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

by Cullen Murphy

  4 A.M.–5 A.M.: Speed cameras track the car heading south through the city’s leafy suburbs. . . . The bombers join the southbound M1 at junction 40 and their progress is tracked as they journey south along the spine of England.

  6:30 A.M.: After 160 miles on the M1, the Nissan Micra turns off at junction 11, arriving at Luton train station car park at around 6:50 A.M.

  7 A.M.: The four don their military-style rucksacks in the increasingly busy car park . . . CCTV cameras, designed to capture car thieves, film the four engaged in a final prayer.

  7:40 A.M.: The four bombers catch a Thameslink train, which winds through the affluent commuter belt of Hertfordshire towards King’s Cross.

  8:26 A.M.: The quartet are captured walking across the concourse of London’s busiest station. They are chatting; Hussain is laughing. Minutes later, they are huddled in a final, earnest conversation.

  The surveillance system is a comfort to some, up to a point. It is also a source of unease. Databases of various kinds—commercial, public, private, medical, biological—are connected as never before. Legal procedures provide the authorities with wide latitude to hold suspects for significant periods, and to deport undesirables with a minimum of due process. A British national identity card was scheduled to be phased in, but the scheme was put on hold in early 2011—the idea engendered too much public opposition. Few doubt that the era of the identity card will one day come, and not just in Britain. Under a law passed in 2000, some 474 local governments and 318 government agencies are permitted to “self-authorize” the surveillance of British citizens—that is, they may, without the approval of a magistrate, have people followed, monitor their phone calls and e-mail, and record their activities surreptitiously with cameras. A woman in Dorset who became a target of such surveillance in 2008 was suspected, wrongly, of nothing more than sending her children to a school outside her district.

  In 2012, London is scheduled to host the summer Olympics. Biometric identification is required for workers at major Olympics construction sites—everyone must negotiate iris and palm scanners. Security plans call for Royal Air Force drones, equipped with optical and other sensing devices, to cruise above Olympic venues at all times. Bomb-sniffing robots may mingle with the crowds. One idea that has been mentioned is the creation of a “tunnel of truth”—a passageway that would scan people attending the games for radiation, explosives, and biohazards, and at the same time use facial-recognition software to identify those who may be on watch lists.

  Henry Porter, a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer, is one of the most persistent critics of a regime he fears is settling into place, as much through bureaucratic inertia and technological advance as through outright advocacy. Privacy erodes by degrees, each step sometimes seen as a sensible response to the circumstances and sometimes not seen at all. Porter’s dystopian thriller The Bell Ringers conjures a Britain in which the surveillance measures that already exist are pushed just a little further along, given just a little more interconnection. You buy some modernity, and you cede some privacy. A famous line in Tacitus notes how eagerly the people of ancient Britain took up Roman customs and devices, observing, “The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as civilization, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.”

  It can be hard to separate the two. The process for obtaining a reader’s card to use the manuscript room at the British Library is easy, efficient, and swift. Much of it can be done online. A brief visit to a well-run office produces an actual card. The reading room itself is the most comfortable place imaginable, staffed by the same pallid, helpful clerks you’d have found there in 1950 or 1870. The rules are on a human scale. Four manuscripts at a time, no more! Pencils only, please! But CCTV cameras are everywhere, behind tasteful orbs of tinted glass. And I realized, as I checked the “past history” window of my account, that the library had a copy of my passport and driver’s license, had my e-mail address, had a record of every item I had looked up or requested, and probably saw that I had once taken out a pen to make a quick note when the point of my pencil broke. It’s a trade-off, and billions of people are making trade-offs of this sort every day.

  A few years ago, I spent an afternoon with Admiral John Poindexter, a national security advisor under Ronald Reagan. The small study in his home was filled with memorabilia—from Annapolis, the navy, the White House. His pipes stood in racks. Poindexter was called out of retirement in 2002 to head up the U.S. government’s Total Information Awareness Office, a visionary program to compile a vast database of personal information, including biometric and surveillance data, which could be analyzed by automated computer tools for patterns of suspicious activity. It was launched without much thought to public relations: its official seal depicted light from a Masonic eye falling ominously on planet Earth, above the Latin motto Scientia est Potentia—“Knowledge is Power.” The program was quickly defunded.

  Poindexter was unapologetic. If America is going to combat asymmetric warfare waged by terrorists, he explained, it needs a lot more information. The world has changed since the bipolar days of the Cold War. Back then, we knew where the threat was coming from. We knew where the Soviets’ missiles were. We understood their communications systems. “Fast forward,” Poindexter said, “to a situation where the U.S. is the only superpower, and you have all of these non-state actors out there, and some rogue states. You have a much more difficult problem.”

  Poindexter has often been portrayed as a caricature. He is in fact a thoughtful man. He laid out his thinking methodically. He professed concern for privacy, and described a “privacy app” that Total Information Awareness would have deployed, intended to offer some measure of protection. That said, he believed deeply in the potential of the effort he had launched, and believed just as deeply that some sacrifice of privacy would be a small price to pay. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. “Strong privacy advocates would not agree with this,” he said, “but my view is that if privacy is invaded, it only really becomes a problem if there are actions taken against the person as a result of invading that privacy. That’s not a commonly held view.” His personal opinion, he went on, was that “in today’s dangerous world,” the insistence on a right to privacy is “a luxury we probably can’t afford.”

  Camp Justice

  The age of Total Information Awareness is not here yet, nor is the regime imagined in Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” in which the authorities have developed the capacity to predict crimes before they happen, and make preventive arrests accordingly. In our world, justice and punishment are still mainly postcrime—mainly, but not entirely. There are times when people can legally be restrained because of fears that they represent a danger to themselves or others. There are times when people can be targeted simply because they belong to a class of persons perceived as threatening. And there are times when people can be subjected to extreme forms of interrogation, including what amounts to torture, because, it is argued, some greater harm will be prevented.

  There is ample precedent in American history for “preemption.” Starting in 1919, amid a Red Scare precipitated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a spate of bombings in the United States, the Justice Department launched the so-called Palmer Raids, named for A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general at the time. In a letter to the U.S. Senate, Palmer indicated that he had drawn up a list of 60,000 presumed radicals. He requested new legislation to suppress radical publications. The raids, led by the young J. Edgar Hoover, rounded up targeted individuals by the thousands. They were held in detention centers and often deported. The efforts enjoyed broad public support. In the words of a Washington Post editorial, “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.”

  Beginning in 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as many as 110,000 Japanese Americans were sequestered in internment camps without due process, on the grounds that, as a group, they represented a potential threa
t to the United States. The general in charge of the internment put it bluntly: “In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race.” The italics are his. Among other things, the internment underscored the value of careful data collection. Although the fact was long denied, the Census Bureau, whose records are normally confidential, provided assistance in tracking down Japanese Americans. Years later, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon would leverage another cache of confidential data—the files of the Internal Revenue Service—for their own political purposes.

  A second and more sustained Red Scare commenced with the onset of the Cold War. The official reaction to it, though often referred to loosely as McCarthyism—after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who leveled damaging accusations at hundreds of individuals whom he suspected of being communists or harboring communist sympathies—was in large part undertaken by the FBI, now led by Hoover. Governments at every level set up boards to look into the loyalty of their employees. So did private companies. One scholar in the mid-1950s estimated that 20 percent of all workers in the country had, as a condition of employment, “taken a test oath, or completed a loyalty statement, or achieved official clearance, or survived some undefined private scrutiny”—a far deeper penetration than any inquisition by the Church could claim.

  McCarthy’s efforts lost steam, and he was discredited, but the FBI carried on under the aegis of its secret COINTELPRO operation, which was directed mostly at leftist groups, civil rights activists, and, later, antiwar protesters. A prominent book on the subject—The Boss, by Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox—is subtitled J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. COINTELPRO personnel, the authors write, “were authorized to use subterfuge, plant agents provocateurs, leak derogatory information to the press, and employ other disruptive tactics to destabilize the operations of targeted groups.” Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency, whose charter prohibits any domestic national-security role, pursued a covert mail-opening program directed at Americans, compiling a database of 1.5 million names. Another secret CIA program, known as CHAOS, infiltrated a broad range of domestic antiwar organizations.

  Hoover’s convictions were absolute, and he had a high pulpit. He warned about America’s “dangerously indulgent attitude toward crime, filth, and corruption.” He denounced those he saw as “mortal enemies of freedom and deniers of God Himself.” COINTELPRO was shut down in 1971, soon after its existence had been exposed by activists. CHAOS was quietly terminated in 1973, not long before its activities became the subject of a New York Times investigation. That same year, Richard Nixon remarked to an aide that Hoover “had a file on everybody.” This was not quite true: Hoover had files on only 25 million people—at the time, one out of eight Americans.

  Legislative oversight, like that provided by the Church Committee in the 1970s, has brought some abuses to light. But the combination of moral panic and existential fear is a potent one. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which allows the authorities to conduct “sneak and peek” searches without immediately notifying subjects, permits access to business records “in connection with” counterterrorism investigations, and expands to the point of vagueness the meaning of “material support” for terrorism. Most of its provisions have been reauthorized. In 2002, the National Security Agency was secretly given license to tap telephone conversations between people in the United States and people abroad without obtaining a warrant beforehand. Legislation eventually gave some legal cover to this practice, though it has run into trouble in the courts.

  No actions connected with the post-9/11 period have received more attention than the use of torture to elicit information from prisoners captured in the war on terrorism. These methods have been referred to by the euphemism “enhanced interrogation.” The term brings to mind the euphemism for torture that the Roman Inquisition employed—rigoroso esamine, or “rigorous examination.” Torture has been employed on detainees in Bagram prison, in Afghanistan, and at numerous black sites in other countries. In the minds of much of the world, the American regime of torture is crystallized in the single word “Guantánamo.”

  The detention facilities at Guantánamo are collectively known as Camp Delta. They were built after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks. The Afghanistan war rapidly produced prisoners by the hundreds—suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters, all of them Muslim, some of them certainly dangerous, some of them old men or young boys. Roughly 750 detainees have been held at Guantánamo altogether; about 175 were still there in 2011. Camp Delta replaced Camp X Ray, the original facility, built years ago to hold Haitian boat people. The famous photograph of the first detainees arriving at Guantánamo, shackled and blindfolded, kneeling in their orange jumpsuits in an open-air passage between chain-link fences, was taken at Camp X Ray. That spot is now overgrown with vegetation. The camp has been abandoned. Flowering vines climb the fences and creep along the barbed wire. Wooden watchtowers creak as you ascend by ladder for the view. The grass comes up to your waist; you can hear the rustle of rodents and reptiles at your feet, but can see nothing. On the perimeter of Camp X Ray stand two long wooden buildings, each divided into several rooms that were used in the early days to conduct interrogations. Tables and benches are fixed solidly to the floor. Bits of duct tape lie among the droppings of banana rats.

  Guantánamo has been a focus of intense international criticism ever since the first prisoners arrived, in January 2002. Many reports, later confirmed in detail, concerned the use of torture during the interrogation of detainees. The nature of the legal regime at Guantánamo also provoked condemnation. The Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is considered U.S. territory, and federal law governs there in ways that are apparent to any visitor. Iguanas, for instance, are everywhere—on lawns, in parking lots, inside the detention facilities. They are a protected species under federal law. Signs on the roadways warn of a $10,000 fine for even the inadvertent killing of an iguana. And yet as far as the detainees are concerned, Guantánamo was chosen because it represented a “legal black hole”: it was not part of the constitutional homeland, the Bush administration argued, or subject to the same legal standards that might obtain within that homeland. Detainees could therefore be subjected to any legal regime the authorities decided to implement.

  In effect, Guantánamo was chosen because it was a place where it was legal to have no legal regime at all. Habeas corpus did not apply—until, after years had elapsed, the Supreme Court ruled that it must. Detainees did not have to be told why they were being held. Their captors did not have to justify holding them. Nor did they need to divulge the names of the detainees. Where and how they should stand trial, if trial was warranted, remained a matter of contention. Among other things, the abuse of prisoners has tainted much of the evidence. An area of tents and makeshift buildings at Guantánamo is known as Camp Justice; it’s the place set aside for the proceedings called military commissions. The Bush administration originally envisaged a $100 million facility for this purpose, and then scaled the plans back to a $12 million courtroom. Spectators sit behind soundproof glass; testimony is relayed by audio feed on a twenty-second delay, and can be cut off if classified information is divulged. By the summer of 2011, only five detainees had made their way through the process.

  In 2010, the technicians at Google Labs introduced a feature called the Books Ngram Viewer, which allows users to discover the frequency with which particular words have been employed in published books going back hundreds of years. The pool is large: some 500 billion words in more than 5 million digitized books (and covering several languages). If you search for the word “Guantánamo,” you’ll see that it underwent a sharp uptick during the past decade. You’ll see the same pattern if you search for the word “inquisition.” The two words have become tightly linked, in the United States and around the world. “The Guantánamo Inquisition.” “Guantánamo’s Inquisitors.
” “Waterboarding: From the Inquisition to Guantánamo.” You don’t have to look very hard.

  “All Means Necessary”

  To reach the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, you must travel four hours by airplane on one of two flights that operate daily out of Fort Lauderdale. The trip would be shorter if the aircraft did not have to avoid Cuban airspace, making a large loop around the island and approaching from the south. The planes are small, and until recently did not have restrooms. The passengers are mainly military personnel and defense contractors. The airport occupies the smaller of Guantánamo’s two peninsulas, on the leeward side. A short ferry ride takes you to the larger peninsula, on the windward side.

  Not far from the landing, at Fisherman’s Point, stands a stone monument with a bronze plaque. It commemorates the arrival here of Christopher Columbus in 1494. He was on his second voyage, with a fleet of seventeen ships, and had brought with him 1,200 colonists. The fleet also carried five religiosos, whose job it would be to serve the colonists and also bring the indigenous people into the bosom of the Church. Columbus had been looking for gold but found only fish, which Indians were cooking on the shore. The Spaniards took note of the many iguanas, not yet endangered. In that same year, the pope would divide the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. The Inquisition was paying attention to the New World, including Cuba, within decades.