Phillippe Sands pulls the curtain open on the "culture of cruelty" that has been ushered in. Organizations across America step in to do what Congress is unwilling to do---hold the lawyers accountable for their actions.

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If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles.
- - Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable to? --Arundhati Roy

We do not torture. -George W. Bush

Phillippe Sands, author of the Vanity Fair article that thrust the issue of torture into the mainstream media where it should be daily until it is no longer an issue, appeared this week on Democracy Now! and Bill Moyers Journal.

Sands cuts through the argument that the issue of torture is something that "trickled up." He specifically looks at Detainee 063, a detainee that was tortured in late 2002 for several weeks.

What does Detainee 063 reveal? It reveals the crucial answer to how the military began to adopt a procedure that involved coercive interrogations and torture.

Sands also focuses on an "action memo" from November 2002 written by William J. (Jim) Haynes II, the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense. In this memo, often called the Haynes Memoe, Rumsfeld gave "“blanket approval” to 15 out of 18 proposed techniques of aggressive interrogation."

On December 2, 2002, Rumsfeld signed "his name firmly next to the word “Approved.” Under his signature he also scrawled a few words that refer to the length of time a detainee can be forced to stand during interrogation: “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?""

Not only does this exhibit a ghastly level of callowness and callousness but it is illegal. As Sands points out in his Vanity Fair piece, "Cruelty, humiliation, and the use of torture on detainees have long been prohibited by international law, including the Geneva Conventions and their Common Article 3. This total ban was reinforced in 1984 with the adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which criminalizes torture and complicity in torture."

Not to mention 18 interrogation techniques used violate the U.S. Army Field Manual, which as Sands said in his appearances, is the "Bible" for the military.

Phillippe Sands did not just appear on those two shows. His article and newly published book The Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values earned him the opportunity to go testify at a hearing before Congress. The responses to his testimony reveal how America has become accepting of a "culture of cruelty" and also how the power structures in this country (our two-party system and the people's lack of voice, respect, and representation in government) are abysmal:

REP. STEVE KING:"Wallowing in self-guilt as a nation, and bringing hearings before this Congress and pumping this into the media constantly, when we've identified that these are narrow, very narrow, exceptional circumstances, and at our knowledge on it isn't complete, that it extends the outrage,That this panel and this testimony, and those things that supplement it across this media, also extend the outrage and may be extending this global war against these people, whom we won't call terrorists, we'll call them Islamic jihadists."

REP. MIKE PENCE: Some, of course, have suggested that relationship-building interrogation techniques are preferable and even more reliable in the long-run than stress methods. They raise the question, though, what about the hard cases? And I can tell by your grin you acknowledge the somewhat absurd thought that you could move people who have masterminded the death of more than 3000 Americans by Oprah Winfrey methods."

Granted, these are Republicans. But what does Speaker Nancy Pelosi have to say about torture?

In December of last year, John Nichols reported in The Nation that, "Pelosi knew as early as 2002 that the U.S. was using waterboarding and other torture techniques and, far from objecting, appears to have cheered the tactics on."

The House subpoenaed David Addington, Cheney's chief-of-staff who is closely linked to the torture memos. Others are volunteering to testify.

Phillippe Sands appears to have hit a nerve in Congress that has caused them to see the need to---I don't know---do something other than prepare for winning the election in November. And so, it must be said that what he has done by making the rounds on popular progressive news shows, by conducting interviews with several Internet websites, and by writing an article that was published in the corporate media and a book is a gift to Americans.

This gift offers us a window of opportunity to educate the people of America on what this Bush Regime has been doing and act on it.

We can act on it by organizing to fire the "torture professors" or those lawyers involved at the top who are now educating future generations of American lawyers and leaders. Do you want future lawyers and leaders of America to think torture is justified by the Constitution like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would like us all to believe?

Douglas Feith, closely linked to the memos and to appear in hearings on torture to be held next month. From the Vanity Fair article:

I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

He currently teaches at Georgetown University.

John Yoo, teaching Constitution classes at Berkeley in California, put together the legal justification for torture, which is that if you cannot prove intent to torture, than you are immune from prosecution or punishment. In other words, you can be cruel and inhumane and not have to take responsibility for it.

This exchange reveals just what kind of mentality these "torture professors" are harboring:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

The Bush Regime is guilty of war crimes.

The most vulnerable members of the criminal regime are the lawyers who have now moved on to teach (or indoctrinate).

The National Lawyers Guild, Center for Responsive Politics, American Civil Liberties Union, and World Can't Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime! are all working collectively to have Yoo fired from Berkeley, disbarred from his profession, and tried for war crimes.

All lawyers/professors connected to the torture memos (and responsible for their existence) deserve to be held accountable for engaging in immoral, inhumane, and illegal acts such as the formulation of legal justifications for torture.

Authors Bio:
Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure." He was an editor for OpEdNews.com