Can’t get a straight answer from A.G. Michael Mukasey as to whether waterboarding is torture or not? Just ask the UT History faculty!
In case you’re currently dwelling under a rock, the answer is yes, by the way. The practice of simulating drowning was used in early modern European witch-hunts, said UT history professor Brian Levack in a public lecture as part of the history department’s celebration of the reopening of Garrison Hall. Garrison has housed UT’s history department since the building was originally built in 1926. Recent renovation had forced the department elsewhere for a year and a half, but as of Dec. 10, they are back in business in the building the department calls “the geographical and intellectual heart of the campus.”
Anywho, the term “witch-hunts” was not meant in the figurative sense, either. We’re talking old ladies flying to their black masses to eat babies.
“There are striking similarities between the use and justification of torture today and its use against witches in the early-modern period,” said Levack. One of the justifications he described was military in nature. According to demonologists of the period, witches could command an army big enough to take down the throne of France. You can bet if they had phones back then, they’d be tapped, too.
Levack said that witchcraft back then was seen as crimen exceptum, an exceptional crime for which all criminal procedures to regulate prosecution were basically thrown out the window. On top of that, those who did not support the practice of torture to secure confessions of witchery did not have enough judicial clout to get anything done about it. Sound familiar? Gitmo who? Abu Ghraib huh?
Levack went on to say that the objections to torture today mainly focus on the violation of human rights, and that there needs to be more objection based on the unreliability of the evidence gained through torture. “America has sacrificed its longstanding commitment to human rights, squandered its moral capital in the world [on] evidence that has turned out to be trash.”
The UT history department will be hosting an entire lecture series open to the general public starting in the fall semester, said professor Joan Neuberger. So watch out for that!
This article appears in February 1 • 2008.