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

by Cullen Murphy

  Cuba achieved independence from Spain in 1902, after the Spanish-American War, and the United States, wanting a naval base, took a perpetual lease on about forty-five square miles of territory on the two peninsulas enclosing Guantánamo Bay. Under the terms of the lease, the U.S. government pays Cuba $4,085 a year. Fidel Castro, protesting the U.S. presence, has for fifty years refused to cash the checks, reportedly keeping them in a drawer. The naval base is cut off from the rest of Cuba by hills. At night a sine curve of floodlit fencing marks the ridgeline. The hills also cut off the area from rain, making conditions at Guantánamo dry and hot. Military vehicles carry coolers filled with bottled water. So do civilians in their own cars, which are referred to as POVs, for “personally owned vehicles.” The Indians left behind massive shell heaps known as middens. If American forces leave middens, they will consist of Dasani bottles.

  The U.S. government does not issue detailed maps of the detention facilities at Guantánamo, and any aerial pictures of the base taken by passengers on incoming aircraft are deleted by security personnel. Pictures taken by departing passengers are fine. A Renaissance censor must be making the rules. In 2010, a Stanford University archaeologist named Adrian Myers used Google Earth images from 2003 and 2008 to map in detail the rapid growth of Camp Delta, from the makeshift facilities that existed on 9/11 to the permanent structures built since then. The newest buildings are modeled directly on “supermax” prisons in the United States. Camp 5, one of the maximum-security facilities, is a replica of a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Camp 6, another maximum-security facility, replicates a prison in Lenawee, Michigan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-value prisoners are held in Camp 7, which is off by itself. Camp 4 is the most relaxed of the facilities. In the detainee library, I noticed several complete sets of Harry Potter and also a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power, and wondered if hard-line members of Congress knew about either of these selections.

  Imperial spores carry the imprint of the homeland. The Indies, declared Columbus, were to be governed “according to the custom and practice of Castile.” Guantánamo in this sense is no different from any other American outpost. It has strip malls, fast-food restaurants, and residential communities that look like any suburb. Ramps on the buildings and cuts in the sidewalks indicate that the Americans With Disabilities Act is very much in force. Signs caution against sexual harassment. Psychological counseling is a phone call away. There are Protestant and Catholic churches, but you can also find a rabbi or an imam if you need one.

  You can’t escape the religious overtones at Guantánamo. A single kitchen the size of a warehouse, presided over by a no-nonsense Filipina (a “third-country national,” or TCN, as such workers are called), prepares meals for troops and detainees alike. Pasta is boiled in industrial pots that tip mechanically, as if at a steel mill. Half the operation is halal, to ensure the delivery of “culturally appropriate” meals to Muslim prisoners. Military personnel uniformly refer to their task as “the mission.” In the camps, the adhan, the call to prayer, is broadcast five times a day. I watched from a guard tower one morning before daybreak as a group of twenty detainees assembled quietly and knelt toward qibla, the direction of Mecca. Their rhythmic chant was still in my ears when I entered the military mess hall at Camp America a few minutes later. A flat-screen TV dominated the wall at each end. One screen showed CNN. The other showed an evangelical preacher delivering a homily. Soldiers listened as they ate. When I sat down for breakfast with the guards who had been with me in the tower, they bowed their heads in silent prayer before cutting into their pancakes. They, like their captives, have God on their minds, if not on their side. These two religions of the book seem to have arrived at something of an impasse.

  It was not always clear why many of the detainees were there—a fact underscored by an assortment of classified documents pertaining to Guantánamo that were made public in 2011. Some detainees had been picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and a significant number were certainly combatants or terrorists. Many others were the victims of denunciation by third parties whose motives remain opaque, or were simply caught up in sweeps and slapped with a label by soldiers who understood neither their language nor their culture. A few were apprehended on tips, at remote locations around the world. Some took a circuitous route, having been rendered to obliging countries for torture and interrogation before being flown to Cuba. To an extent, Guantánamo became a self-fulfilling prophecy: men who were not radical when captured became radicalized by captivity. One of Francis Walsingham’s spies, Maliverny Catlyn, observed a similar phenomenon in English prisons in the 1580s, where Catholics were detained in large groups: “If you mean to stop the stream, choke the spring. Believe me, the prisons of England are very nourishers of papists.”

  Very early on—within months of 9/11, Guantánamo was the site where issues of torture and criminal justice converged, seizing the full attention of officials at the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. The British lawyer Philippe Sands has laid out an indisputable time line. First the administration decided, in February of 2002, to abrogate the Geneva Conventions regarding detainees. Then it created a legal justification for torture by defining the term in such a way—it must produce pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”—that most acts of torture fell outside it. This standard was embodied in the so-called torture memos drafted in 2002 by the Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; those documents did for the twenty-first century what the papal bull Ad extirpanda did for the thirteenth. With that threshold in place, the Bush administration drew up a list of techniques—including isolation, twenty-hour interrogations, nudity, hooding, standing for long periods of time, deprivation of light and sound, the use of dogs—and conveyed the list to interrogators on the scene. This list was given sanction in the famous memo on which Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, scrawled, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

  In late 2002 and early 2003, the techniques were employed over a period of seven weeks on a detainee who went by the number 063, and is now known to be Mohammed al-Qahtani. Transcripts of the interrogations were eventually leaked to the press. The transcriber had taken note of al-Qahtani’s reactions at various points in the interrogation process, and Sands strung them together for emphasis:

  Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled uncontrollably.

  The resemblance to Inquisition transcripts—“Oh, dear God!”—is hard to miss. In another parallel with Church practice, medical personnel were always present; they witnessed the questioning firsthand. The administration would attempt to blame brutal interrogations on “rogue elements” or, in the case of Guantánamo, on “an aggressive major general.” It is true that, for a time, the interrogators at Guantánamo, operating without guidance, often amateurs, and under extreme pressure to show results, improvised as best they could. They gleaned ideas from the Fox drama 24. The Jesuits should be grateful that Richard Topcliffe did not have television. But the explicit sanction of torture, and the demand that it be used, came from above.

  The administration never voiced second thoughts. In its resolution approving military action after 9/11, Congress had authorized the use of “all means necessary”—a deliberately open-ended phrase that would be interpreted to include domestic surveillance and other efforts. “All” meant “all.” When it came to interrogatio
n, the permissible techniques would be extended, in some cases, to include waterboarding, physical abuse, and threats of death. The interrogation techniques, it was said, had “worked.” The information gathered had “saved innocent lives.” That assessment has never been documented. In 2008, the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, was asked whether extreme forms of interrogation had produced intelligence that disrupted any attacks on America. He replied, “I don’t believe that has been the case.” Efficacy aside, the only demonstrated concern has been for semantics and legality, narrowly understood, not the justice and legitimacy of the enterprise itself. Michael V. Hayden, President Bush’s outgoing director of the CIA, told Leon Panetta, the incoming director, “I’ve read some of your writings while you’ve been out of government. Don’t ever use the words CIA and torture in the same paragraph again. Torture is a felony, Leon. Say you don’t like it. Say it offends you. I don’t care. But just don’t say it’s torture. It’s a felony.”

  Razor v. Music

  Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer, was speaking with a young intern, a high school student named Will, when I caught up with him at his home in Symondsbury, Dorset. Stafford Smith had given Will the job of listing all the forms of abuse employed at Guantánamo and then finding the Spanish terms for the same techniques from the Inquisition, assuming he could find a match. He had found a corresponding term for just about everything, he said, but had stalled on “extraordinary rendition.” I suggested relajado al brazo secular—relaxing penitents to the secular arm for punishment. It wasn’t perfect, but it captured the idea of getting someone else to do your dirty work for you. Will said he would look into it.

  Stafford Smith, lanky and voluble, is the British-born but American-trained director of Reprieve, an organization he founded to oppose the death penalty and defend prisoners on death row. After 9/11, as Guantánamo began to fill, Reprieve offered assistance to the families of some of the detainees. It also joined efforts in the United States to mount legal challenges to the detention system, challenges that eventually met with success in a series of Supreme Court rulings. One of Stafford Smith’s clients is Binyam Mohammed, a onetime Guantánamo detainee from Ethiopia, whose civil suit wrested an admission from the British government that it had colluded with the United States in the application of torture.

  The village of Symondsbury nestles in a quiet vale. From high ground it has a view of the sea. The church, on a slope, goes back to the fourteenth century. Wildflowers grow among the tombstones. The village is about as far from Guantánamo, psychologically, as it is possible to get. This was the setting in which Stafford Smith recalled a conversation with Binyam Mohammed.

  “The whole argument over the definition of torture,” he said, “is another one of these semantic debates that allowed the Bush administration to do horrible things. When you take some of the things like sleep deprivation or like loud music that Rumsfeld would disparage—I had no idea how pernicious that stuff was, really. If you keep someone awake for ten or eleven days, they just die.

  “And the music! Binyam Mohammed enlightened me on that one. If you ask someone if they’d rather have a razor blade taken to their penis or have loud music played at them, everyone goes for the music. Binyam had the razor blade in Morocco and the loud music in Kabul. He said he would rather go with the razor blade because physical pain has a beginning and end; mental pain, you start losing your mind. The way he put it was, Would you rather lose your power of sight, as in be blinded, or lose your mind, as in go insane? When you reframe the question that way, suddenly the whole thing turns right around in your head.”

  All told, Stafford Smith has by now spent perhaps nine months living in Guantánamo, interviewing detainees and preparing cases. When he is not out of the country, he commutes once a week from Symondsbury to Reprieve’s offices in London, in the legal warren among the Inns of Court. It is a cluttered place, ranging over several floors, and has become a gathering spot for many of the former detainees now living in England.

  In 2010, the British government agreed to an out-of-court settlement with fifteen former detainees and one man still being held at Guantánamo. All of them are British citizens or legal British residents who have alleged complicity by MI5 and MI6 in their mistreatment. The amount of the settlement, though not known, runs into the millions of dollars.

  7. With God on Our Side

  The Inquisition and the Modern World

  The Church has no fear of historical truth.

  —POPE JOHN PAUL II , 1998

  We know you’re wishing that we’d go away,

  But the Inquisition’s here and it’s here to stay.

  —MEL BROOKS, HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART 1 , 1981

  Making Martyrs

  ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I returned to Rome to spend some time with Msgr. Alejandro Cifres, who after more than a decade is still in charge of the Inquisition archives at the Vatican. Some things had not changed. The shop Euroclero still stood across the street, beyond the gates, selling chalices and cassocks and resplendent liturgical garments for clerics of every rank. It has been Josef Ratzinger’s tailor for many years. The windows of the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio still bore their heavy bars. The studded wooden doors at the entrance were as welcoming as ever. But there seemed to be more cars and fewer Vespas parked outside. And there had been other changes. For one thing, the monsignor’s boss, Cardinal Ratzinger, had taken a new job, and had moved from his office upstairs to quarters on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, above the northern arm of Bernini’s colonnade. The papal apartments, a ten-room suite that had long been in a state of disrepair, received a thorough renovation. Shelving was installed for the pope’s personal library of 20,000 books. Water pipes, encrusted with lime, were replaced. A German company was brought in to remodel the kitchen. Some of the papal rooms had been using 125-volt outlets. Everything is 220 volts now, the Italian standard.

  The rooms housing the Inquisition archives have been remodeled too; Msgr. Cifres had been a busy man, and had become a building contractor as well as an archivist. The Vatican city-state is confined within tight boundaries. It will not soon be rolling back the Risorgimento in a war of expansion. The only place it can grow is down. Of course, another city exists there already, an ancient Roman one. Below the Holy Office lies a cemetery and whatever is left of an amphitheater, the Circus of Nero, where many Christians went to their deaths. This little plot of ground has been making martyrs of Christians ever since. Nero’s mother, Agrippina, lived in the neighborhood; the frescoed walls of what may have been her villa were discovered in 1999, when the Vatican built an underground parking garage to handle crowds for the upcoming Jubilee. When the archive decided, in 2003, that it must have more space, it added two new levels underneath the palazzo. The excavations went down twenty feet below the existing basement, and produced as much marble as dirt. (“And some bones,” Cifres notes matter-of-factly.) Fragments of columns and cornices and pediments and tombstones now line the hallways. They had to go somewhere.

  The new underground space is modern—the walls clinically white, the atmosphere regulated by science. Instruments in the corners keep track of temperature and humidity. There is room to grow. The documents are stored on automated metallic bookshelves twelve feet high, like the ones at the U.S. National Archives. Cifres showed me how they work, but did not make a joke about torture. The facility could be the Social Security Administration or MI6, except that the floors are marble, the files are labeled in a fine Renaissance hand, and crucifixes grace the walls. One section holds official maps of the old Jewish ghettos in Italian cities. In another are architectural plans for Inquisition offices that would one day be built throughout the Papal States. Elsewhere are shelves of Hebraic material, confiscated over the years, and an early printed copy of Nicholas Eymerich’s manual for inquisitors.

  Certain items in the Archivio reappeared, like old friends. I was glad to see the two mahogany card catalogues on their wooden stand—the Index of Forbidden Books. I opened
up the box labeled “A–K” and touched the soft, worn edges of the cards. It is hard to believe that any volume in these two catalogues would make anyone’s jaw drop today. Carlo Botta’s Storia d’Italia dal 1719 al 1814? Jacobus Ode’s Comentarius de angelis?

  Upstairs, the old archive space has been turned into conference rooms and reading rooms. There is actually a reception area now, with an alcove for the mandatory lockers where researchers must lodge their belongings. The condemnation of Descartes won’t be disappearing in a tote bag. By Vatican standards, the Archivio is a busy place. Well over a hundred researchers applied to work here last year. I opened a door and came in upon half a dozen scholars in front of laptops, each with a bundle of documents unwrapped on a desk. They turned as one to look when the door creaked open, and then returned as one to their labors.

  “What are they working on?” I asked Msgr. Cifres later. “Censorship, mostly,” he said. And the trial of Galileo. And, from a later period, the Modernist controversy. Also, he went on, now that the Holy Office archives are accessible up through 1939, anything having to do with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany is getting more and more attention. He paused, thinking about what he might have missed. “And of course apparitions,” he said. Apparitions are reported more frequently than you might imagine, and bishops typically consult the CDF on how to proceed. In December 2010, just before Christmas, a bishop in Wisconsin affirmed that the Virgin Mary had most likely appeared to a Belgian immigrant woman near Green Bay in 1859. (A vision of the Virgin in Akita, Japan, was affirmed by Ratzinger himself in 1988.) The scholars at the CDF, from universities around the world, focus mainly on sterner stuff. The biggest project under way is the publication of all Inquisition documents relating to science and natural philosophy. The first four volumes, under the series title The Catholic Church and Modern Science, were published in 2010 and cover the years from the start of the Inquisition to the execution of Giordano Bruno. The editors find it “inconceivable” that the Church’s policies of “preventive control” could have failed to dampen intellectual life. Galileo is up next.