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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taro who wrote (476549)	4/30/2009 10:01:49 AM
From: Steve Dietrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576761

morningsentinel.mainetoday.com "One difference between the Inquisition and what goes on at Guantanamo is that the Inquisition didn't destroy its tapes," Gitlitz said. "They are in the archives for people to read." Gitlitz and his wife, Linda Davidson, also a scholar and author at URI, have done their reading. Over a period of 30 years, they have spent months in the national archives of Spain and Mexico researching the carefully preserved original Inquisition documents. If Mukasey does not know what waterboarding is, it's because he has not tried to find out. Records show that the Inquisition used three methods of torture: The prisoner could be hung by his wrists from a pulley, repeatedly hoisted and dropped. He could be tied to a rack and stretched. Or he could be waterboarded. "The Spanish Inquisition didn't invent any of these systems of torture but they systematized them," Gitlitz said. Waterboarding was used in medieval times and was used by the Inquisition for more than 350 years -- from about 1478 to 1834 -- both in Spain and Mexico. Henry Kamen, a respected historian, described waterboarding in his book, "The Spanish Inquisition." "He was tied down on a rack. His mouth was kept forcibly open and a toca or linen cloth was put down his throat to conduct water poured slowly from a jar. The severity of the torture varied with the number of jars of water used." The Inquisition used torture in about 20 percent of the cases, Gitlitz told me. It was not used more often because even in those times "there was debate about whether testimony elicited under duress was credible," Gitlitz said. Confessions generated by torture were generally disregarded unless other evidence corroborated them. There was always a doctor present; the historic records show that many times the doctors made the inquisitors stop. "There are a lot of false ideas about the Inquisition, but these facts are pretty straightforward," Gitlitz said. "I'm astounded that well-educated leaders who have a sense of history -- or whose staff do -- or who have access to this kind of material think waterboarding is so novel," Gitlitz said. SD