As part of his defense of the techniques used by the Bush administration to gain information, Bradbury went out of his way to play the historian, claiming that the water torture of yore differed from today’s American-style version in crucial ways. The waterboarding employed by interrogators during the infamous Spanish Inquisition, he insisted, “involved the forced consumption of a mass amount of water.” This led, he claimed, to the “lungs filling with water” to the point of “agony and death.” The CIA, on the other hand, employed “strict time limits,” “safeguards,” and “restrictions,” making it a far more controlled technique. As he put it: “[S]omething can be quite distressing or uncomfortable, even frightening, [but] if it doesn’t involve severe physical pain, and it doesn’t last very long, it may not constitute severe physical suffering” — and so would not qualify as torture. Bradbury summed up his historical case this way, “There’s been a lot of discussion in the public about historical uses of waterboarding,” but the “only thing in common is the use of water.”
To remind readers, Bradbury is the government lawyer who, in 2005, drafted two secret memos authorizing the use of freezing temperatures,and waterboarding in CIA attempts to break terrorism detainees. Nor is Bradbury the only one with the urge to distinguish any current American proclivity towards torture from the barbaric procedures used until the Enlightenment set in. As Senator Joseph Lieberman commented last week, citing another medieval torture technique, waterboarding “is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological.” Waterboarding isn’t torture, both men claimed, because it leaves no “permanent damage.”
Visiting the Water Table
It’s here that our stroll down history’s narrow, medieval lanes comes in. Anyone curious to test Bradbury’s historical accuracy should consider a visit to one of the dozens of torture museums that dot Europe’s landscape. Why not, for instance, the bluntly named Torture Museum in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. Unlike other European memorials to torture, such as the Clink Prison in London and the torture museums in Florence and San Gimigniano, this modest two-story building in a former private home in Prague’s historic Old Town is a relative newcomer to the continent’s penchant for recording its past mistakes.