For serious devotees of torture, Washington's embarrassment about Abu Ghraib paled beside the Vatican's defense last week of the Spanish Inquisition. It turns out, reported church officials at a June 15 press conference, that the Spanish Inquisition burnt at the stake less than 1% of the 125,000 accused heretics brought before it. On the strength of this statistic they qualified Pope John Paul II's previous apology for the Inquisition. "A request for forgiveness can only refer to facts that are true and objectively recognized. One does not ask forgiveness for some impressions widely held by public opinion, which contain more myth than reality," said Cardinal Georges Cottier.
Catholic publicists in possession of these data have been campaigning to rescue the Inquisition's good name from the besmirchment of Protestant propaganda. Wrote Prof Thomas F Madden of St Louis University in October 2003: "The Spanish people loved their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so long."
We might, of course, ask ourselves the same thing. Why has the Bush Inquisition lasted so long and what was it supposed to accomplish?
The author of the essay in the Asia Times has got it partly right:
People do nasty things not because they are negligent or bloody-minded, but rather because they cannot avoid doing them. That is why we call such things tragic. Spain's inquisitors were not the horror-movie sadists of popular myth, but sad little functionaries seeking to prevent the sort of religious war that plagued Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Bush's minions could not avoid committing torture for two reasons. First, they had sold their souls (the obligation to make independent moral judgments about their actions) for the dispensation that the vow of obedience provides. By making obedience to a higher authority their only commandment, they relieved themselves of responsibility for the consequences of their vile acts.
The second reason follows from the first. The commission of vile acts does leave behind a residue of guilt, creating an association by guilt from which it is difficult to extract oneself. Besides, as those who did extract themselves demonstrate for the world to observe, (General Taguba comes to mind) honor is not rewarded. Rather, the honorable individual must be prepared to sacrifice his/her own well-being and suffer the indignity of not being believed. It isn't just a matter of expectation. Nobody wants to believe that torture is happening and they certainly don't want to see it with their own eyes.
Perhaps we need to call it something else. Perhaps "partial execution" would be more meaningful. There's a large segment of the population that seems partial to the word "partial."
