History teaches us how torture was misused

From the years I spent researching mass persecution in the European witch hunts and the Soviet Union, the word “torture” evokes for me a nearly endless line of old women forced to say they flew to huge witch gatherings, where they fornicated with the devil and killed and ate babies.

I picture young Soviet engineers, dedicated to their jobs but made to “confess” that they had sabotaged steel production. I’ve seen instruments of torture in Western Europe, simple but effective devices that would splinter bones, crush thumbs or force gallons of water down a victim’s throat. Soviet practice was simpler yet: fists, maybe a table leg or a door jamb, in which to break fingers.

The irony of torture is that it does not work.

All those broken people almost invariably said what they thought their tormenters wanted to hear. The uselessness of torture eventually became clear during the witch hunts and Soviet terror.

In fact, commentators from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment to an Israeli anti-torture group active today have repeatedly shown that torture does not produce reliable information.

A Church Synod in Rome in 384 denounced the use of torture in secular courts. Louis IX of France (ruled 1226-1270), dubbed the “ideal medieval king,” held that torture should not be used on his subjects, rich or poor.

Even the Inquisition, begun in the 13th century, allowed torture only after a heretic had been convicted by other evidence. Of course, individual inquisitors often broke the rules.

Nonetheless, in the 11th century, secular courts on the European continent began to allow judges to order torture when other “indications” linked a crime to an accused person.

During the witch hunts, roughly 1500-1700, local jurisdictions often violated even that simple requirement.

A bad reputation, a squint, or a “gobber tooth,” as one English cleric put it, could put someone accused of witchcraft into the hands of a torturer. Since a confession served as the “queen of proofs,” officials often took the low road of inflicting pain to extort an avowal of guilt.

Two developments ended the reliance on confessions and hence on torture by the 18th century. First was the rise of new forms of punishment beyond maiming or death; these were the galleys and more permanent prisons. Second was a chorus of objections to the use of torture itself.

The best-known critic of torture in that era was the German Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, who had served as confessor to tortured and convicted “witches.” In 1631, Spee bitterly protested the violence inflicted upon “countless innocents daily,” saying anyone could be made to confess.

By 1764, when Cesare Beccaria published “Of Crimes and Punishments,” a denunciation of judicial torture, he was knocking on an open door: Most European jurisdictions had already abandoned legal infliction of pain in the pursuit of evidence.

Still, one of the Enlightenment’s great claims was that it ended court-ordered torture.

Can torture ever work? Soldiers have long used it on freshly captured prisoners to learn whether new enemy units are moving up to the front; but the value of torturing a captive diminishes rapidly.

As for terrorism, if officials already possess highly specific information about a coming attack, they are in a position to launch searches and counter-measures.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims that torture during the Bush administration was successful in providing vital information on terrorists have been undermined by, among others, former FBI agent Ali Soufan, in the New York Times on April 23.

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel investigated government assertions that in 1990-99 it prevented numerous terrorist acts by obtaining information under severe duress.

The committee found no credible evidence to support that claim. In 2007 the committee concluded that the idea of finding a “ticking bomb” by torturing prisoners was a convenient cover that allowed government agents to continue using extreme physical abuse.

Officials use torture when they have already dehumanized their victims —- a witch is not a normal person, a “terrorist” is a beast —- when a government puts revenge before other goals, and when a sense of helplessness rules.

Promoting fear of the unknown enemy who must be exposed through torture gives officials a great sense of their own importance; and, because they can waterboard a suspect like Abu Zubaydah 83 times, they do have considerable power —- to inflict pain, not to obtain useful information. In the process, the torturers dehumanize themselves.

Leaving all moral qualms aside, are we to learn nothing from the experience of keen observers who have understood torture’s uselessness over the centuries?

The ticking bomb is a lurid fantasy for the Cheneys of this world. I would like to think that most Americans are better —- or at least smarter —- than that.

Robert W. Thurston is author of “The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America.”