History offers some answers to torture debate

[struggle4progress]

JAMES MANDRELL
Published: 05/19/09 12:05 am

The release of Bush administration torture memos proves one thing at least: When people at the highest levels of our government discussed “enhanced interrogation,” they neglected to consider the sordid history of torture.

Had they been interested, they might have discovered an illustrated article on water torture in a popular 19th-century Spanish newspaper. Published in 1836, just two years after Spain abolished the Inquisition, the article noted that torture was still practiced in a few places, although Catherine the Great of Russia outlawed its practice in 1760, as did France’s Louis XVI in the early years of his reign.

The article claimed that the principal objection to torture was not necessarily moral or ethical. Torture doesn’t work, it said: “It’s not efficacious” ...

In 1888, in the first comprehensive history of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea described one of the inquisitors’ punishing techniques, which ought to sound familiar. Prisoners were bound to a ladderlike plank that was tilted, so their heads were lower than their feet. A piece of linen was forced down the “patient’s” throat to allow water to trickle through slowly as it was poured from a vessel ...

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