God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  Sanitation has taken hold in the old Jewish Quarter of Córdoba—still called the Judería, despite the fact that Jews have been largely gone for five hundred years. Wandering through the narrow, winding streets, a few blocks from the Mezquita, one can’t help recalling Peter De Vries’s remark about how so many places are named for what had to be removed in order to make them what they are. De Vries had suburban subdivisions in mind (Orchard Hills, Fox Run), but he could have been talking about any U.S. state with an Indian name—or about the Judería of Córdoba. At one time, as many as 10,000 Jews lived here. They supported more than twenty synagogues. Today, the walls of dwellings are freshly whitewashed, flowers bloom in window boxes, and souvenir shops sell small brass menorahs. The sole medieval synagogue that escaped destruction has been restored. Not far away, in a public space, a bronze Maimonides sits contemplatively, a book open in his lap.

  And then, right around the corner, you come upon the Galería de la Tortura—the museum of torture. This sort of commercial showcase seems obligatory in cities where religious persecution was once endemic—it’s part of the taming process. Someday, when strife has subsided and memories have cooled, there will no doubt be an Abu Ghraib museum, at the prison outside Baghdad, with a waxen figure of the hooded man on the box, electrodes trailing from his fingertips. At the museum in Córdoba, the devices of torture are all on display. But the effect is oddly Disneyfied—a theme-park version of inhumanity. The same is true of exhibits of torture instruments that from time to time go on tour. The names the instruments have been given reinforce the sense of distant fantasy: Brazen Bull, Iron Maiden, Pear of Anguish, Judas Cradle, Saint Elmo’s Belt, Cat’s Paw, Brodequins, Thummekins, Scavenger’s Daughter, Pilliwink, Heretic’s Fork, Spanish Tickler, Spanish Donkey, Spanish Spider, Scold’s Bridle, Drunkard’s Cloak. They could just as easily be the names of pubs, or brands of condoms, or points of ascent on a climber’s map.

  The failure to shock lies as much in the times as in the curators. These days, the reality of torture is graphically accessible to everyone—in grim color photographs, in macabre videos posted online, in voluminous interrogation transcripts pried from intelligence agencies. The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades, and arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages. In the so-called Bybee memo (later modified), the Bush administration argued that interrogators could not be prosecuted for their deeds if they were acting in good faith: “The absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture.” (Following Aquinas, the inquisitors, too, cited the cleansing power of good intentions.) The administration also asserted a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To put this standard in perspective: the Bush administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins is the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that an act of torture must stop.

  The legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, though not a proponent of torture, has argued that democratic governments should make provision for the issuance of official “torture warrants” that would sanction the use of torture in extreme cases—his argument being that torture is employed clandestinely in any event, and it would be better to subject it to legal regulation. “The major downside of any warrant procedure,” Dershowitz writes, “would be its legitimation of a horrible practice, but in my view it is better to legitimate and control a specific practice that will occur, than to legitimate a general practice of tolerating extra-legal actions, so long as they operate under the table of scrutiny and beneath the radar screen of accountability.”

  The Spanish Inquisition is not what Dershowitz had in mind, but it, too, sought to legitimate and control a regime of torture, just as the Medieval Inquisition had. Torture might once have been limited to crimina excepta—crimes of the utmost gravity—but over time that category was broadened, and the threshold of permissibility was lowered. The phenomenon is sometimes known as torture creep. It comes in various forms. In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, in May 2011, a number of commentators asserted that the Al Qaeda leader’s hideout had been discovered owing mainly to information gleaned from torture—demonstrating just how worthwhile torture can be. The claim was not true, but the fact that it was made illustrates a moral slide: where once torture was seen as justified only by some “ticking time bomb” scenario, now it was seen as justifiable for obtaining useful intelligence of a lesser kind.

  Inquisitors resorted to torture for one main purpose: to elicit statements by the victim, about himself or people he knew, that they could legally regard as “the truth.” Torture was not employed officially as punishment, though it would be impossible to rule out such a motivation—in the hearts of many who wield it, torture has always entailed some measure of punishment. Officially, it was a tool of jurisprudence—an essential element in the hierarchy of proof. Because the gravest of crimes brought a penalty of death, it was essential to have an ironclad assurance of guilt—and no assurance was more persuasive than a confession. Crimes against the faith were also crimes of personal conscience, and the testimony of witnesses could be suggestive but not conclusive—which again put a premium on confession.

  Darius Rejali, the most prominent modern specialist on torture, has divided certain torture techniques into what he calls the Greater and Lesser Stress Traditions. The Greater Tradition consists of methods that are applied with few limitations and that leave victims with “permanent, visible injuries.” The Lesser Tradition comes with certain rules and leaves “fewer telltale marks.” When modern democracies resort to torture, as they do, their tendency has been toward the Lesser Tradition—easier to hide, easier to explain away. Authoritarian regimes have no such concerns. The Inquisition straddled both traditions. It operated in an environment in which secular authorities could treat suspects as they pleased. Some of the methods employed could by their nature do irreparable damage. At the same time, the Inquisition’s procedures and rituals represented a clear attempt at limitation. The moral may be that the regulation of torture never really works—it just points the practitioners in new directions. As Rejali writes, “When we watch interrogators, interrogators get sneaky.”

  Before a session began, the person to be interrogated by the Inquisition would be placed within sight of the instruments of torture—in conspectus tormentorum—in the hope that this would suffice to compel his testimony. Often it did. A physician was generally in attendance. Records were kept meticulously; the usual practice was for a notary to be present, preparing a minutely detailed account. These remarkable documents survive in large numbers; they are dry, bureaucratic expositions whose default tone of clinical neutrality is punctuated matter-of-factly by quoted screams (“Oh! Oh!”). Henry Charles Lea reproduces one such account at length—the interrogation of a woman in Toledo who had fallen under suspicion because, among other things, she did not eat pork.

  She was told to tell what she had done, for she was tortured because she had not done so, and another turn of the cord was ordered. She cried, “Loosen me, Senores!, and tell me what I have to say: I do not know what I have done, O Lord have mercy on me, a sinner!” . . . More turns were ordered, and as they were given she cried, “Oh! Oh! Loosen me for I don’t know what I have to say.”

  It continues for pages. Statements made during torture were not themselves admissible as evidence—they had to be repeated afterward, freely, not sooner than a day later and in a location away from the torture chamber. It is a mistake to assume that duress is absent when its instruments are out of sight; and those who retracted their confessions knew they might be tortured again. But the practice of allowing a respite and demanding a repetition at least reflected the recognition, well understood by modern interrogators, that people will say anything while being tortured. Nor does torture per se need to be involved to p
roduce such a result—any kind of intense interrogation can lead to a false confession.

  In 1975, as Britain attempted to cope with an upsurge of lethal activity by the Irish Republican Army, the so-called Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment for their alleged role in the bombing of two pubs. Under duress, eight of the ten defendants had confessed to complicity—but all ten were probably innocent. An appeals court overturned their sentences, after a government investigation, and the prisoners won their freedom. A recent study in the Stanford Law Review discussed more than forty cases in America since 1976 in which DNA evidence has led to the exoneration and release of individuals who, usually as a consequence of harsh interrogation, had confessed to crimes they had not committed.

  The unreliability of torture has yet to deter it. Three main forms were employed by the Spanish Inquisition, each of which came in a number of variants. None were new. All were widely employed by secular jurisdictions of the time, in Spain and elsewhere. All remain in use today, as investigations by governments and human-rights organizations attest.

  The first technique was known in Spanish as the garrucha (“pulley”) and in Italian as the strappado (a “pull” or “tug”). It was a form of torture by suspension, and worked through simple gravity. It was widely known as the Queen of Torments. Typically the hands of the person to be interrogated were tied behind his back. Then, by means of a pulley or a rope thrown over a rafter, the body would be hoisted off the ground by the hands, and then be allowed to drop with a jerk. Sometimes weights would be tied to the feet. The strain on the shoulders was immense. Joints could be pulled from their sockets. Muscles could be stretched to the point where elasticity would never return. Damage to the brachial plexus, the nerve fibers running from the spinal cord to the arms, could cause paralysis. The weight of the body hanging from the arms contorted the pleural cavity, making breathing difficult (the typical cause of death in crucifixion, for the same reason).

  Under various names—“Palestinian hanging,” “reverse hanging”—the strappado appears frequently in later history. It is commonplace in our own times. Senator John McCain was subjected to a version of it, called “the ropes,” when he was a prisoner of war in a North Vietnamese camp. Leaving aside its use by authoritarian regimes, as documented in many reports, it has been employed in the interrogation of prisoners in U.S. custody. One prominent case is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died during interrogation at Abu Ghraib in 2003. His hands had been tied behind his back, and Jamadi had then been hung by the wrists from the bars of a window that was five feet off the ground. Michael Baden, the chief pathologist for the New York State Police, explained the consequences to Jane Mayer, of The New Yorker:

  If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired, so there’s less oxygen entering the bloodstream.

  The second technique employed by the Inquisition was the rack. In Spanish the word is potro, meaning “colt,” the reference being to a small platform with four legs. Several things could occur on this platform. The victim might be placed on his back, his legs and arms fastened tautly to winches at each end. Each turn of the winches would stretch him by some additional increment. Ligaments might snap. Bones could be pulled from their sockets. The sounds alone were sometimes enough to encourage compliance in those brought in to watch. Another version of the rack relied not on radical extension but on tight compression. Rope would be wrapped around the body and fastened to the winches, coiling tighter with every turn. The rope sometimes cut through muscle, all the way to the bone.

  Here is an account of a suspected heretic who had been placed on the potro and was being questioned by inquisitors in the Canary Islands in 1597. The winch had just been given three turns. The suspect would confess after five more. The recording secretary preserved the moment:

  On being given these he said first “Oh God!” and then, “There’s no mercy”: after the turns he was admonished, and he said “I don’t know what to say, oh dear God!” Then three more turns of the cord were ordered to be given, and after two of them he said, “Oh God, oh God, there’s no mercy, oh God help me, help me!”

  The third technique involved water. Toca, meaning “cloth,” was the term in Spanish, the reference being to the fabric that plugged a victim’s upturned mouth, and upon which water was poured. The effect was to induce the sensation of asphyxiation by drowning. “Waterboarding” is the English term commonly used today, for a similar practice with a similar consequence. The modern term in Spanish is submarino. One expert on torture writes,

  Even a small amount of water in the glottis causes violent coughing, initiating a fight-or-flight response, raising the heart and respiratory rate, and triggering desperate efforts to break free. The supply of oxygen available for basic metabolic functions is exhausted within seconds. While this is sometimes called “an illusion of drowning,” the reality is that death will follow if the procedure is not stopped in time.

  There are collateral consequences as well. A review of contemporary cases by a medical journal noted that the water is “often contaminated with hair, vomit, saliva, mucus, urine, etc.” and that most victims suffered “acute respiratory symptoms during the torture and also later.”

  The CIA has acknowledged that one of its detainees, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Defenders of the practice contend that this figure is misleading—that 183 refers to the number of individual “pours,” and that they occurred in the context of no more than five “sessions.” It is an argument that recalls the hairsplitting semantics of the Inquisition. Faced with statutory limitations on the number of times a person could legally be tortured, Church interrogators defined episodes that were beyond the limit as simply a “continuance” of the earlier, legal sessions.

  What, in any event, is a “pour”? In 2008, the journalist Christopher Hitchens put himself in the hands of U.S. Special Forces veterans in order to experience the reality of waterboarding. “You may have read by now,” he wrote afterward, “the official lie about this treatment, which is that it ‘simulates’ the feeling of drowning. This is not the case.” He went on:

  This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

  U.S. forces used various forms of water torture in the Philippines to suppress an insurgency there at the turn of the last century; William Howard Taft, then the governor of the Philippines, and later president of the United States, referred to the technique as the “water cure.” Water torture was used by the French in Algeria in the 1950s; a vivid account was left by the French-Algerian journalist Henri Alleg in his book La Question. Vice President Dick Cheney, half a century later, called waterboarding “a dunk in the water.” Defenders of the practice insist that waterboarding is not torture, on the grounds that the procedure does not cause lasting impairment —which, as it happens, was precisely the Inqu
isition’s standard of performance. The Inquisition, however, understood that the toca was torture.

  A Clash of Explanations

  There is yet another stage in the life cycle of historical trauma—the stage called revisionism. We all live within cocoons of received wisdom on every subject imaginable. A commonly accepted view provides basic mental orientation on such things as the lessons of Vietnam, the virtues of free speech, the dangers of cholesterol. Because the passage of time is what it is, and generations rise and fall, we don’t carry around long memories of how the received wisdom used to be different. Typically, we don’t even stop to ask ourselves if it was.

  With respect to the Spanish Inquisition, persecution of the Jews is today the first thing that comes to mind. That wasn’t always so. The enmity between Protestant England and Catholic Spain was long reflected in the writing of history and polemics. Until the nineteenth century, most readers in the English-speaking world would have associated the Spanish Inquisition with a pursuit of Protestants. Eventually, the work of prominent historians began to move the Jews to the center of the story. But only within living memory have revisionist scholars—some but not all of them impelled by the long shadow of the Holocaust; some but not all of them Jews themselves—produced work that has altered the mental map of people outside academe.