of Kenneth Bigley, of Eugene Armstrong, and so on. The question arises: when the perceived enemy speaks for such atrocities - when his very justification for such atrocities drives him to commit further atrocities, without limit or restraint - is not a reciprocal violence, of any character, somehow justified?

And when the object of that violence is not punishment but “to prevent the next 9/11” (as one of Sands' interviewees puts it), then why not do what it takes? The much-discussed “ticking bomb” scenario has strengthened this readiness to contemplate injuring the defenceless. What if you knew that the acknowledged terrorist you had in detention had it in his power to prevent a massacre by disclosing the whereabouts of a bomb, imminently to go off, and otherwise untraceable? Wouldn't you do everything you could to prise that secret from him? Of course, implicit in this question is the assumption that torture works.

Last, there is the effect on public sentiment of the TV show 24 - now in its sixth series. Isn't it entirely fair that a field agent who is himself at continuous risk of injury or death takes extreme measures both to protect himself and achieve his mission? The very form of the show, an action drama, drives the audience to take the agent's side. It is a secular version of a familiar Christian narrative - after enduring many trials, the hero, Jack Bauer, achieves redemption. Bauer is both torturer and tortured, and this equalising of pain has somehow made his enthusiasm in inflicting it morally acceptable.

In Sands's view, torture is always wrong. It is always, that is, a gross abuse of the radically unequal power relation between the torturer and his victim. It subverts the defence of precisely those civilised values and freedoms that are now at stake in the new wars of the 21st century. It puts soldiers of the torturer's own nation at risk. It can so anger neutrals, or those weakly supporting the tortured person's cause, as to convert them into supporters of the cause, or strengthen their support for it. And it rarely even produces any useful intelligence.

The “torture team” for a time reversed, Sands demonstrates, “the “long and distinguished record [of the US military] of treating detainees decently”, one that goes back to 1863, with Lincoln's instruction, “military necessity does not admit of cruelty,... nor of torture to extort confessions”. The team also overcame the objections of the State Department and military lawyers. In the end, the reversal was itself reversed. The lawyers failed, that is, but without being held to account for their actions - so far, at least.

Though Sands works hard to be fair, the book has a prosecutorial tone, and the comparison with Nazi lawyers is misjudged - regardless of Nuremberg's juridical value as a precedent. On occasion, he also gives the impression of advancing a broader political argument about the character of the current conflict, and no doubt America's enemies will welcome his book. None of this matters. Sands has written an important book about every lawyer's responsibility when giving advice to do more than merely please the client.

Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of the Law by Phillippe Sands
Allen Lane, £20 Buy the book here

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