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TechnoratiSalem Witch Trials, Guantanamo Have a Lot in Common
The Idaho Shakespeare Festival should be congratulated on a timely and entertaining reminder of what justice is not. Sitting in the audience recently, seeing "The Crucible" for the first time, I was heartstruck by both its historical accuracy and its immediate relevance.
The Salem witch trials are perhaps the best example of what happens when special courts are convened in times of panic. Imagine being charged by anonymous rumors from witnesses you can not confront. Consider what it was like trying to explain a false "confession" obtained by your own repeated dunking, or pressing (having stones placed on your chest until you confess or die).
See the play, and then read the Supreme Court's ruling last week shutting down the Special Administrative Courts for detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom were "water boarded."
It is eerie to consider the parallels between the court at Salem and the now defunct special courts. The one in Salem also was appointed by the executive, a royal governor, and it combined standard and novel methods of jurisprudence. It was not a universally accepted process and, as Arthur Miller's brilliant work chronicles, there was sufficient opposition in Andover, Mass., to shut down the proceedings there.
Of course, Miller's play was inspired by his own experience with another reactionary proceeding promulgated by Sen. Joe McCarthy. The playwright had been named by a fellow writer as a communist sympathizer in the 1950s. After Miller refused to appear before McCarthy's Senate committee, he was blacklisted and sentenced to jail.
One of the worst consequences of terrorism is the assault on justice that follows from public panic. A lot has changed in 300 years, but we must be ever vigilant to guard the ideas embodied in our Constitution.
When Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Gen. Thomas Hartman whether our own airmen also should be subject to waterboarding, the general said that he was "not prepared to answer that question" -- this from the man who is the Guantanamo Bay legal adviser for the Military Commissions Office.
Most professional interrogators are against torture for both humanitarian and practical reasons. Torture does not get you the truth; victims of assault will say whatever is needed to stop their tormentors.
This side effect of "aggressive interrogation" is the reason the Swiss government proposed a long-delayed exoneration last week. The case involved a confession obtained by a non-lethal means: hanging by the thumbs with stones tied to the feet. During such an interrogation, Anna Goeldi admitted that she was a witch who had caused a young woman to spit out needles and go into convulsions. Miss Goeldi was beheaded in 1782.
There are those who believe that our government should use extreme measures to get convictions. To them, I say that if we measure the justice system only by the number of guilty people who are convicted, then we must consider the Salem witch trials a resounding success, since 100 percent of the witches in Salem were convicted. Rather, I suggest that the founders of our nation wisely add safeguards to decrease that other measure of the justice system -- the number of innocents convicted.
Greg Hampikian, Ph.D., is director of the Idaho Innocence Project, professor of Biology, and Criminal Justice at Boise State University.
© 2008 Idaho Statesman
10 Comments so far
Show AllBush has shown us who he is by his fruits. He is not of God. He is not of the ideals that founded this country. He is not even a President to be proud of.
We have become the enemy that we fear. And we need to repent.
I think an important element of the similarity between the Gitmo trials and the Salem trials has been left out. Acquiring evidence is not the purpose of torture--it doesn't work well for that. The real purpose is terrorism--fascistic governments always release enough of their victims to be sure that word of the horrors reaches into the mass of the populations likely to be in resistance, as a threat. Most people would rather keep their noses clean and their heads down, than risk being subjected to torture or leaving their families fatherless, etc. So this form of initmidation is the real purpose of torture. As for the trials, they serve a different and actually uglier purpose: they satisfy the public hunger for a scapegoat when times are bad. It didn't matter how dubious the evidence was at Salem--people wanted an enemy to hate and kill to relieve their fear. It doesn't matter that at Guantanomo there aren't even any accusations--people are happy to believe that the helpless creatures in orange glimpsed behind fances, are scheming mass murderers, so that they can be punished, punished PUNISHED, to relieve the sense that something is very very wrong in this world--and how much easier if it's those helpless shackled men, rather than the rich and powerful rulers of the country!
Don't forget the TV show 24, which was presumably specifically created for the purpose of legimitizing torture by depicting a very narrow and unlikely set of circumstances that would seem to most people to justify it--and then breathing life and color into that scenario, and running it with variations week after week, so that a good many Americans now imagine when they hear of Gitmo or other US prisoners being tortured that these guys are planning heinous crimes that will kill thousands of Americans, and are being tortured to get the details just in time to stop the ticking bombs.
From time immemorial this (or a similar variation) has happened: There's a severe prolonged drought..... the god's must be angry, so go get a virgin and throw her in the volcano. Keep doing this until it rains.... and it always does. Success rate 100%. Problem solved.
P.S. I guess there's an assumed presumtion that if I/we like virgins, god must too.
"One of the worst consequences of terrorism is the assault on justice that follows from public panic."
Nonsense. The "assault on justice" is a perennial wet-dream of the ruling elites, who use cries of "the terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming" to stampede the gullible and uninformed masses to transfer more power to the elites.
All you need is a really stupid public, a really frightened public, and "witch trials" happen. Good parallel. We qualify.
Salem Witch Trials were conducted out of fear and ignorance.
GITMO torture's conducted out of unexcusible sadistic cruelty.
My guess is the Bushies felt they are upholding an American dream by allowing waterboarding.
Something isn't right, just because the M$M says it is.
Justice is fuddy duddy but torture is rad and bad.
Justice is usually a mask Power wears to get its way. It equates to the noble causes that people cite as their excuses for going to war. Torturers know full well they aren't getting the truth. That's just the self-justifying bullshit they use to give themselves permission to have powerful kinky fun.
I watched a documentary many years back where bunch of south American (I forget which country) former torturers talked about what they had done. To a man they said at the time the actions they took were presented to them as sane and necessary, and that's the way they accepted it. They were able to separate themselves from the mean sadistic joy they were experiencing by excusing themselves with defensively pompous assertions of doing duty and justice. Years after they now know that what they did was considered to be grievously wrong, but they don't understand how they could have been the kind of people who could have done them.
They folks whereof Mr. Hampikian speaks probably DO consider the Salem witch trials a resounding success. They would be completely comfortable with having 100 percent of all potential terrorists "taken out" -- whether they were real threats to life and limb or falsely accused saps. After all, you can't always tell? All those people claiming to be innocent couldn't all be. Why take a chance? Do them all, Let God sort them out. Ya gotta be tough!
All those solemn public assertions that human life is sacred are just so much, in the words of Judge Judy, "who-shot-john". They may, in a hokey actorish way, feel it in their hearts while they're saying it, but later, when they go out to do their grisly businesses, those ideas and feeling don't come up much.
The Powers That Be will continue to use aggressive interrogation and all the rest of the technototalitarian torture tricks of the trade so long as to a lot a large population doing like that is just totally cool; right on!
I have no idea how to reach such people. Telling them that what they think is stupid and destructive seems to make them indignantly hang tough and fight tooth and nail to stay way as they are.
The witch trials are but one of many of mankind's successful means of oppression that the neocons have identified and successfully implemented within the span of one generation.
Neocon implementation of oppression extends way beyond Guantanamo.