ABSTRACT
During the heated controversy over the American government’s use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib prison, in Afghanistan, and at black sites around the globe, both sides have summoned the specter of the middle ages and forced it into the role of modernity’s evil ancestor. US officials, for example, have sought to exculpate themselves by arguing that their methods of interrogation did not actually constitute torture because these techniques were gentler than those of the Spanish Inquisition. In February 2008, a Washington Post article reported Steven J. Bradbury, a Justice Department official, as asserting that the method of “simulated drowning … used to compel disclosures by prisoners suspected of being al-Qaeda members … was not … like the ‘water torture’ used during the Spanish Inquisition.” In his insistence on the difference between medieval practices and those approved by the Bush administration, Bradbury went so far as to declare: “The only thing in common is, I think, the use of water.”1
