Visiting the Torture Museum
Barbarism Then and Now
Sometimes a little stroll through history can have its uses. Take, as an example, the continuing debate over torture in post-9/11 America. Last week, Stephen Bradbury, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, testified before the House Judiciary Committee about waterboarding. In defending its use, Bradbury took a deep dive into the past. He claimed that the CIA’s waterboarding of at least three of its prisoners bore “no resemblance” to what torturers in the Spanish Inquisition had done when they used what was then called “the Water Torture.”
As part of his defense of the techniques used by the Bush administration to gain information, Bradbury went out of his way to play the historian, claiming that the water torture of yore differed from today’s American-style version in crucial ways. The waterboarding employed by interrogators during the infamous Spanish Inquisition, he insisted, “involved the forced consumption of a mass amount of water.” This led, he claimed, to the “lungs filling with water” to the point of “agony and death.” The CIA, on the other hand, employed “strict time limits,” “safeguards,” and “restrictions,” making it a far more controlled technique. As he put it: “[S]omething can be quite distressing or uncomfortable, even frightening, [but] if it doesn’t involve severe physical pain, and it doesn’t last very long, it may not constitute severe physical suffering” - and so would not qualify as torture. Bradbury summed up his historical case this way, “There’s been a lot of discussion in the public about historical uses of waterboarding,” but the “only thing in common is the use of water.”
To remind readers, Bradbury is the government lawyer who, in 2005, drafted two secret memos authorizing the use of freezing temperatures, and waterboarding in CIA attempts to break terrorism detainees. Nor is Bradbury the only one with the urge to distinguish any current American proclivity towards torture from the barbaric procedures used until the Enlightenment set in. As Senator Joseph Lieberman commented last week, citing another medieval torture technique, waterboarding “is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological.” Waterboarding isn’t torture, both men claimed, because it leaves no “permanent damage.”
Visiting the Water Table
It’s here that our stroll down history’s narrow, medieval lanes comes in. Anyone curious to test Bradbury’s historical accuracy should consider a visit to one of the dozens of torture museums that dot Europe’s landscape. Why not, for instance, the bluntly named Torture Museum in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. Unlike other European memorials to torture, such as the Clink Prison in London and the torture museums in Florence and San Gimigniano, this modest two-story building in a former private home in Prague’s historic Old Town is a relative newcomer to the continent’s penchant for recording its past mistakes.
Upon entering one of a series of gloomy, cave-like rooms, filled with the implements of the dismal craft that had its heyday from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, you would notice a range of mechanical devices and iron tools (also illustrated in drawings galore), all once meant to pierce, prod, or otherwise drive some poor heretic into the agony of confession. Often in those years before video cameras were available, all this was done in public sight.
And then, as you wound your way through the exhibit, you would come upon one of its centerpiece displays — the “water torture table” to which Bradbury alludes. After you’d checked out the period drawings of prisoners being tied to the edges of the flat tabletop or read about the interrogation method in which the water-filled abdomen was struck repeatedly with heavy blows, you might stop for a moment to consider the more detailed explanatory text nearby.
It would inform you that, over the course of these centuries, several water torture techniques were developed, one of which involved “inserting a cloth tube into the mouth of the victim [and] forcing it as deep as possible into his throat. The tube was then filled slowly with water, swelling up and choking the victim.” This is, in fact, an almost exact description of what has been described as CIA-style waterboarding. Former interrogation expert Malcolm Nance, once an instructor for the U.S. military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training program — said to have been the template for some of the interrogation techniques the Bush administration developed — himself experienced waterboarding. He has described the process this way:
“Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word…
“Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject.”
The similarity in methods across a torture gulf of at least four centuries would have been but the first of many striking lessons for our modern moment from a tour of this museum, only steps from the famed Charles Bridge with its own medieval and religious statues, a museum modest in everything but its subject matter. Perhaps the eeriest lesson would be just how many of the torture techniques illustrated in these rooms are still painfully recognizable, are, in fact but minor variations on those practiced today in America’s name.
Take, for example, those etchings of the strappado or “jerking” in which the arms were pulled up behind the prisoner in what would now be called a “stress position” before he would be “jerked” or dropped painfully. The weights and leather ties on display are perhaps a reminder that a version of the strappado is perhaps the most common form of torture reportedly used throughout America’s offshore prison systems today. It is called “short shackling.”
And don’t forget the Vigil or Cradle of Judas, which today we far more mundanely term “sleep deprivation.” Or what about the medieval use of cold water sprinkled onto naked bodies (another kind of water torture), today mimicked with what official documents call “exposure to freezing temperatures”? Of course, with those infamous photos from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in mind, you would have no trouble recognizing the persistent themes of nakedness and sexual humiliation endemic to what no one back in the less civilized days of the Inquisition hesitated to label “torture.”
Torture Lite
As you wandered through the Prague Torture Museum, noting all the practices other than waterboarding that have their modern American equivalents, you shouldn’t skip past the medieval forms of torture the United States doesn’t practice. Scattered through these precincts are terrifying mechanical devices and tools that once led to permanent physical damage and often to the death of those being questioned. Take the Virgin of Nuremberg, a full-body casket studded with spikes meant to slowly pierce any living being closed inside and sure to cause a long, agonizing death.
Then, there’s the Bock, often called the Witch’s Billy Goat, a wood pyramid designed to pierce the genitals, and that torture shown in classic Hollywood medieval costume dramas, the Rack, in which the human body was literally stretched beyond the tearing point, or the Garrote, an instrument whose sole task was to crush the head.
Had Stephen Bradbury come along with you, eager to discover the differences between pre-Enlightenment torture and today’s “enhanced interrogation” methods, he might feel satisfied indeed as he passed through this part of the exhibit — if, that is, he avoided the accompanying texts that sit on small easels near these horrifying arrays of instruments. For on them, you and he would find the theory that lay behind the practices of those torturers from a barbaric past, and he would discover that those torturers of old, like his colleagues in the Bush administration, distinguished between torture and Torture Lite. The former was indeed meant to result in permanent damage or simply death. The latter was consciously meant to cause “mere” suffering, however protracted.
Reading these texts, Bradbury might find himself uncomfortably at home. After all, his Justice Department has followed similar reasoning, although, unlike medieval torturers, its practitioners have used it as the basis for distinguishing between torture and what they like to describe as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” They have, in other words, declared part of the Spanish Inquisition’s torture techniques too lenient to qualify as torture. This is perhaps their unique achievement.
Medieval torturers, of course, hadn’t had the benefit of the Enlightenment and modern American civilization when they failed to make this fundamental distinction. They did not understand that the infliction of “mere suffering” did not qualify as torture.
If Bradbury were being honest with himself, however, he would certainly recognize a parallel between the medieval distinctions and those made by his predecessor as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo. In his infamous “Torture Memo” of August 2002, Yoo parsed the definition of torture this way: “[Torture] must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure… Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is [a] significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment fail to rise to the level of torture.”
In terms of torture as it was understood from medieval times until the Enlightenment, what American interrogators have inflicted on terror suspects in secret prisons around the world has amounted “only” to Torture Lite, now redefined as “mere suffering” and so not really torture at all. As Bradbury reminded congresspeople just the other day, what we do is, by definition, not torture. Following Yoo’s and Bradbury’s lead, the President, Vice President, two Attorney Generals, and the Secretary of State have joined in the same chorus, repeatedly insisting that “we do not torture.” And in John Yoo’s terms, echoing pre-Enlightenment understandings, we don’t.
Now, if Bradbury were to stop off by that Water Torture table on his way out of the museum and then opened his catalogue of the show, he might be intrigued to discover as succinct a legitimization of his form of torture as any he offered Congress. The catalogue follows a passage noting that the medieval water torture “in all of its variations, was considered ‘light’” with this: “…and any eventual confession obtained through this technique was considered by the courts to be ‘spontaneous’ and obtained without the application of torture.”
If this isn’t a moving example of the brotherhood of torturers across the centuries, what is? After all, just as in the distant past, there has, in recent years, been purpose behind the seeming madness with which the Bush administration embraced torture and then repeatedly insisted on calling it not-torture. The purpose centuries ago was to have any confessions admissible in court - and this, certainly, was what Yoo and his colleagues must have been hoping for all along. In the specific cases of the three detainees whom top administration officials have recently admitted were waterboarded — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ibn al Shayk al-Libbi, and Abu Zubaydah — their confessions, obtained by a range of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” have repeatedly been called trustworthy, valuable, and conclusive as to guilt by administration spokespeople.
Someday, Americans will have to reckon with this period of time — and with a group of leaders who were more comfortable with definitions out of the darker ages than ones out of the Enlightenment era. This administration’s bold flirtation with torture, medieval-style, has led us into sorry company, whether in the past or the present. Its top officials told the world they would do “what it takes” in their war on terror and in the Middle East, with or without allies. They then chose to leave the family of nations and take up kinship in the family of torturers.
Someday, our children may travel to Washington and somewhere near the Smithsonian and the Holocaust Museum, perhaps they, like the Czechs and other Europeans, will be able to visit their own official torture museum. There, a step from the Potomac River, they will be able to view strange instruments for inflicting pain and perhaps even watch horrifying videos of torture happening. And they may wonder how we ever faltered so miserably when it came to a war that was supposed to be on terror, but ended up adopting the worst traditions of terror in the Age of Barbarism Lite.
Karen J. Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, is the editor of the Torture Debate in America and, with Joshua Dratel, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib as well as the forthcoming The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, April 2008).
Copyright 2008 Karen J. Greenberg
I have no sympathy at all for all these “bush” motherf***ers. Simply take this prick out back of the Capitol and shoot him. It’ll save the government the cost of a trial (in these times of mass deficits) and will also have the added benefit of helping the unemployment situation by opening up another position in government.
“The sleep of reason,” according to the Goya etching, “produces monsters.” The cheery essay above supposes that there are dark places in human history relieved by enlightened places when all the horror goes away… that someday we will look back on our inquisitors and shake our heads with disbelief.
The dark places are, I think, places in ourselves that are always present. Periods of civilization may recognize and suppress savagery, but we never emerge from it. We have a sort of disease - malignant aggression, a penchant for sadism, a nasty streak. It can be held at bay only with constant diligence, and will come back every time we doze off.
I too have no sympathy for these “bush” types, but violence and calls for violence are not the answer.
A simple way to define torture….if you would not want it done to your wife/children/mother/self it is torture.
Depriving someone of oxygen, no matter how the mechanics of it work, is simple and dreadful TORTURE.
THE USA IS THE HOME OF SCUM-SUCKING TORTURERS AND MURDERERS. AMERICANS ARE THE EARTH’S LOWEST FORM OF LIFE
hague is waiting……
“AMERICANS ARE THE EARTH’S LOWEST FORM OF LIFE”
If I’m not mistaken, Canada is in North America so…wouldn’t that make Canadians Americans also?
Canuckchuck, I love Canada and its people, and would continue to do so even if it happened to have a leader as totally unfit for being a member of the human race as our current idjiot in chief happpens to be. Don’t you think that labeling EVERY citizen of the US as “scum sucking torturers and murders” a tad bit prejudiced and unreasonable. In fact, that is the exact reasoning that members of the KKK used about all black people. When you get a group of people that think the same way as you do, eventually you wind up with creating excuses to commit the very atrocities that you claim to be against. Watch out when you or anyone else tries to classify an entire population of people as all having the same characteristics!
I an an American, canuckchuck, and have worked endlessly, tirelessly, consistantly since Vietnam and I am not what you just named me in your post 22 February 2008, 1:30 PM.
There are times, as in those now, where the capability to discern between the people and the ?government? along with its enablers, not all Americans,between the preceding murderers, torturers, traitorous, spying, lying subuman evil beyond reason things, that I will not call human.
I feel badly for my country being plunged into the depths of hell by these theives of humanity, I feel badly you have named everyone here as such. It is a chapter in this worlds History I hope to pass on through generations so it is never forgotten.
I will not be named as such for I have done and continue to do everything short of violence to stop them.
‘and perhaps even watch horrifying videos of torture happening’……er, no, the videos were destroyed……….remember?
Violence begets violence. Many years ago when tasers were first introduced to police forces, several officers of my acquaintance told me that as part of their training involved being on the receiving end. It elicited a higher level of respect. Perhaps the it’s not-torture apologists should be on the receiving end before passing judgement
Peace, love, and Joy
Shawn February 22nd, 2008 3:36 pm
“AMERICANS ARE THE EARTH’S LOWEST FORM OF LIFE”
If I’m not mistaken, Canada is in North America so…wouldn’t that make Canadians Americans also?
Yep, as another canuck let me tell ya that we aren’t as nice as our reputation suggests. The diff’s of racism up here is that we jail natives (or Quebecers) rather than black people. The only real diff in foreign policy is that we don’t have the soldiers to send to other countries as often as the us does, but we have usually supported what you do either actively or passively.
In the past the police in the states have buried bodies under dykes (Mississippi) in Canada we beat the native senseless then dump him without shoes into a Saskatchewan snowdrift when it’s 30 below zero. But we didn’t shoot the native so we’re better… F*ck that sh*t!
Canuckchuck, do you really think the police in Canada have never beaten a confession out of someone? If you do I’d like to sell you the High Level Bridge, it comes with an artificial waterfall.
Well, friends, now that John McCain has joined the list of those who believe torture is appropriate against our enemies, this problem is not going to go away if McCain manages to win the Presidency. I cannot believe this man has said that, but he has.
So our new “Bush” may be with us for another 8 years whilst we continue to watch our country go down the drain.
Be very careful about who you vote for.
As the framers of the constitution, and George Washington made very clear to the troops during the revolution, that America would stand above such low behavior practised by the British -meaning torture and other forms of mistreatment. Obviously, this country is in great need of some great leaders. The only problem is that once a true leader arises and captures the Nations attention, their life span is very short. I wouldn’t be the least suurprised if Obama were assasinated.
I lived in Europe many years. During those years, the “Tortue” museum exhibit was making the rounds.
I read the history and other information about these various forms of inflicting pain and suffering. After all that I saw, to me the worst form of torture was when they used to bond the hands and legs of the victim so that they couldn’t move and then salt was poured on the feet of the person being tortured. Next, goats would be released and they would lick off the salt and eventuallv the skin until nothing but bone was exposed. To me that seemed the cruelest form of torture because of the length of time it took to occur while the victim was helpless and only able to scream in agony.
Let’s learn from countries such as Spain and many others, as well as many in our own intelligence community. Torture does not work. This is not television. This is a matter of good police work and cooperation between countries - something I’m afraid the USA is not willing to do.
Canuckchuck; If you want Canadians to have a rotten reputation as well keep on spewing hateful garbage. You must not be a real Canadian.
Sparkplug
The best way for people to learn what’s wrong with Canada is to have someone from each of the five regions - Maritime, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies and BC - get together for a debate… It’s truly a wonder our country has never had a civil war, given the degree to which we hate each other. Ya know, such a debate would be an example of how Canadians like to torture each other…
If you think we say nasty things about yanks, you should hear what we say about each other.
re: ’something i’m afraid the usa is not willing to do’………..no, as long as they don’t even know where spain is…………..
No Canuckchuck- we are “torturing” the lowest forms of life.
Skip I found you. and have again dropped the keys to the handcuffs, I not very good at this.
Did you read the article jon? Perhaps have something to contribute to the discussion, or at least a canuck bashing tale. (grin) Anything in the article that leads you to believe that torturing individuals while in custody does you or your state any good whatsoever?
canuckchuck, tell is about the-
pig farmer and the prostitutes,
the Christian schools and the natives,
tazers,
police brutality.
Don’t condemn every American for what our Right Wing Christian elected administration does.
there, now you can hit the bong again and relax.
Skip- reading that my tax dollars pay for a shrink and a doctor in the room while the bastard sucks water. I am a touch angry about that. How bout one interrogator and a video camera for entertainment.
Here is the way I think, I hate these people (terrorists). I’m angry I need to tell my kids that the reason we take are shoes off to get on a plane is because, a muslim reads the Quran and thinks he can kill them because they don’t worship Allah. You want limits on interrogation, fine. I want the most effective way of getting accurate info from a detainee. Until the debate on the most effective way to interrogate terrorist is over,(and this article did not do it) turn on the hose and have them drink up. I will sleep well tonight.
By the way, will one of you guys type Islamic-Terrorist for me. I want to see if it’s in you.
So, jontroll didn’t read the article, doesn’t have any canuckbashing tale, and wants to see if anyone can type Islamic-Terrorist… Guess what jon, I can also type whackonutball. You all better pray that jon’s not the ambulance jockey who arrives if you’re in need of traveling to a hospital. Your bandages might be used as garottes.
By the way, why haven’t you commented on the article that appeared above this one? If you support torture, shouldn’t you do it consistantly?
Relax skippy, I’m getting to it. While your enjoying the leather whip, I’m feeding my two month old, playing football with my five year old and getting my nine year old away from Hanna Montana reruns. By the way I’m not a paramedic anymore(no, I didn’t kill anyone) more money in Insurance health exams.
I will talk to ya tomorrow
Canada is no paradise but it is no US either.
In Europe, torture is found in museums. In the U.S. it’s public policy. Someday, when George Bush and the ignorant people who voted for him are long dead, the U.S. will have a museum for television sets. It’s astonishing how a corrupt government can destroy a nation simply by 24-hour broadcasting of ugly bigotries and misinformation. It’s time that television be regulated as a dangerous drug.
Corporate media is not a free press any more than Bush and his cronies are fit to head a people’s government — nor should we forget that Gore won the 2000 election no matter how you count it — and the US Supremes put Bush in the White House.
As for TORTURE, this is obvious US policiy and not something that any one person has moved to on their own.
As for the TORTURERS, whether those who demand it by signature, or those who carry it out under corrupt military/intelligence orders, it is they we should be looking at closely.
Certainly this is no Cold War — which seems farce, itself, in retrospect.
Certainly this is no WWII — which took all of 5+ years?
To pretend extravagant dangers from terrorism is an effort to fool the public.
We are more threatened by Global Warming and the often already chaotic weather being visited upon us and the increasingly more chaotic weather which will follow. And, not in the long distant future as the public has been misled to believe for decades, but in the near future.
Our problems weren’t “enemies” but rather a lack of enemies as recited by Colin Powell and Condi Rice at the BEGINNING of this administration.
Only LIES have brought us to “illegal” war against Iraq — almost 4,000 of our own troops now dead — and 2 million Iraqi civilians dead over more than 5 years!!! Five years!!
9/11 itself is farce — the facts do NOT support the official conspiracy theory.
As they say — violence breeds violence — and in America we can see that that’s true.
CORRECTION . . .
that should say —
“9/11 itself is farce — the facts do NOT support the
official conspiracy theory”
“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tax breaks for the rich, breaking the backs of the poor, torturing the indigent…. Hurray for the USA!
Why would we have a torture museum when we don’t torture? Maybe we could sell the videos on the internet as a fund raiser for the war.