The New York Times
By: Samuel G. Freedman
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In the moral atlas of Cullen Murphy, the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the secret “black sites” of the war on terror begins in Montsegur, a fortress in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, in 1244, a French army assembled at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church besieged several hundred Cathars. Their sect’s heresy was dualism, a belief in both a beneficent God and an equivalent evil deity. Enticed into surrendering by the promise that their followers would be spared, the Cathars were burned alive on a pyre.
From the run-up to this massacre, Murphy dates the start of the Inquisition. By this, he means not only the Spanish iteration with its concentration on Jews converted to Christianity (Marranos) but several sequential inquisitions that over 700 years convulsed Europe, Central America and parts of Asia in pursuit of a wide variety of theological deviants. Even this expansive history, in turn, functions for Murphy as a kind of prologue, for the goal of this lucid, learned and ultimately predictable…
Is this to say that in the present context, nonviolent, psychologically astute interrogation is as heinous as torture? Unless I misread him, Murphy appears to be saying so. Yet isn’t the lesson of the former F.B.I. agent Ali Soufan in his recent memoir, “The Black Banners,” that precisely such methods obtained accurate information from prisoners, as opposed to the desperate fictions that captives offered to stay a torturer’s hand? It is to America’s shame that our nation swept up so many innocent people in its hunt for terrorists. But that sweep also did capture some of the guilty, a reality that Murphy mentions only belatedly and almost backhandedly.
“Moral certainty ignites every inquisition,” he writes late in the book, “and then feeds it with oxygen.” “God’s Jury,” while no inquisition, abounds in moral certainty…
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