Status Updates From Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Me...

And Sands’s tone is very outraged, rightfully, though not very scholarly—a lot of these books on war on terror torture act as if this was the first time soldiers/CIA engaged in activity like this, and it was all Bush’s fault. Top-down approach to abuses. I think it would be more honest and powerful if these books mentioned that this stuff was commonplace, but Bush was the first one to properly sanction it.

On page 9, Sands is talking about how respected the Army Field Manual was to interrogators before Rumsfeld’s torture memo, how soldiers didn’t view it as quaint or obsolete. I don’t know much about Vietnam, and massacres aside, I’m pretty sure soldiers tortured people for information not infrequently.