Only one interviewee, the former Pentagon lawyer Doug Feith, expresses some distrust of him ("the problem with moral authority is people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes") but even he cannot quite bear to show Sands the door.
Instead, Feith sets him straight - by describing at great length just how central a role he played in sidelining the Geneva Conventions after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Such loquacity is central to Sands's narrative. It was not skulking renegades who emboldened ordinary Americans to strip and leash their captives, to pin images of World Trade Centre victims to their bodies, to expose them to snarling dogs, and to half-drown them. It was suited attorneys, who still proudly proclaim their fidelity to US law.
Their objection was not to legality, but to the "quaint" terms used by human rights treaties - and they thought it perfectly legal to disregard past international interpretations of those treaties, unless and until a US court told them otherwise.
Sands's suggestion is that they still betrayed their calling. Even assuming that American rules were all that counted, they remained professionally obliged to flag up aspects of their advice that others might consider controversial - and by choosing to characterise preordained political goals as settled law, they crossed the line that separates the advocate from the accomplice.
[ ... ]
As Dick Cheney was instructing America that it should prepare to "work through... the dark side" and Fox television had begun broadcasting 24, a programme that celebrated righteous torture, the first practical proposals came from a Harvard professor and former civil rights champion, Alan Dershowitz.
The time had come, he argued, to consider thrusting needles under the fingernails of terrorist suspects. "Pain", he said, was "overrated". In the name of moral clarity, moral blindness had descended - and the shadowy course to Abu Ghraib was set.
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