An Historical Perspective on Torture

On January 22, in only his second full day in office, President Obama signed into law an executive order forbidding the use of torture in government interrogations. More than a repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration, the order is nothing short of a statement recommitting America to the Constitutional principles on which it was founded--equality under the law and the right to a fair trial. Certainly, introducing these prisoners into the justice system, where the innocent can be set free and the guilty sent to jail where they belong, will strengthen our resolve and make the US a safer, not more dangerous, place. If the goal of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was "to destroy America's way of life," then didn't the Bush administration play right into their hands with its flaunting of these supposedly hallowed principles? By sanctifying the use of torture, we said to our enemies not that they should fear us, but that we would inadvertently bow to their wishes by condoning that which we supposedly stand so stridently against. By way of life, bin Laden likely referred more to our economic and foreign policies, but if the foundations of these crumble, the house cannot be far behind. And, if America is truly weakening as a nation relative to China and the European Union, our reassertion as a moral leader in a dangerous world can only bolsters our credentials on the world stage. This is desperately needed in the aftermath of Iraq. The moral argument against torture seems apparent enough, and the point, at least for the meantime, is hopefully moot, but I'd like to point out how it has failed pragmatically as well. So, for the moral relativists, a practical argument against torture:

Many historical societies, at some time or another, have used torture either as a way to extract confessions among the accused or as a form of punishment, usually as a prelude to execution. In some societies it may have been a continuation of religious human sacrifice; in others, born out of the militaristic nature of the culture. Roman torture first took the form of military-style punishment and was later utilized privately as the aristocracy employed it as a fear-inducing weapon designed to keep the lower-classes and slaves in their socio-economic places. Some of the most historically memorable instances of Roman torture in the first few centuries of the common era were a point of entertainment for the masses--gladiatorial games, the participants of which were almost always either prisoners or slaves. And of course, as anyone who has studied early Christianity knows, the brutality of the first and second century Romans against the first Christian martyrs was legion (no pun intended).

Torture has been variously outlawed in the past and the Geneva Convention is by no means new in its interpretation and moral outrage against the practice. In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory I famously declared all confessions extracted during torture to be inadmissible in courts, but this proclamation was not far reaching, applying only to those courts under the jurisdiction of the Church, and torture continued to be used for the purposes of punishment, as well as in the recently converted Germanic peoples. In the case of this culture, which had yet to be fully synthesized with the Romano-Judeo-Christian one, the use of compurgations or ordeals, from which we get our modern word, was commonplace to determine the innocence or guilt of convicted persons. The process usually involved enduring some sort of physical pain, after which one would be judged on that endurance. One process involved grasping a hot iron or dunking one's hand into a pot of boiling water. The wound would be bandaged and if it healed quickly, innocence was presumed, whereas a lengthy recovery or the development of a particularly nasty scar would result in a conviction. Gregory the Great's proclamation did not touch this practice and ordeals were commonplace until at least the early 13th century. Still, torture, in its modern definition, was a feature of Roman rather than Germanic law. In the year 1215, Pope Innocent III forbade the use of ordeals at the Lateran IV Council (Canon 18) and negated their efficacy in courts. The implementation of this rule was, however, not out of compassion, but an attempt to diminish the significance of "planned miracles" because the standard belief of the Church was that miracles should be spontaneous and should not be expected to prove the worth of common people. Around the same time, the polymath emperor of the sprawling central European Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II, also outlawed ordeals for a more practical reason, stating that they would only determine who was stronger, not who was morally right.

This legal standard was not to last though, and the use of torture as a weapon of the powerful would return with legal sanction as the Inquisition came into the fore. Less than forty years after Lateran IV outlawed ordeals, Innocent IV's papal bull Ad Extirpanda (1252) authorized papal inquisitors to confiscate property, imprison, torture, and execute suspected heretics. Two centuries later, as the specific category of witchcraft (maleficarum) evolved, first the use of ordeals began to resurface and then the use of torture in extrication of confession reemerged as a serious practice in Western Europe. Scholars such as Norman Cohn have pointed to the example Rome set for the medieval world and argues that the same techniques used by the Church to deal with heretics had precedent among, ironically, the Roman persecution of Christians. More to the point, he argues that, while "financial greed and conscious sadism" were certainly aspects of these torturous trials, the real motivation was religious zeal, and that torture as a practice was not only legitimate but a necessity, because it was required to extricate the devils from the perpetrators. The practical implications here are the most suspect, but unfortunately, the historical record of common people from pre-modern times is usually scant. There do exist, however, some telling examples of the futility of torture as a reliable tool for information gathering. One occurs in 1587, when the mid-wife and widow Walpurgia confessed, under considerable duress to copulating with the devil, denying the name of Christ, terminating pregnancies with a magical ointment, and a number of other fantastical crimes that she certainly did not commit. Her case is representative of a great many witchcraft trials from the late 16th and early 17th centuries: a woman, usually older, sometimes illiterate and oftentimes a widow or mid-wife, is accused by men of the same socio-economic class, authorities (usually secular in England and religious on the Continent) are called, and under torture, patently false accusations are confessed to after which the persecuted person is put to death (usually by hanging in England and by burning at the stake on the Continent). From the hand of Junius, a male accused of witchcraft in 1628, we have an actual letter written to his daughter and smuggled out of his prison detailing the torture he endured: "Innocent have I come to prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must...be tortured until he invents something out of his head. When I was the first time put to the torture...I said 'I am no witch, I have a pure conscience on the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious.' And then came also--God in highest heaven have mercy--the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.... Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the [strappado]. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony.... And so I made my confession...but it was all a lie."


The methods have little changed over the years, and neither have the results.

The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and lies
To beat and burn and kill

They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and bookstore shelves
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves

Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand...

-Rush, "Witch Hunt"