Table Of ContentANATOMY OF TORTURE
ANATOMY OF
TORTURE
Ron E. Hassner
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,
512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.
cornell.edu.
First published 2022 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hassner, Ron E. (Ron Eduard), author.
Title: Anatomy of torture / Ron E. Hassner.
Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033284 (print) | ISBN 9781501762031 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781501762048 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501762055 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Torture—Spain—History. | Inquisition—Spain. | Torture—
Mexico—Mexico City—History. | Inquisition—Mexico—Mexico City.
Classification: LCC HV8599.S8 .H37 2022 (print) | LCC HV8599.S8 (ebook) |
DDC 364.6/750946—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033284
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033285
Cover image: The torture of Isabel Rodriguez. Detail from a lithograph, after a
drawing by Primitivo Miranda, in El Libro Rojo (1870) by Vicente Riva Palacio.
In memory of Carolyn Paxton (1948–2020)
who loved truth, justice, and history,
and cherished human worth and dignity
Contents
1. How Little We Know about Torture 1
2. Three Myths about the Spanish Inquisition 21
3. Learning to Torture: Ciudad Real (1484–1515) 38
4. Correlates of Torture: Toledo (1575–1610) 67
5. Exploratory Torture: Mexico City (1589–1591) 82
6. Corroborative Torture: Mexico City (1594–1601) 97
7. Lessons from the Spanish Inquisition 116
Epilogue: Ethics and the Study of Torture 143
Acknowledgments 153
Notes 157
Index 179
ANATOMY OF TORTURE
1
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW
ABOUT TORTURE
Does torture “work”? My answer will frustrate some readers and infuriate others.
Those who believe that torture “doesn’t work” will read that torture has, at times,
forced victims to divulge crucial and truthful information that they would not
otherwise have revealed. On the other hand, those readers who regard torture to
be a quick and effective, if cruel, tool for addressing “ticking bomb” threats will
learn that torture is slow and tends to provide fragmentary information even
under optimal conditions. It also exacts a tremendous social, political, and moral
cost. Bluntly put, torture “works” but not the way you think it does.
It is impossible to assess the nature of modern torture. We know too little
about contemporary cases, in the United States or elsewhere. Most of the infor-
mation on recent US torture is classified and is likely to remain inaccessible for
decades to come. Evidence from twentieth-century cases is equally sparse. Gov-
ernments that have engaged in torture have not released comprehensive data
that would permit a thorough analysis. Witness accounts are no less problematic.
Victims and perpetrators alike are loath to share their experiences. Social science
research on confrontational interrogation methods relies on analyses of police
interrogations or on laboratory experiments, neither of which involve torture.
There exists, however, an underutilized historical source that can shed sig-
nificant light on the nature of torture. That source is the archives of the Spanish
Inquisition. This book is the first to wield extensive data from the Inquisition in
order to conduct a dispassionate empirical analysis of torture, its causes, char-
acteristics, and effects. I analyze scores of manuscripts, drawn from key peri-
ods in the history of the Spanish Inquisition, to provide an anatomy of torture.
1
2 CHaptER 1
To analyze these findings, I bring together two research programs that have not
been in conversation with one another: the historiography of the Spanish Inqui-
sition and the study of contemporary interrogational torture. I analyze the inter-
section of these two literatures by means of a third field of inquiry, the scholar-
ship on intelligence analysis, to explore how the Inquisition assessed information
extracted by coercive and noncoercive means and to explain why it adopted the
torture practices that it came to adopt.
This book does not purport to provide the anatomy of torture. Five-hundred-
year-old evidence can only teach us so much about current torture practices.
This is an anatomy of torture. It is a study of how torture has been employed
in the past, in a specific period and under particular circumstances. Those cir-
cumstances are extreme: the Inquisition’s target population was confined within
the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute
power and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of
these resources was time. The Inquisition suffered none of the pressures of a
combat setting or an antiterrorism campaign. It could afford to spend decades
and centuries perfecting its methods, and it could afford to dedicate years to
gathering evidence against its prisoners. Thus the specific anatomy of torture
presented here functions as an a fortiori argument. It showcases the strengths
and weaknesses of torture under the most permissive conditions, which are
unlikely to be met during future interrogation efforts in the United States or
other democracies.
How best to define torture has become a matter of some contention in the
context of the US counterterrorism effort post-9/11. The United Nations Con-
vention against Torture defines torture broadly to include “any act by which
severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted
on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person informa-
tion or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third
party.”1 In contrast, US advocates of “enhanced interrogation” have conceived of
torture more narrowly to include only physical pain that is equivalent in intensity
to serious physical injury, such as organ failure or death. They have argued that
US coercive interrogation practices fall short of constituting torture.2
No such ambiguity clouds the Inquisition’s definition of torture. As I eluci-
date in the next chapter, inquisitorial handbooks defined torture very clearly. It
consisted of only three forms of physical coercion, applied only in the torture
chamber, under strictly delimited circumstances. The Inquisition did not regard
harsh confinement prior to interrogation, or the threat of torture, to be torture,
nor did it regard painful sentences executed after the end of a trial, such as lashes
or hard labor, to be part of that torture.
How LittLE wE Know about toRtuRE 3
Institutions have employed torture to punish, hurt, and terrorize. My focus
in this book is exclusively on interrogational torture, torture designed to extract
information. Interrogational torture is analytically distinct from confessional
torture, torture designed to elicit particular statements. In reality, these categories
overlap, and they overlap with other forms of torture, such as torture designed to
intimidate, or control a population. Often, torturers will purport to torture for
one purpose while introducing other goals, intentionally or accidentally.
I divide interrogational torture into two types: exploratory torture and cor-
roborative torture. Exploratory torture is interrogational torture that occurs
early in an investigation in order to reveal novel information. As I show, this type
of interrogational torture rarely yielded information that the Inquisition found
significant or reliable. In the absence of parallel sources of information, detain-
ees subjected to exploratory torture were able to provide false information, hide
true information, or pretend not to know much. Indeed, given how sparse infor-
mation can be at the outset of an investigation, the Inquisition often subjected
detainees to exploratory torture even though they had no relevant information to
share. Exploratory torture fails because it risks interrogating the wrong individu-
als and because it fails to uncover the right information. A second type of interro-
gational torture, corroborative torture, occurs toward the end of an investigation.
It is used to confirm or reject prior information, not to generate new discoveries.
At times, this type of interrogational torture provided the Inquisition with truth-
ful, and useful, information. Nonetheless, the Inquisition treated its results with
suspicion, as one questionable source among many in its investigations.
The next chapter will demonstrate that the primary goal of inquisitorial tor-
ture was interrogational, and not confessional as is often falsely believed. The
Inquisition was not interested in unfalsifiable claims about belief, and it did not
demand, let alone believe, confessions of faith. The “confessions” that the Inqui-
sition sought were falsifiable statements of fact about heretical practices, not
heretical ideas or sentiments. The Inquisition corroborated these testimonies by
contrasting them with parallel sources of evidence, as any intelligence-gathering
organization would. In that sense, its stated goals were not much different than
the purported goals of contemporary intelligence agencies. And since the stated
goal of inquisitorial torture was interrogatory, that is also the standard against
which I evaluate its results. Did its suspects reveal accurate information that the
Inquisition considered useful, as a result of torture, that they would not have
revealed in the absence of torture?
Drawing on hundreds of cases of inquisitorial torture, I show that interroga-
tional torture did provide the Inquisition with reliable information under very
restricted conditions. Like all sources of intelligence, interrogational torture mis-
guided and mislead much of the time. But it also yielded accurate and actionable
