arnisador
11-09-2007, 08:23 PM
Waterboarding Drew Critics During U.S.-Philippine War (http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/11/08/waterboarding-drew-critics-during-us-philippine-war/)
Those opposed to the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique would find echoes of their protests going back more than a century, to the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, the History News Network (http://hnn.us/articles/44411.html)reports.
The “water cure,” as it was then known, was widely used in the 12-year war in the Philippines that began in 1898, says historian William Loren Katz. William Howard Taft, then the U.S. governor of the islands, made the technique front-page news when he told Congress it had been used to extract information in the conflict. Meanwhile, a soldier’s letter boasting of giving 160 people the “water cure,” of whom only 26 survived, was made public. The U.S. War Department demanded a retraction.
Opposition papers called Mr. Taft’s remark’s the “most humiliating admission.” Mark Twain, a leading opponent of U.S. imperialism at the time, attacked the use of waterboarding. Did it produce “Truth? Or lies?,” he asked. “How can one even know which it is they are telling.” In private, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt assured a friend that waterboarding was “an old Filipino method of mild torture” and that no one was “seriously damaged.”I'd always taken it to be an extension of the corresponding Spanish Inquisition toca (tortura del agua) method.
Those opposed to the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique would find echoes of their protests going back more than a century, to the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, the History News Network (http://hnn.us/articles/44411.html)reports.
The “water cure,” as it was then known, was widely used in the 12-year war in the Philippines that began in 1898, says historian William Loren Katz. William Howard Taft, then the U.S. governor of the islands, made the technique front-page news when he told Congress it had been used to extract information in the conflict. Meanwhile, a soldier’s letter boasting of giving 160 people the “water cure,” of whom only 26 survived, was made public. The U.S. War Department demanded a retraction.
Opposition papers called Mr. Taft’s remark’s the “most humiliating admission.” Mark Twain, a leading opponent of U.S. imperialism at the time, attacked the use of waterboarding. Did it produce “Truth? Or lies?,” he asked. “How can one even know which it is they are telling.” In private, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt assured a friend that waterboarding was “an old Filipino method of mild torture” and that no one was “seriously damaged.”I'd always taken it to be an extension of the corresponding Spanish Inquisition toca (tortura del agua) method.