| Popis: |
This chapter looks at the extensive data from the Spanish Inquisition in order to conduct a dispassionate empirical analysis of torture, its causes, characteristics, and effects. It examines scores of manuscripts, drawn from key periods in the history of the Spanish Inquisition, to provide an anatomy of torture. To analyze these findings, the chapter brings together two research programs: the historiography of the Spanish Inquisition and the study of contemporary interrogational torture. The chapter investigates the intersection of these two literatures by means of a third field of inquiry, the scholarship 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. The chapter emphasizes that the study is about how torture has been employed in the past, in a specific period and under particular circumstances. 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. |
