Free God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy

the work of his predecessor and achieved even greater renown.
    Torture was an integral part of the inquisitorial process, though it was reserved for difficult cases and was technically subject to certain restrictions. Eymerich and others granted wide latitude to inquisitors. For instance, although the accused was supposed to be subjected to a single “cycle” of torture, if he failed to confess or retracted a confession the inquisitors could decide that the cycle had not proceeded sufficiently: the accused, to use the term of art, had not yet been “decently” tortured. The cycle could therefore resume. Half a millennium later, the interrogators of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, employed similar reasoning to expand their options.Like Gui, Eymerich became a figure in later works of fiction. His inquisitor’s manual turns up, for instance, in the library of the doomed mansion in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
    Eymerich’s methods, and perhaps his personality, frequently landed him in political trouble, and his career was one of frenetic activity interrupted by sudden bouts of exile. But it was never a torpid exile. During one of these periods, he wrote his
Directorium.
     
    Tricks of the Trade
     
    In modern times, the techniques of interrogation have been refined in theory by batteries of psychologists, criminologists, and intelligence experts, and in practice by soldiers, policemen, and spies. In some quarters, the word “interrogation,” with its inescapable undertones, has been replaced by the sanitized “eduction,” from “educe,” meaning “to lead out.” In 2006, the Intelligence Science Board, a government advisory group, published a thorough overview of current and historical interrogation practices under the anodyne title
Educing Information.
It contains papers with titles such as “Mechanical Detection of Deception: A Short Review” and “Options for Scientific Research on Eduction Practices.” In passing, it mentions the works of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich. Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as
Human Intelligence Collector Operations,
the U. S. army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors’ practices seem very up-to-date.
    The inquisitors became astute psychologists. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being interrogated would employ a range of stratagems to deflect questions and disarm the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out ten ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” They include “equivocation,” “redirecting the question,” “feigned astonishment,” “twisting the meaning of words,” “changing the subject,” “feigning illness,” and “feigning stupidity.” For its part, the army interrogation manual provides a “Source and Information Reliability Matrix” to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of “reporting information that is self-serving,” who give “repeated answers with exact wording and details,” and who demonstrate a “failure to answer the question asked.”
    But the well-prepared inquisitor had ruses of his own. To confront an unforthcoming prisoner, he might sit with a large stack of documents in front of him, which he would appear to consult as he asked questions or listened to answers, periodically looking up from the pages as if they contradicted the testimony and saying, “It is clear to me that you are hiding the truth.”The army manual suggests a technique called the “file and dossier approach,” a variant on what it terms the “we know all” approach:
     
The HUMINT [human intelligence] collector prepares a dossier containing all available information concerning the source or his organization. The information is carefully arranged within a file to give the illusion that it contains more data than actually there. . . . It is also effective if the