WITCH HUNTS AND TORTURE !!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/06/ ... tml?csp=34

Western religious history can shed some useful light on today’s discussion of ‘enhanced interrogation’ — or as they referred to such practices back in the 15th century, torture.
By Mary Zeiss Stange

Former POW John McCain knows torture, and he has consistently condemned its use by government agents. Nonetheless, in April he warned that any probe into the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques would amount to a "witch hunt." The senator was surely unaware of the considerable historical irony involved in his invoking this phrase.

(Illustration by Keith Simmons, USA TODAY)


Viewed objectively, the original witch hunts shed significant light on the current debate about the uses of torture. Conducted under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, the Inquisition, and more particularly that aspect of it known as the Witchcraze, was the most spectacular case of systematic torture in Western religious history. It lasted roughly from the 15th through the 17th centuries in Europe, and it offers definitive proof that if reliable information is what you are after, torture is not a good way to get it.

If invoking religious precedent seems an odd way to resolve the question of whether torture is ever acceptable, it is sobering to note that according to a recently released poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a majority of regularly attending American churchgoers say it is. Questioned by the Associated Press as to whether Jesus would condone torture, conservative commentator Gary Bauer has speculated that Jesus himself, being the Son of God, probably wouldn't be a torturer, but that he'd regard as "morally suspect" any of his followers who shrank from torturing for the sake of the greater good.

Where does Jesus leave off and Jack Bauer, the torture-prone hero of Fox TV's series 24, begin? The national debate about "enhanced interrogation" vis-á-vis "torture" has launched us into murky ethical waters, indeed.

Does it work?

One of the most vexing questions that keeps bobbing to the surface in this debate is also the most purely, and chillingly, pragmatic. Whatever you label it, does a technique such as waterboarding yield reliable information? This isn't the same as asking, "Does it work?" Of course it works, to the extent that it yields answers to questions posed under extreme duress.

But are those answers trustworthy?

Intelligence experts, across the political spectrum, attest that they are not. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee in mid-May that when CIA contractors took over from him the interrogation of accused al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, Zubaydah stopped producing reliable information when the contractors began employing waterboarding.

The history of the Inquisition tells us the same thing about the practical limits of torture. And there are some interesting similarities between then and now. The Inquisition targeted a particular population of individuals who were deemed to be an immediate threat to the public safety. It was held that witches killed babies, that they caused male impotence, female infertility and miscarriages. They spoiled the crops and caused the plague. And so on.

The population identified as witches was mostly female. Indeed, the Witchcraze has been called a "women's holocaust." But it's worth noting that as in the Nazi Holocaust, those accused of witchcraft also included mentally and physically disabled persons of both sexes, children, lesbians and gay men, and Jews. Questions of relative guilt or innocence aside, collectively these "heretics" were the demonized "terrorists" of their time.

The witch trials were devised by the church on the expert advice of lawyers, many of whom were also priests. A key focus for these lawyers was the appropriate use of torture — they didn't hesitate to call it such — in order to gain a confession, and hence a conviction.

The inquisitors had at their disposal a handbook: the Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer against Witches"), which was published in the 1480s by two Dominican priests. The logic employed in this document — covering areas such as the relative merits of red hot irons as opposed to boiling water, and how to strike the right balance of food and/or sleep deprivation — is strikingly similar to that revealed in the Bush administration's "torture memos" released in April by President Obama's Justice Department.

In the witch trials, as at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there was a general presumption of guilt, not innocence. Ironically, accused witches had more habeas corpus rights than did Gitmo detainees under the Bush administration: They were informed in precise terms of the charges being brought against them, and they were assured a timely trial with a public record of the proceedings. Meticulous records were kept, and among the thousands of condemned witches, a remarkably consistent pattern of testimony emerged. Their stories of their dealings with Satan, and of the precise details of their evil practice, were uncannily similar.

Of course, these stories were forced out of them. The point of the increasingly heinous three degrees of torture — this is the origin of our term "third degree" — was to get the accused persons to crack, and admit to being witches, according to the program laid down in the Malleus. They would also then admit to whatever it was that they had been accused of doing. To escape further torture, they would name neighbors as witches and attest to their strange witchy behavior: the ability to fly, for example, or to cast spells, or to turn themselves into animals, or, in one of the inquisitors' favorite fixations, to magically castrate men, in one striking case keeping their stolen "members" in birds nests where they fed them grain and corn.

In short, the witches said whatever the inquisitors wanted them to say, no matter how bizarre, based upon the latter's preconceived expectations. So many people were implicated in this way at the Inquisition's zenith that entire villages in Northern Europe were basically wiped out. Farther south, the practice of waterboarding was one of the favorite torture techniques for inquisitors in Spain and Italy. While it appears to date at least to the 13th century, the technique essentially as used today is described in documents from the Spanish Inquisition.

The greater good

In drawing this historical comparison, I am not saying that Gitmo detainees or other suspected terrorists should not be brought to justice. I do mean to suggest, however, that torturing them is not the way to get there.

The contemporary Catholic Church agrees. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Vatican are squarely opposed to torture in any and all circumstances. Last year, the USCCB issued a study guide, "Torture is a Moral Issue," that explicitly condemns practices such as waterboarding.

Whether under the auspices of church or state, and whether "well-intentioned" or not, "enhanced interrogation" clearly has no place in any system that aims toward justice and the greater good. The Bible tells us so, of course, as does the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But for people for whom practical results trump moral or political theory, religious history provides the most convincing object lesson. Anyone who wonders about the practicality of waterboarding should look into, and learn from, the results achieved by the folks who perfected the technique in the first place.

Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of women's studies and religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She is also a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Posted at 12:15 AM/ET, June 29, 2009 in Forum commentary, On religion column, Stange | Permalink
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