In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer
Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture
program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.
Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted
that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they
were “complicit in the commission of a crime.”
“There was not a hint of recognition that anything had
gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,”
he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.
Sands cited former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who was
instrumental in shredding the Geneva Conventions, as an example:
When you read my account with Doug Feith and
with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual
responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement.
Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called
war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement
in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And
yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved
in the decision making from step one. So it’s about
individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject
failure on that account.
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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that
torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands
slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering
the implications of his words:
I’ve listened, for example, to Justice
Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize
torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops
it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing
to say. If the United States president can do that, then why
can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British
prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?
“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses,
and you expose the American military to real dangers,”
Sands concluded.
