The Spanish Inquisition and the Effectiveness of Torture

Trigger warning: evil. If you prefer to keep your mind on pleasant things today, read something else.

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When I was in graduate school, I knew people into scoffing at the "black myth" of the Spanish Inquisition. It wasn't really so bad, they said; they had real standards of evidence and proper procedures, unlike some of the witch hunting courts in Germany or England; most people had no fear of the inquisitors and some people openly laughed at them. 

That all depends, I think, on what you mean by "bad." To me the Inquisition reeks of evil because I regard the persecution of people for what they believe as a horrible evil no matter how carefully the judges proceed and how hard they tried to reach the truth. They burned people alive for believing wrongly about invisible things, and that I do not forgive.

But they kept wonderful records, which makes their career of persecution a boon for social historians. If you want to learn about, for example, secret Judaism in Spain or Spanish America between 1492 and 1750, the records of the Inquisition are by far your best source. Consider the torture of Pedro Rodrıguez Saz in Mexico City on 16 May 1596: 

Once he was naked, and his arms were tied, he was admonished to tell the truth. He said that he had already told it and that witnesses who testified against him had testified falsely. His arms were ordered to be tied tightly, and he was admonished to tell the truth and the minister ordered the first turn of the cord. He complained loudly. He said: “Help me Lord, Jesus Christ, help me, I am here because of false witnesses.” Another turn of the cord was ordered and he said: “Oh Christians! I will tell the truth! I beg for mercy! I will tell the truth!” The official who administered the torture was ordered to leave. 

He said: “It is true that, starting six to seven years ago, Luis de Carvajal started keeping the Laws of Moses.” He was told to confess the truth clearly and openly, to satisfy this Holy Office, for the salvation of his soul. He said: “About seven years ago, when Diego Henríquez, brother in law of Manuel de Lucena, and son of Beatriz Henrıquez, La Payba, was arrested by the Holy Office, Manuel de Lucena taught me the Law of Moses, telling me that the Lord had promised to send a great prophet who will save the people. And that Jesus Christ was not the true God, but only God, who was in the highest heaven, will save the world. This God has a great day that the Jews call their Great Feast, on which they celebrate and fast. On this Great Day of the Lord, I was there with Manuel de Lucena, his wife Catalina Henríquez, Clara Henríquez, her daughter Justa Mendez, Leonor Díaz, and a man called Juan Rodrıguez. I don’t remember whether Constanca Rodrıguez was there. We fasted and celebrated in Mexico City at the house of Manuel de Lucena, near the workplace of Juan Álvarez, in observance of the Law of Moses. I and the rest of the people I have listed, we danced and we celebrated, we wore festive clothing. We did not eat all day long until night, when I went to eat at my house, which is the house of Phelipe Nuñez, where I stayed, and I ate in the company of Phelipe Nuñez and his wife Phelipa López. We ate fish, garbanzos, eggs, and fruit. That’s all that happened on the Great Day of the Lord.

This comes from a fascinatingly awful article I stumbled across yesterday, "The Cost of Torture: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition" by Ron E. Hassner, published in Security Studies.  This begins with a chilling sentence:

The study of interrogational torture has made significant strides in recent years.

Hassner goes on to say that the reason the study of torture has not made more progress is the lack of good data. While entities like the UN HCR and Human Rights Watch have tried to compile statistics, their results are biased in many ways and probably do not represent a real sample of torture in any particular program. Hence, the records of the Spanish Inquisition:

The archives of the Spanish Inquisition provide a detailed historical source of quantitative and qualitative information about interrogational torture. The inquisition tortured brutally and systematically, willing to torment all who it deemed as withholding evidence.

As Hassner says, the Inquisition had centuries of experience and built up a strong institutional knowledge base about how and when torture was effective. Hassner's article is based on two sets of records, a single manuscript that records 1,046 cases from the tribunal in Toledo between 1575 and 1610,  and the investigation of a network of Jews in Mexico in 1596 to 1601.

Of the 1046 suspects in the Toledo manuscript, 123 were tortured. It is important to note that the Inquisition did not immediately put suspects to torture, but did all they could to build up a detailed case before even bringing the suspect before an Inquisitor. The Inquisition generally had no interest in extracting false confessions; their goal was not to trap particular individuals so much as to wind up networks of secret Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, and for that they needed accurate information. This is quite different from the witch hunts going on at the same time, trials in which people were routinely tortured until they confessed to completely impossible things. The Inquisition did not use torture to fish for new information, because they believed that any such data would be unreliable; they were looking for confirmation of what they had already been told. The Inquisition proceeded slowly, taking years if necessary to build up a detailed case. The Inquisitors also understood very well the problem of leading questions, which could get the suspect to tell them "what they wanted to hear." Their usual method was, in fact, to ask no questions at all. 

Imagine: a suspect is arrested and taken to prison, never told anything about the charges against him or her, kept in a cell for days or weeks or months, then brought before a panel of judges who simply say, "Tell us the truth." If the suspect says nothing, he or she goes back to prison. This could go on for years. Eventually, if they had learned enough from other sources, the inquisitors might decide to torture the suspect, again without asking any questions.  The inquisitors were forbidden to draw blood, and they usually inflicted pain by having the suspect's arms twisted with ropes or by a sort of water boarding. The very tough could bear this, and often did, but some suspects who held out for years of imprisonment did break quickly and confess. In the Toledo sample, 29% of those put to torture confessed, and in every case their confessions corresponded closely enough with what the court already knew to lead to a conviction.

By comparison:

The methods of the Inquisition stand in stark contrast to American torture policy. In the aftermath of 9/11, US interrogators quickly formed an interrogational torture program to prevent additional mass terror attacks and dismantle the al Qaeda network. US interrogators tortured rashly, amateurishly, and haphazardly. Amateurs carried out interrogation sessions without bureaucratic oversight or strictly delimited procedures, and the sessions did not lead to an accumulation of organizational expertise. Rather than torturing those believed to withhold crucial information, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel tortured terrorist leaders who had “blood on their hands.” Culpability, not utility, determined who would be tortured. This was hot-blooded torture and it failed, by and large.

According to Hassner, experienced inquisitors would have scoffed at the "ticking bomb" scenario used by some Americans to justify torture. They believed that torture was not a reliable way to extract new information, and that it did not work quickly. It could produce valuable information, but only if it was used systematically and patiently alongside other investigations.

It makes me queasy to dwell on these things, but I feel like we have to. If decent people refuse to learn about how torture has been used and the problems with any information so acquired, we may again end up at the mercy of sinister people who claim that what they are doing is essential to protect us. 

The CIA's Torture Rebuttal

Seven senior CIA men -- George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, John Rizzo, and Philip Mudd -- have produced a response to the Senate Committee's report on torture. Retired CIA officer Philip Giraldi read it, and he is not impressed:

The CIA rebuttal narrative goes something like this: the Senate report on torture was written by Democrats who were out to get the Agency and is therefore little more than a partisan hatchet job that targeted some senior officers. The book includes multiple assertions that the senators and their staffers willfully ignored things like “context,” which means that everyone was terrified that a bunch of bearded guys in caves were about to overthrow our Republic, justifying extreme measures.

And those Democrats, who ought to have known better, refused to accept that torturing people produced valuable information that saved “hundreds and even thousands of lives,” even arguing instead, perversely, that the sought-after intelligence was or could have been obtained without the physical coercion. Per the authors’ rebuttal that’s because information is like money—you can never have too much of it, an argument they label “corroboration.” Also, according to the authors, all of the CIA’s conduct was completely legal (even when someone was getting banged around before being hung from a wall and forced to listen to nonstop Michael Jackson tapes) because of authorization provided by Justice Department and White House lawyers, all of whom were indisputably men of great honor who would not lie or conform to political pressure under any circumstances. . . .

I also tried to find proof that the book’s contributors saved the claimed thousands of lives, but all I came up with were generic assurances based on “what if” terrorist plots, suggesting to the completely gullible that if the CIA had not been torturing terrible things might have happened somewhere and at some time. The rebuttal also did not address directly any of the scores of fully documented cases of incompetence and egregious brutality that are recorded in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

These men belong in prison for war crimes, but instead they have cushy retirements and get to publish a book justifying those same crimes. Makes me ill.

Senate Votes to Bar Torture

Today's really good news:

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly voted to ban the U.S. from ever again subjecting prisoners to waterboarding, “rectal feeding” and other brutal interrogation practices widely condemned as torture. In a 78-21 vote, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle supported a new prohibition on "enhanced interrogation" practices and other novel detention methods.

“We must continue to insist that the methods we employ in this fight for peace and freedom must always, always, be as right and honorable as the goals and ideals we fight for,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee and an author of the amendment. “Our enemies act without conscience. We must not.”

On the other hand, this means that 21 US Senators voted for torture. All of the Democrats voted for the ban, so those who voted for waterboarding are all Republicans. They are:

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY)
Majority Whip John Cornyn (TX)
John Barrasso (WY)
Roy Blunt (MO)
Dan Coats (IN)
Thad Cochran (MS)
Tom Cotton (AR)
Mike Crapo (ID)
Jodi Ernst (IA)
Deb Fischer (NE)
Lindsay Graham (SC)
Orrin Hatch (UT)
Jim Inhofe (OK)
James Lankford (OK)
Mike Lee (UT)
James Risch (ID)
Pat Roberts (KS)
Ben Sasse (NE)
Tim Scott (SC)
Jeff Sessions (AL)
David Vitter (LA)

Shame on all of them. But double shame on the one senator out of 100 who managed to miss this vital vote, who also happens to be a presidential candidate: Marco Rubio. Now there's showing some real courage and leadership.

How to Motivate your Enemies to Fight You

How did Charlie Hebdo killer Chérif Kouachi first get involved in serious jihadism?

In the year after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, a 22-year-old pizza delivery man here couldn’t take it anymore. Sickened by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison, he made plans to go fight United States forces. He studied a virtual AK-47 on a website. Then he took lessons from a man, using a hand-drawn picture of a gun.

That time he was arrested before he managed to leave France for Iraq. In prison he met other, more experienced jihadists, and preachers who radicalized his Islam, setting him more firmly on the path to suicidal violence. But it started with Abu Ghraib.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Torture and False Information

Fascinating story in the New Yorker pinning a big share of the CIA's most brutal and idiotic acts on a single agent, one of the leaders of the counter-intelligence branch. Among other things she personally oversaw the torture of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad:

According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana.

Behold how torture actually works. When you torture people, they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Thus all your misconceptions are confirmed, and the truth remains farther away than before you started.

According to NBC and the New Yorker, this woman (if it is a woman) is still a top figure in the CIA. Sickening.

Noah Millman Explains American Torture

Noah Millman has a great post on why America tortured people. After all, the main reason dictatorships torture people is to keep the population in a state of fear and thereby insure their grip on power, and that can hardly apply to 21st century America:

I believe that our reasons were far less rational.

I’ve written before about the overwhelming fear that afflicted the country in the wake of 9-11, and how, perversely, exaggerating the severity of the threat from al Qaeda helped address that fear, because it made it acceptable to contemplate more extreme actions in response. If al Qaeda was really just a band of lunatics who got lucky, then 3,000 died because, well, because that’s the kind of thing that can happen. If al Qaeda was the leading edge of a worldwide Islamo-fascist movement with the real potential to destroy the West, then we would be justified in nuking Mecca in response. Next to that kind of response, torture seems moderate.

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

Brilliant.

Even Ted Cruz

What do you know:

But then Cruz clarified that he does not support the tactics used by the CIA described in the report: "And let me be clear, torture is wrong, unambiguously. Period. The end. Civilized nations do not engage in torture and Congress has rightly acted to make absolutely clear that the United States will not engage in torture."

Torture and Middle Earth

This is what happens when you try to use the Ring to beat Sauron.

--Chad Pecknold

Still with the Secrets, Still with the "Executive Privilege"

You might think that after the Senate's report on CIA torture was finally made public, there wouldn't be much else to keep secret about this sordid affair. But the Obama administration is still withholding the 9,000 pages plus of documents from the Justice Department's investigation of the CIA program, which includes transcripts of interviews with participants. They refused to give them to Senate investigators because of "executive privilege" and they just refused an FOIA request from the New York Times under the so-called "deliberative materials" exemption. Sigh.

Power corrupts. Power used secretly corrupts in especially insidious ways.

An Interesting Idea about American Torturers

Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU:

Before President George W. Bush left office, a group of conservatives lobbied the White House to grant pardons to the officials who had planned and authorized the United States torture program. My organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, found the proposal repugnant. Along with eight other human rights groups, we sent a letter to Mr. Bush arguing that granting pardons would undermine the rule of law and prevent Americans from learning what had been done in their names. But with the impending release of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal. . . .

Let’s face it: Mr. Obama is not inclined to pursue prosecutions — no matter how great the outrage, at home or abroad, over the disclosures — because of the political fallout. He should therefore take ownership of this decision. He should acknowledge that the country’s most senior officials authorized conduct that violated fundamental laws, and compromised our standing in the world as well as our security. If the choice is between a tacit pardon and a formal one, a formal one is better. An explicit pardon would lay down a marker, signaling to those considering torture in the future that they could be prosecuted.

Blaming the CIA for Our Sins

A lot of the early headlines about the Senate's report on torture after 9-11 paint the CIA as some sort of rogue agency, violating the rules set for them by the White House and then lying about it.

This makes me roll my eyes. The President authorized the use of waterboarding, which is torture under US and international law. The President authorized the use of sleep deprivation, which has been described by victims as the worst possible torture. The whole program of "enhanced interrogation," which is the exact phrase used by the Gestapo, was pushed by Dick Cheney and his pals and enthusiastically embraced by a big swath of official Washington.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was kept informed about all of this and did nothing.

When the people learned, there was no outcry. A majority of Americans still supports the waterboarding of suspected terrorists.

Pinning this on the CIA is a disgusting evasion of responsibility by the Senate in particular and the rest of America by imputation.

Ok, so CIA agents went beyond the rules set by the IG. That's what field agents do; they would hardly be good agents if they didn't bend the rules when they thought it mattered. The leadership on this came from the top, and the agents were only doing what they thought the President wanted. The fault for their acts lies first with Bush and second with America as a whole, and then down through the whole chain of command. Blaming the agents is pathetic excuse for morality.

I see a clear parallel with things that happened in Vietnam. The military brass formulated the policy that made the body count the main measure of success, and the President approved it, and officers all through the theater made it clear to their men that they wanted dead bodies and since anybody might be Viet Cong, every dead body counted as Viet Cong. The My Lai massacre should have surprised nobody, and in fact it did not surprise most people who had served in Vietnam. Given the overall American policy and the way officers habitually spoke about the Vietnamese, it was inevitable.

This is why the top leadership should be drawing clear moral lines, not messing around with arbitrary distinctions between this stress position and that one. The instructions from the top always get fuzzy as they work their way down. What matters is not the fine points of the legal logic in memos drafted by the White House counsel; what matters is taking a clear moral stand. Torture is wrong. American presidents from Washington to Ronald Reagan all took that stand. In practice, of course, American agents and soldiers have regularly bent the rules and sometimes flagrantly broken them; that happens in wars. But it happens a lot less when the leadership at the top makes it very clear what is expected.

I am glad that the Senate has published a record of the crimes done in our name. But to the extent that they are trying to shift the blame from themselves to the CIA, they are moral frauds.

The Pope on Torture

I repeat the firm condemnation of every form of torture and invite Christians to commit themselves to work together for its abolition and to support victims and their families. To torture persons is a mortal sin. A very grave sin.

– Pope Francis.

Still waiting for the bishops or any other part of the American church to take Catholic teaching on war and torture as seriously as they take Catholic teaching on abortion and birth control.

The Poisonous Fruit of Torture

David Cole looks behind the disputes between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Senate torture investigation:

In law, we say that torture “taints” an investigation. The legal doctrine that precludes reliance on evidence obtained from torture is called the “fruit of the poisonous tree” rule. But as this latest saga reflects, torture does far more than merely “taint” evidence. It corrupts all who touch it. The CIA’s desperate efforts to hide the details of what the world already knows in general outline—that it subjected human beings to brutal treatment to which no human being should ever be subjected—are only the latest evidence of the poisonous consequences of a program euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation.”

The Torture of Guy Fawkes

The Constitution Project's Torture Report

Huge report from an impressive array of political and legal figures. Here are the key sentences:

Perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.

The second notable conclusion of the Task Force is that the nation's highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture.

They also offer a strong denunciation of the torture regime:

Torture and democracy cannot coexist in the same body politic.

More from commission member Thomas R. Pickering:

It’s not just the Bush-Cheney administration that bears responsibility for diminished U.S. standing, although the worst abuses undeniably took place in the years immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Obama administration also has failed to be as open and accountable on such fundamental questions of law, morality and principle as a great power that widely supports human rights needs to be.

What can be done to mitigate the damage and set this country on a better course? First and foremost, Americans need to confront the truth. Let’s stop resorting to euphemisms and call “enhanced interrogation techniques” — including but not limited to waterboarding — what they actually are: torture. Torturing detainees flies in the face of principles and practices established in the founding of our republic, and it violates U.S. law and international treaties to which we are a party. Subjecting detainees to torture, no matter how despicable their alleged crimes, runs counter to the values embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

Solitary Confinement is Torture

George Will takes on one of worst human rights abuses in contemporary America:

Supermax prisons isolate inmates from social contact. Often prisoners are in their cells, sometimes smaller than 8 by 12 feet, 23 hours a day, released only for a shower or exercise in a small fenced-in outdoor space. Isolation changes the way the brain works, often making individuals more impulsive, less able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds.

And he found this from Charles Dickens, who toured Philadelphia's all-solitary Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842:

I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

I hope liberal activists, evangelical Christians, and libertarians can come together to curtail this grotesque misuse of state power.

Hints about the Classified Review of US Torture

Senate hearings on the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director produced some tantalizing hints about the Senate's classified review of "enhanced interrogation." The LA Times:

Brennan also said he had revised his earlier view that what the CIA called "enhanced interrogation techniques," including nudity and stress positions, at now-shuttered secret prisons around the globe had produced valuable intelligence. He said a 300-page summary of a recently completed 6,000-page classified report by committee Democrats was "rather damning."

If confirmed as CIA chief, Brennan promised to find out "what went wrong in the system, where there were systemic failures, where there was mismanagement in the system." He added it would be "one of my highest priorities."

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said the interrogation program was "corrupted by personnel with pecuniary conflicts of interest." He did not elaborate.

The CIA has yet to formally respond to the report and it's unclear if some portions will be made public. 

The most disappointing thing about Obama's presidency has been his insistence of maintaining Bush's crazy policies about secrecy. I understand the desire to keep operations secret, but it boggles my mind that anybody thinks it is ok for a Democratic government to keep secret its justifications for keeping things secret, especially when those involve its interpretation of the Constitution.

Zero Dark Thirty, Torture, Art, and Our Cruel Nature

I don't waste a lot of time complaining about historical inaccuracy in movies. The need to tell a compelling story has always overridden mere fact, from Homer's time to ours. The best historical fiction gets at deeper truths, creating symbols that mean something more than accurate details. And the less great can still be entertaining.

What I am thinking about today is the way filmmakers keep falling back on certain simple and violent stories, whether they happened or not. Like the motifs the recur in folk tales, these elements come up again and again, even where they are, historically, completely inappropriate. For example, the revenge tale. Writers and directors like to turn complex political events into fables about wronged people getting revenge. The Patriot did this with the American Revolution, subverting the narrative of growing interest in democracy on both sides of the Atlantic, and an increasingly strong American identity, with a tale of giving some evil bastards what they had coming to them. I do understand that many people who fight in ideological wars do so from petty motivations, but, really, that is not what the Revolution was about.

Another narrative element that Hollywood and television can't resist is the torture scene. The tough guy hero captures a bad guy and threatens or beats him into giving up the crucial piece of information, in thirty seconds to three minutes of screen time. The new movie about the hunt for Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, seems to do this. I haven't seen it, but lots of people have complained that it shows an al Qaeda operative tortured until he gives up a crucial piece of information, the name of the courier who takes messages to Bin Laden:

senior senators who received advance copies of the movie this week have reacted angrily, saying that the movie may lead viewers to believe inaccurately that coercive CIA interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, led to the eventual death of bin Laden.

This week the Director of the CIA sent a letter to his staff this, complaining about distortions in the film, including the waterboarding scene.

Director Kathryn Bigelow must have known that she was asking for trouble when she included this scene, but she still couldn't resist. Why? Why are these scenes so compelling?

As I think about this, I can't come up with any pleasant answers. At some level, we just enjoy cruelty. We like to see bad people suffer, and we like to see them subjected to our will. It would cross too many moral lines to depict torture done for no reason at all, so we show torture in the cause of justice and right, only to the point where the bad guy is "broken" and assists the good guys in their mission. If we can't persuade them to help us, we will force them. But it isn't accurate -- have you ever seen one of these action thrillers in which the tortured bad guy gives up the wrong name, as they usually do? -- and it substitutes a fantasy psychology for the real thing. These scenes are S&M, plain and simple, dressed up in narrative urgency.

I also have a feeling that this matters. Ignorant simpletons like George W. Bush and Rick Santorum seem to believe that the truth really can be beaten out of people. Santorum once told John McCain, the only American legislator who has actually been tortured, that he "doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works." Where, I wonder, did Santorum acquire his own ideas about torture? From the movies, I suspect. And that ought to trouble us a little.

Three Moral Reasons to Vote for Obama

Andrew Sullivan offers three "moral" reasons to choose Obama over Romney:

1) Expanded Access to Health Care

"the fact that tens of millions of human beings cannot afford access to this often excellent private healthcare, even in a basic form, remains, to my mind, a scandal. That there are two nations in this country - one with the security of healthcare and one with no security at all - remains, to my mind, a moral disgrace."

2) Torture

"Torture is also a non-negotiable issue for me. It is simply unacceptable. It is the negation of the West's entire founding principles. Any candidate of any party who supports it rules himself out for me on that ground alone. Romney will bring it back. He will make America a torturing nation again. He would employ the former war criminals of the dark years of Bush-Cheney and legitimize them still further. He would reinforce the idea, propagated by Cheney, that torture is a "no-brainer", giving comfort to every vicious dictator on the planet to do the same."

3) War with Iran

"I cannot reconcile a pre-emptive war against a country that only has the technical ability to make a nuclear bomb, but has not weaponized it or threatened its use, with any reading of just war theory."

As Sullivan says, these issues have an importance that goes far beyond tax rates on capital gains and what have you. Until we have a Republican candidate who turns his back on the Bush-Cheney regime of torture and unlimited, unending warfare, they will never get my vote. Until they accept --no, proclaim -- that there are higher goals for our society than letting the rich keep their money, they will never get my vote. These are not partisan issues in any simple sense. Across much of American history it has been the conservatives who opposed unnecessary war, and who favored creating a caring society over economic growth. All of Sullivan's points would be endorsed by the Pope and his conservative Catholic supporters. How Ayn Randism at home and unending violence abroad came to be mainstays of American conservatism remains something of a mystery to me. But as long as they are, I will be voting Democratic.

If you want the US to do good in the world, rather than evil, you have only one possible choice: Obama.

Torturing the Prophet

From a review in Lapham's Quarterly of  Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet by Donald Weinstein (Yale University Press):

On May 20, 1498, Girolamo Savonarola, the friar whose visions of tribulation and transformation had galvanized the citizens of Florence for almost a decade, faced torture for the second time in his life. For years, he had been telling the Florentines that the end of the world was near. An adroit combination of threats and promises had brought him political, as well as spiritual, authority. But now he stood exposed as a charlatan who had only pretended to receive instruction through visions sent by God. In April of that year, a government commission had already interrogated him. Attendants bound his hands behind his back with a rope that went over a pulley. Then they hoisted him into the air—a procedure that dislocated his arms and eventually broke one of them—and either dropped him to the floor or left him suspended just above it. Savonarola gave in, as most suspects did, and confessed in writing that he had only pretended to be a prophet whose revelations came from God. When the new set of inquisitors sent by Pope Alexander VI confronted him in May, he fell on his knees and insisted that his confession had been false: “I confess I have denied Christ. I lied.” But as soon as Savonarola was raised into the air again, he confirmed his confession. When the commissioners demanded to know why he had lied, he admitted, “I’m more susceptible than other people. Just looking at [the instruments of torture] is for me like getting ten turns of the rope.” Three days later he would die on the Piazza della Signoria, where he was defrocked and hanged. His body was burned and the ashes thrown in the river Arno, to prevent his followers from collecting any relics.