The History of Torture Shows It Does Not Work

Recent comments on torture pay inadequate attention to the history of the practice.  Observers have long noted that torture does not work; it does not elicit the truth, nor does it provide solid evidence of anything.

            Saint Augustine thought that the idea of extracting a true confession from a felon by torture was “absurd.”  A Church Synod held in Rome in 384 denounced the use of torture in secular courts, while in the sixth century Pope Gregory I ordered ecclesiastical tribunals not to accept any statement made under torture.  Louis IX of France (ruled 1226-1270) held that torture should not be used on his subjects.  The Inquisition, begun in the thirteenth century, allowed torture only after a heretic had been convicted by other evidence, and then only to fill in gaps in testimony or to learn the names of other suspected heretics.  Of course, individual inquisitors often broke the rules.

            In the eleventh century, European continental secular courts began to allow judges to order torture when other “indications”–for example a bloody knife that fit the wounds in a dead body–were linked 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.

            By the eighteenth century, judicial torture decreased, partly because of the rise of punishments less final than maiming or death; these were the galleys and more permanent prisons.  Since sentences could be undone, less than the “final” proof of confessions now served for convictions.  More important in torture’s decline was a chorus of objections to the practice itself.  In his essay “On the Lame,” 1588, Michel de Montaigne indicated his belief in witches and the devil, yet understood that evidence for the practice of witchcraft was defective.  It was wrong to execute people on the basis of testimony, however obtained, that they had flown to a witches’ sabbat and committed evil deeds on the devil’s orders.  “After all, it is placing a very high value on one’s conjectures to burn a man alive because of them,” he continued. 

            In 1621 the French jurist Bernard de la Roche Flavin proclaimed torture “a dangerous invention.”  He asked, “What would people not say or do to avoid such great pain?”  Flavin realized that under torture people said what they thought their tormentors wanted to hear.

            The German Jesuit Friedrich Spee von Lagenfeld, a confessor to tortured and convicted “witches,” became an outspoken opponent of torture.  In 1631, Spee denounced the violence inflicted upon “countless innocents daily.”  Anyone could be made to confess; torture had been “all powerful” in the witch hunts.  Other writers of the same period remarked that torture tested only an individual’s ability to withstand pain.

            My work on the European witch hunts and the Soviet Terror of the 1930s underscores the views of early modern critics.  “Torture” evokes for me thousands of women forced to say that they flew instantly to sabbats and that they fornicated there 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.

             Those broken people almost invariably said what they thought their tormenters wanted to hear.  The uselessness, even dysfunctionality, of torture eventually became clear during both the witch hunts and Soviet Terror.  Sometimes torture caused the hunt for enemies to spiral out of authorities’ control.  In 1585 the magistrates at Rottenburg, Germany, after burning more than twenty females since 1578, remarked that there would soon be no women left in the town.  A French woman about to be executed for witchcraft in 1601 exclaimed, “What is this, they say that every woman is a witch!”

            In 1937, all 32 Soviet butter experts who returned from a trip abroad to study dairy production were arrested and charged with espionage.  Only 17 of the top 170 executives in one network of coal mines had held their positions more than one year in October 1938; 126 had been in their posts five months or less.  The Communist Party all but ceased to exist in the countryside, its membership was so reduced by the Terror.

            In February of 1938, Andrei Vyshinskii, procurator-general of the USSR, whose reputation as prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of 1936-38 will forever mark him as repugnant, began to condemn the use of torture in memoranda to other Soviet officials.  He mentioned beatings, forcing arrestees to stand for long periods, and “direct fabrication of cases.”  In March the Procuracy Council, under Vyshinskii’s direction, referred to widespread “beating of honest Soviet people.”  By the fall, many memoirs and other accounts show, torture had become a rarity.

            Despite the recent promotion by Dick Cheney and others of torture as a route to the prevention of terrorism, no evidence supports his view.  A notable example in opposition to his view is the finding by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel that for the period 1990-99, no credible evidence demonstrates that physical coercion helped avert a terrorist attack.  In 2007 the Committee concluded that the idea of finding a “ticking bomb” by torturing prisoners was merely a convenient cover that allowed government agents to continue using extreme physical abuse.

            There will always be people who advocate torture as somehow a necessary and non-naive approach to the most evil enemies of order and civilization.  The historian Andrew Roberts has taken this position.  He has argued that British torture somehow convinced “19 hard-bitten Nazi spies” that the Allied invasion of France would proceed through Calais, thus saving thousands of soldiers’ lives when the Germans positioned their troops in that area, not in Normandy.  Roberts does not explain how someone can be tortured into believing a false story–and why wouldn’t these men have changed their “testimony” as soon as they were released, as many “witches” and Soviet citizens did?  Finally, Roberts states that former British counter-intelligence officers “never . . . would have revealed precisely how the Abwehr agents were turned.”  Once more, no evidence.

            Torture may “work” on a battlefield when used on freshly captured prisoners, to learn if new units have been brought into combat.  Even then, the value of information obtained decreases minute by minute.  For all other cases, torture is simply a favorite of self-styled tough guys and women who believe that they know better than others how hard it is to deal with reality.  The historical record shows that they do not.

Related Links

HNN Hot Topics: Torture