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(so the subject could be absolved before death) however, the military torturer in a theater of war wants information. The confession of the Inquisition subject can't be checked against anything--and most of the time the accusation that brought the subject to the Inquisition was based on nothing real in the first place; by contrast, the information that a terror/resistance suspect knows can be checked. It follows the model of a police interrogation instead of an examination of the penitent's conscience. Information derived from police questioning methods can be checked against the information given by other torture subjects for example who are suspected or known to be involved in the same things. If a Maquis cell leader confessed to his Gestapo interrogator that he crawled backwards across a floor to kiss Satan's anus in a witch's initiation ceremony and Black Mass, that might be called detail, but it's not information about the real world that can be checked out. If you invent narratives, while under torture, about a Black Mass at which the Devil presides or is invoked in absentia, no crazy hallucinatory details you might make up can "sound wrong" to your torturers, or contradict what they know to be true about the time, place, the names of persons and demons involved, or the manner of worship, since the subject is purely imaginary and under the rules of evidence for witchcraft trials, one person can be in two places at the same time. That is to say, normal earthly logic that would falsify certain statements as unlikely or impossible, or verify statements as possibly true is not in use by either the tortured or the torturer. Your confession will be accepted even though the whole thing is made up from start to finish, and the torture will stop (it may end in the sweet release of death but it will end). If you just make crazy/incorrect stuff up to tell the Gestapo or the CIA it will "sound wrong", and it may contradict known facts, and the torture will go on and on. Unlike a Witches Sabbath where the whole concept is imaginary, there are real details to be known about a resistance cell--it's acts of violence and composition. Instead of supplying or suggesting the particulars to be confirmed, as an Inquisitor would do, the police interrogator who knows the subject is lying on some key point keeps applying torture until the subject spontaneously corrects the known-false information. As I once read of modern day witchcraft trials in Africa, the goal of the witchhunters is not investigate or punish some specific crime(s), but simply to affirm the continued existence of the world of spirits and demons. Every confession is held good. By contrast the secret police interrogator using torture knows that most interrogations will be shot through from beginning to end with false information. When the lies told by one subject begin to comport well with known facts, or when the lies told by related subjects under interrogation begin to converge, then the torturer knows he's finally on the trail to new and verifiable information. The imaginary nature, as I indicated, of the whole enterprise of religion marks the rules of evidence used by witchhunters/Inquisitors, as well as the goal of their interrogations, and in consequence one sees the "leniency" of their policy towards accepting confessions. Confessions of witchcraft are never turned down as faked or unacceptable.
The French applied Nazi techniques in Algeria (techniques that had been used on them during the occupation) and broke the FLN resistance organization in Algiers (see Pontocorvo's Le Combat d'Algers). Pentagon staff have screened this film to adjust themselves to the scenery and concepts of torture and occupation wars fought against "terrorist" resistance groups.
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