March 18, 2007
Torture, in the Sixteenth Century and Today II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:55 PM EST I was, of course, not endorsing all Tudor methods for guaranteeing the safety of the queen, as Mr. Smoler knows perfectly well. I merely stated that Walsingham found torture efficacious for obtaining good information. No one, I would hope, wants to go back to Tudor ideas of how to maintain domestic tranquility. But I’m not sure we need a ticking bomb and a proven murderer to justify methods of interrogation that would not pass muster in a civilian court. Whether they are torture, of course, is a good question. Apparently what induced Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to start talking was “waterboarding,” which, as I understand it, is utterly terrifying but not terribly painful. I think “torture,” by definition, must involve very considerable physical pain. Just as law and order has evolved in the last 400 years, so has our ability to make people talk without resorting to the rack. But I would hope that if the ticking bomb scenario ever came to pass, we would not hesitate to do what was necessary, including the rack or its modern equivalent. I think that nearly all of the people we have in Guantanamo right now, if not indeed all, are known to be the enemies of what we think of as civilization, and were known to be so very soon after capture if not immediately. So far as I know, none of them has been subjected to what Walsingham would have regarded as torture. While I don’t doubt Mr. Smoler’s statement that German spies were not tortured by the British, I would be surprised if they were not made very uncomfortable indeed when necessary. Again, where does forceful interrogation leave off and torture begin? By the way, I don’t believe that the English had any substantial part of the slave trade in the late sixteenth century, when there were as yet no colonies in the New World but Spanish ones (Portugal was part of Philip II’s dominions after 1580). Non-Spanish ships were not welcome in Spanish colonies, as Sir John Hawkins, England’s first slaver, found out for sure in 1568 at Veracruz. The British would, of course, come to dominate the slave trade a hundred years hence, and it would certainly help mightily to fund the country’s wars in the eighteenth century. But it put only trivial sums into Queen Elizabeth’s exchequer.
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