Few pieces of paper have the power to change the course of history. On Tuesday 2 December 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signed one that did. With a signature and a few scrawled words he wantonly discarded principles dating back to President Lincoln's famous edict of 1863 that 'military necessity does not admit of cruelty'. Drafted a few days earlier by the Defense Department's lawyer, William J. Haynes, the aptly named Action Memo was entitled 'Counter-Resistance Techniques', and attached to it was a request for approval of eighteen new techniques for interrogating detainees at Guantanamo - techniques which disregarded the US Army Manual's instructions on interrogation and violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.Torture Team reveals the story of how the Action Memo and its four apparently innocuous attachments came to be legal documents, the cover-up by the Defense Department to hide their origins, the whistleblowers who forced the rescinding of Rumsfeld's approval and the human consequences of the new techniques for one detainee at Guantanamo, and their migration to Abu Ghraib and Basra.In this forensic investigation of deception at the highest levels, international lawyer Philippe Sands questions the role of lawyers who are required to give legal opinions on sensitive political matters, and asks what responsibility they bear. The answers to these questions will be of concern to all those who care about human rights and the rule of law in our world. Read Less