Reviewed by:

• Anatomy of Torture by Ron E. Hassner
• Ryan M. Welch (bio)

Torture works (sometimes). That rather non-committal declaration might risk me being labelled pro-torture by some. At least, that’s the feeling I get from my past experiences. For example, early in my graduate school career, a heavy-hitter scholar visited our department. He graciously took a few graduate students to coffee at our campus café. There he told a story detailing the impossibility of publishing a paper that showed state torture levels correlated with fewer terror [End Page 347] attacks in the future. Reviewers and/ or editors, it seemed, could not bring themselves to publish something that empirically showed torture may be in any way efficacious. This anecdote meshed well with my experience in a graduate seminar the following year with the rather uncomfortable title, the Ethics of Torture, where I found myself wondering aloud to the class about torture’s ability to compel people to divulge information they would rather keep secret. The looks on the students’ faces in the decidedly anti-torture class made me wonder if I had become a torture apologist just for considering it. If only Ron E. Hassner’s Anatomy of Torture had been available a decade sooner.

In the book, he sets out to answer a fundamental empirical question: Can torture work? Anecdotes abound, but, due to both ethical and national security considerations, until now, we have had no way of systematically answering that question. Or so we thought.

Instead of patiently waiting decades for governments to declassify material, Hassner devised a rather creative solution—look to the past; so far into the past, that the present government has no political reason to oppose the research. To that end, Hassner relies on centuries-old archives of the Spanish Inquisition. For all of the gore-filled reality of torture, the Inquisition kept decidedly tidy books of the practice including: the victims, what the Inquisition knew prior to the torture, what the victims divulged, and what the Inquisition uncovered after the torture. Voilà! Systematic data on torture and its effects.

Over the course of seven chapters, Hassner paints a picture of the Spanish Inquisition as a strategic actor that learns over time. He wisps us from fifteenth-century Spain to seventeenth-century Mexico, introducing us to the human beings that would become the (future) victims of the Inquisition’s torture practices. Over these two centuries, and across several victims, the Spanish Inquisition learned a great deal about the most effective ways to wield pain for the purposes of acquiring information. In what follows, I review this brazen book by giving a short description of what Hassner finds and his methods for doing so before, then, posing several questions, that, without the book would not have occurred to me. As I’ll make clearer throughout this review, although I have several questions on main points of the book, the intellectual conversation it kicks off is invaluable for both ethical and policy reasons.

Chapters 3 through 6 represent the main empirical contribution of the book. In Chapter 3, Hassner uses archival evidence to perform a sort of comparative case study between the Inquisitional courts in Ciudad Real from 1484–1500, and those same courts during the years 1500-1515. This period represents the earliest years of the Inquisition and Hassner uses it to present the Inquisition as a strategic actor capable of learning over time. From 1484-1500, the Inquisition uses a rather scattershot strategy, haphazardly deploying its tools in the service of identifying and eliminating the underground Jewish networks populated by what it called “conversos.” In this exploratory phase, the Inquisition did not know much about who belonged to these networks much less the specific religious crimes they were committing (i.e., various Jewish customs such as keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, refraining from eating pork, funeral rituals, and celebrating Jewish holidays). What it did know came from an attempt at initial information collection that came mostly from a grace period the courts instituted that offered individuals absolution for informing on [End Page 348] others. This, in...