R
Raymond
Guest
U.S. Water Boarding, 1899 Style
Some high U.S. officials claim not be aware of it, and Judge Michael
Mukasey, the President's choice for attorney general, prefers to
equivocate, but water boarding has long been a form of torture that
causes excruciating pain and can lead to death. It forces water into
prisoner's lungs, usually over and over again. The Spanish Inquisition
in the late 1400s used this torture to uncover and punish heretics,
and then in the early 1500s Spain's inquisitors carried it overseas to
root out heresy in the New World. It reappeared during the witch
hysteria. Women accused of sorcery were "dunked" and held under water
to see if they were witches.
In World War II Japan and Germany routinely used water boarding on
prisoners. In Viet Nam U.S. forces held bound Viet Cong captives and
"sympathizers" upside down in barrels of water. Water boarding also
has been associated with the Khmer Rouge.
An extensive record of its use by the United States land forces exists
in the records of the invasion and occupation of the Philippines that
began in 1898. As the U.S. encountered armed resistance by the
liberation army of Filipino General Emilio Aguinaldo, and sank into a
12-year quagmire on the archipelago, U.S. officers routinely resorted
to what they called "the water cure." Professor Miller's study of the
Philippine war reveals this sordid story through Congressional
testimony, letters from soldiers, court martial hearings, words of
critics and defenders, and newspaper accounts. The pro-imperialist
media of the day justified the "water cure" as necessary to gain
information; the anti-imperialist media denounced its use by the U.S
or any other civilized nation.
Fresh from their recent victories in the Indian wars, the Philippine
invasion of 1898 began with a war whoop. U.S. forces landed in the
Philippines in 1898 led by American officers such Pershing, Lawton,
Smith, Shafter, Otis, Merritt, and Chafee, who had fought "treacherous
redskins." At least one officer had taken part in the infamous 1891
massacre of 350 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee. A U.S.
media that had supported the Army's brutal Indian campaigns
rhapsodized about this new opportunity for distant racial warfare. The
influential San Francisco Argonaut spoke candidly: "We do not want the
Filipinos. We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich,
but unfortunately they are infested with Filipinos. There are many
millions there, and it is to be feared their extinction will be slow."
The paper's solution was to recommend several unusually cruel methods
of torture it believed "would impress the Malay mind."
President William McKinley dispatched Admiral Dewey to the Philippines
with a pledge to bestow civilization and Christianity on its people,
and promise eventual independence. Perhaps he was unaware that most
Filipinos were Catholics. Perhaps he did not know that General
Aguinaldo and his 40,000 troops were poised to remove Spain from the
islands. Dewey supplied Aguinaldo with weapons and encouraged him, but
that soon changed.
From the White House and the U.S. high command to field officers and
lowly enlistees the message became "these people are not civilized"
and the United States had embarked on a glorious overseas adventure
against "savages." Officers and enlisted men - and the media -- were
encouraged to see the conflict through a "white superiority" lens,
much as they viewed their victories over Native Americans and African
Americans. The Philippine occupation unfolded at the high tide of
American segregation, lynching, and a triumphant white supremacy
ideology.
U.S. officers ordered massacres of entire villages and conducted a
host of other shameful atrocities as the Philippine quagmire dragged
on for more than a decade. "A white man seems to forget that he is
human," wrote a white soldier from the Philippines.
Atrocities abounded. To produce "a demoralized and obedient
population" in Batangas, General Franklin Bell ordered the destruction
of "humans, crops, food stores, domestic animals, houses and boats."
He became known as the "butcher" of Batangas. General Jacob Smith, who
had been wounded fighting at Wounded Knee, said his overseas campaigns
were "worse than fighting Indians." He promised to turn Samar province
into a "howling wilderness." Smith defined the enemy as anyone "ten
years and up" and issued these instructions to Marine Commander Tony
Waller: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more
you kill and burn the better it will please me." He became known as
"Howling Jake" Smith.
The "water cure" was probably first instituted when U.S. forces
encountered local resistance. Professor Miller states that General
Frederick Funston in 1901 may have used it to capture the Filipino
General Emilio Aguinaldo. A New York World article described the
"water cure" as forcing "water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make
it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of patients until
their bodies become distended to the point of bursting . . .." This
may have been only one on the versions used.
The water cure became front-page news when William Howard Taft,
appointed U.S. Governor of the Philippines, testified under oath
before Congress and let the cat out of the bag. The "so called water
cure," he admitted, was used "on some occasions to extract
information." The Arena, an opposition paper, called his words "a most
humiliating admission that should strike horror in the mind of every
American." Around the same time as Taft's admission a soldier boasted
in a letter made public that he had used the water cure on 160 people
and only 26 had survived. The man was compelled by the War Department
to retract his damaging confession. But then another officer stated
the "water cure" was being widely used when he reported, "the problem
of the 'water cure' is in knowing how to apply it." Such statements
leave unclear how often the form of torture was used for interrogation
and how often it became a way to exhibit racial animosity or display
contempt.
During a triumphal U.S. speaking tour General Frederick Funston,
bearing a Congressional Medal of Honor and harboring political
ambitions, bellicosely promoted total war. In Chicago he boasted of
sentencing 35 suspects to death without trial and enthusiastically
endorsed torture and civilian massacres. He even publicly suggested
that anti-war protestors be dragged out of their homes and lynched.
Funston's words met far more applause than criticism. In San Francisco
he suggested that the editor of a noted anti-imperialist paper "ought
to be strung up to the nearest lamppost." At a banquet in the city he
called Filipinos "unruly savages" and (now) claimed he had personally
killed fifty prisoners without trial. Captain Edmond Boltwood, an
officer under Funston, confirmed that the general had personally
administered the water cure to captives, and had told his troops "to
take no prisoners."
President Theodore Roosevelt reprimanded Funston and ordered him to
cease his inflammatory rhetoric. Facing a political challenge from
General Nelson Miles based in the Philippines, TR, who rode into the
White House on his heroic exploits at San Juan Hill, did not intend to
nourish more competition. The President privately assured a friend the
water cure was "an old Filipino method of mild torture" and claimed
when Americans administered it "no body was seriously damaged." But
publicly TR was silent about the "water cure."
In an article, "The 'Water Cure' from a Missionary Point of View,"
Reverend Homer Stunz justified the technique. It was not torture, he
said, since the victim could stop it any time by revealing what his
interrogators wanted to know. Besides, he insisted, it was only
applied to "spies." The missionary also justified instances of torture
by pointing out that U.S. soldiers "in lonely and remote bamboo
jungles" faced stressful conditions.
Mark Twain, a leading anti-imperialist voice, offered this view of the
water cure:
"Funston's example has bred many imitators, and many ghastly additions
to our history: the torturing of Filipinos by the awful 'water- cure,'
for instance, to make them confess -- what? Truth? Or lies? How can
one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a
man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his
evidence is worthless. Yet upon such evidence American officers have
actually -- but you know about those atrocities which the War Office
has been hiding a year or two...."
U.S. military trials for what are now known as war crimes all resulted
in convictions. Waller was acquitted because he followed the orders of
Smith, and later retired with two stars. "Howling Jake" Smith was
convicted, but he returned to a tumultuous citizens' welcome in San
Francisco. When the convicted U.S. war criminals received only slaps-
on-the-wrist U.S. prestige abroad sunk to new lows.
A San Francisco park was named after General Funston. TR appointed
General Bell of Batangas infamy as his chief of staff. And the
President continued to wave the banner of aggressive imperialism. In
1903 he flagrantly seized a broad swath of Columbia's Isthmus of
Panama so he could link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans under U.S.
control. This boosted his popularity and splintered the anti-
imperialist movement. TR also worked to undermine efforts to grant the
Philippines independence, which finally took place after World War II.
TR easily won a return to the White House in 1904, and in 1908 he
chose Taft as his successor. By the time Taft left the White House in
1913, military resistance in the Philippines had ended, and so
presumably had the "water cure." TR had become a Mount Rushmore-size
American icon.
The "water cure" was accepted as a necessary embarrassment in wartime.
Appeals to muscular patriotism had exonerated the "water cure" and
reduced a crime of torture to a misdemeanor. Is the U.S. headed the
same way in 2007?
By William Loren Katz
Mr. Katz is the author of forty U.S. history books, and has been
affiliated with New York University since 1973. His website is
www.williamlkatz.com. His essay draws from his The Cruel Years (Beacon
Press, 2003) and more heavily from Stuart Creighton Miller,
"Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines,
1899-1903 (Yale University Press, 1982), a moving account of this
country's first major overseas imperialist venture
------
The current debate over waterboarding may be new, but the practice is
not. It predates the Inquisition and has been used, off and on, around
the world ever since....
The present administration has no problem with waterboarding enemy
captives and does not consider it to be torture. Therefore, should an
American be captured and waterboarded, it should not be considered an
act of torture either. Apparently all is truly fair in the hostilities
of war.
" Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be
concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to
yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth."
--Eugene V. Debs, Speech, June 16, 1918
Some high U.S. officials claim not be aware of it, and Judge Michael
Mukasey, the President's choice for attorney general, prefers to
equivocate, but water boarding has long been a form of torture that
causes excruciating pain and can lead to death. It forces water into
prisoner's lungs, usually over and over again. The Spanish Inquisition
in the late 1400s used this torture to uncover and punish heretics,
and then in the early 1500s Spain's inquisitors carried it overseas to
root out heresy in the New World. It reappeared during the witch
hysteria. Women accused of sorcery were "dunked" and held under water
to see if they were witches.
In World War II Japan and Germany routinely used water boarding on
prisoners. In Viet Nam U.S. forces held bound Viet Cong captives and
"sympathizers" upside down in barrels of water. Water boarding also
has been associated with the Khmer Rouge.
An extensive record of its use by the United States land forces exists
in the records of the invasion and occupation of the Philippines that
began in 1898. As the U.S. encountered armed resistance by the
liberation army of Filipino General Emilio Aguinaldo, and sank into a
12-year quagmire on the archipelago, U.S. officers routinely resorted
to what they called "the water cure." Professor Miller's study of the
Philippine war reveals this sordid story through Congressional
testimony, letters from soldiers, court martial hearings, words of
critics and defenders, and newspaper accounts. The pro-imperialist
media of the day justified the "water cure" as necessary to gain
information; the anti-imperialist media denounced its use by the U.S
or any other civilized nation.
Fresh from their recent victories in the Indian wars, the Philippine
invasion of 1898 began with a war whoop. U.S. forces landed in the
Philippines in 1898 led by American officers such Pershing, Lawton,
Smith, Shafter, Otis, Merritt, and Chafee, who had fought "treacherous
redskins." At least one officer had taken part in the infamous 1891
massacre of 350 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee. A U.S.
media that had supported the Army's brutal Indian campaigns
rhapsodized about this new opportunity for distant racial warfare. The
influential San Francisco Argonaut spoke candidly: "We do not want the
Filipinos. We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich,
but unfortunately they are infested with Filipinos. There are many
millions there, and it is to be feared their extinction will be slow."
The paper's solution was to recommend several unusually cruel methods
of torture it believed "would impress the Malay mind."
President William McKinley dispatched Admiral Dewey to the Philippines
with a pledge to bestow civilization and Christianity on its people,
and promise eventual independence. Perhaps he was unaware that most
Filipinos were Catholics. Perhaps he did not know that General
Aguinaldo and his 40,000 troops were poised to remove Spain from the
islands. Dewey supplied Aguinaldo with weapons and encouraged him, but
that soon changed.
From the White House and the U.S. high command to field officers and
lowly enlistees the message became "these people are not civilized"
and the United States had embarked on a glorious overseas adventure
against "savages." Officers and enlisted men - and the media -- were
encouraged to see the conflict through a "white superiority" lens,
much as they viewed their victories over Native Americans and African
Americans. The Philippine occupation unfolded at the high tide of
American segregation, lynching, and a triumphant white supremacy
ideology.
U.S. officers ordered massacres of entire villages and conducted a
host of other shameful atrocities as the Philippine quagmire dragged
on for more than a decade. "A white man seems to forget that he is
human," wrote a white soldier from the Philippines.
Atrocities abounded. To produce "a demoralized and obedient
population" in Batangas, General Franklin Bell ordered the destruction
of "humans, crops, food stores, domestic animals, houses and boats."
He became known as the "butcher" of Batangas. General Jacob Smith, who
had been wounded fighting at Wounded Knee, said his overseas campaigns
were "worse than fighting Indians." He promised to turn Samar province
into a "howling wilderness." Smith defined the enemy as anyone "ten
years and up" and issued these instructions to Marine Commander Tony
Waller: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more
you kill and burn the better it will please me." He became known as
"Howling Jake" Smith.
The "water cure" was probably first instituted when U.S. forces
encountered local resistance. Professor Miller states that General
Frederick Funston in 1901 may have used it to capture the Filipino
General Emilio Aguinaldo. A New York World article described the
"water cure" as forcing "water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make
it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of patients until
their bodies become distended to the point of bursting . . .." This
may have been only one on the versions used.
The water cure became front-page news when William Howard Taft,
appointed U.S. Governor of the Philippines, testified under oath
before Congress and let the cat out of the bag. The "so called water
cure," he admitted, was used "on some occasions to extract
information." The Arena, an opposition paper, called his words "a most
humiliating admission that should strike horror in the mind of every
American." Around the same time as Taft's admission a soldier boasted
in a letter made public that he had used the water cure on 160 people
and only 26 had survived. The man was compelled by the War Department
to retract his damaging confession. But then another officer stated
the "water cure" was being widely used when he reported, "the problem
of the 'water cure' is in knowing how to apply it." Such statements
leave unclear how often the form of torture was used for interrogation
and how often it became a way to exhibit racial animosity or display
contempt.
During a triumphal U.S. speaking tour General Frederick Funston,
bearing a Congressional Medal of Honor and harboring political
ambitions, bellicosely promoted total war. In Chicago he boasted of
sentencing 35 suspects to death without trial and enthusiastically
endorsed torture and civilian massacres. He even publicly suggested
that anti-war protestors be dragged out of their homes and lynched.
Funston's words met far more applause than criticism. In San Francisco
he suggested that the editor of a noted anti-imperialist paper "ought
to be strung up to the nearest lamppost." At a banquet in the city he
called Filipinos "unruly savages" and (now) claimed he had personally
killed fifty prisoners without trial. Captain Edmond Boltwood, an
officer under Funston, confirmed that the general had personally
administered the water cure to captives, and had told his troops "to
take no prisoners."
President Theodore Roosevelt reprimanded Funston and ordered him to
cease his inflammatory rhetoric. Facing a political challenge from
General Nelson Miles based in the Philippines, TR, who rode into the
White House on his heroic exploits at San Juan Hill, did not intend to
nourish more competition. The President privately assured a friend the
water cure was "an old Filipino method of mild torture" and claimed
when Americans administered it "no body was seriously damaged." But
publicly TR was silent about the "water cure."
In an article, "The 'Water Cure' from a Missionary Point of View,"
Reverend Homer Stunz justified the technique. It was not torture, he
said, since the victim could stop it any time by revealing what his
interrogators wanted to know. Besides, he insisted, it was only
applied to "spies." The missionary also justified instances of torture
by pointing out that U.S. soldiers "in lonely and remote bamboo
jungles" faced stressful conditions.
Mark Twain, a leading anti-imperialist voice, offered this view of the
water cure:
"Funston's example has bred many imitators, and many ghastly additions
to our history: the torturing of Filipinos by the awful 'water- cure,'
for instance, to make them confess -- what? Truth? Or lies? How can
one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a
man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his
evidence is worthless. Yet upon such evidence American officers have
actually -- but you know about those atrocities which the War Office
has been hiding a year or two...."
U.S. military trials for what are now known as war crimes all resulted
in convictions. Waller was acquitted because he followed the orders of
Smith, and later retired with two stars. "Howling Jake" Smith was
convicted, but he returned to a tumultuous citizens' welcome in San
Francisco. When the convicted U.S. war criminals received only slaps-
on-the-wrist U.S. prestige abroad sunk to new lows.
A San Francisco park was named after General Funston. TR appointed
General Bell of Batangas infamy as his chief of staff. And the
President continued to wave the banner of aggressive imperialism. In
1903 he flagrantly seized a broad swath of Columbia's Isthmus of
Panama so he could link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans under U.S.
control. This boosted his popularity and splintered the anti-
imperialist movement. TR also worked to undermine efforts to grant the
Philippines independence, which finally took place after World War II.
TR easily won a return to the White House in 1904, and in 1908 he
chose Taft as his successor. By the time Taft left the White House in
1913, military resistance in the Philippines had ended, and so
presumably had the "water cure." TR had become a Mount Rushmore-size
American icon.
The "water cure" was accepted as a necessary embarrassment in wartime.
Appeals to muscular patriotism had exonerated the "water cure" and
reduced a crime of torture to a misdemeanor. Is the U.S. headed the
same way in 2007?
By William Loren Katz
Mr. Katz is the author of forty U.S. history books, and has been
affiliated with New York University since 1973. His website is
www.williamlkatz.com. His essay draws from his The Cruel Years (Beacon
Press, 2003) and more heavily from Stuart Creighton Miller,
"Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines,
1899-1903 (Yale University Press, 1982), a moving account of this
country's first major overseas imperialist venture
------
The current debate over waterboarding may be new, but the practice is
not. It predates the Inquisition and has been used, off and on, around
the world ever since....
The present administration has no problem with waterboarding enemy
captives and does not consider it to be torture. Therefore, should an
American be captured and waterboarded, it should not be considered an
act of torture either. Apparently all is truly fair in the hostilities
of war.
" Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be
concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to
yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on Earth."
--Eugene V. Debs, Speech, June 16, 1918
