Letter to the White House

I cannot sleep, I cannot eat. I’m scared to walk to the bathroom because I’m afraid they will hunt me down.… I’m not the same. — An American citizen trapped in Kuwait

Here is my letter:

A water-cure establishment

I’ve mentioned how the term “water cure” was used by U.S. troops in the Philippines as a sarcastic euphemism for water torture. Here is an illustration and excerpt from an 1855 description of a resort where the water cure, or “hydropathic system,” was in use.

I’m quoting George White’s Historical Collections of Georgia:

The above is a view of Dr. Cox’s Water-Cure establishment. It is located at the base of the Kenesaw Mountain, and immediately upon the Western and Atlantic Railroad, one and a half miles from Marietta.
For purposes of health, so far as pure water, bracing armosphere, and fine scenery are concerned, a more desirable situation can scarcely be found.
It is not our business to enter into any discussion as to the merits of the Hydropathic system, but justice requires we should say, that hundreds have derived important benefits from the regimen adopted by Dr. Cox.1

The “regimen” consisted of applying cold water to parts of the body, in the belief that doing so promoted health. Modern-day polar bear clubs would endorse this. By the end of the 1800s, though, the term “water cure” had less pleasant associations.

It took a depraved sense of humor to apply the term to a torture technique that simulates drowning — the same technique we now call waterboarding. This new usage of “water cure” emerged around 1899, while U.S. troops were keeping the Philippines from winning their independence. (See “A brief history of waterboarding”)

It was no less depraved to coin the modern term “waterboarding,” which likens water torture to an extreme sport. This happened in 2003, while U.S. troops were doing whatever it is they’re doing in our name in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See “Why we call it waterboarding”)

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1 George White, Historical Collections of Georgia (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1855), p. 400. ↩

Why we call it waterboarding

I recently found some supporting evidence for my theory (in this post, one of my most read) that the term waterboarding is intended to make nonsense of a victim’s suffering by comparing his torture to an extreme sport. (Think of snowboarding, etc.)

Well, a while ago Isabel Macdonald searched newspaper archives to learn about the history of the word waterboarding in print. She found that “until May 2004, the term had actually meant an aquatic sport similar to surfing.” Since then it has rapidly come to signify water torture.

In a May 2004 article, a New York Times reporter quoted an anonymous “counterintelligence official” who said the CIA was using “a technique known as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.” That seems to be the first time the word went public. Evidently it was already in use among U.S. interrogators. No explanation of the term is offered.

Alan Dershowitz, who notoriously argued in favor of legal torture in 2004, was probably the first to use the single word waterboarding, instead of water boarding, in the mass media.

You can read the whole story in Macdonald’s article for fair.com.

A brief history of waterboarding

American soldiers torture a Philippine captive as European despots look on with delight (Life magazine cover, 1902).

“Waterboarding” is the latest name for a form of water torture going back to the Middle Ages in Europe, but condemned as illegal and immoral since the 1700s. Banned from Europe, water torture persisted in other parts of the world, including some European colonies, until the mid-20th century.

In the United States, water torture first appears as a means to terrorize slaves. It persists into the 20th century as a routine punishment for African American convict laborers in the Deep South. Most notoriously, it was used by U.S. soldiers on Philippine captives during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). After that war, the technique shows up sporadically in some domestic police departments as a way to force detainees to confess to a crime.1

The “water cure”: Here’s a description by 1st Lt. Grover Flint, 35th U.S. Infantry, of a typical field interrogation in the occupied Philippines:

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick … is simply thrust into his jaws … as a gag. In the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out — I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down, and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose …, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious.… A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be like that of a man who is drowning, but who can not drown.2

Soldiers and officers called this technique “the water cure,” after a type of alternative health care, popular in the 1800s, in which applying cold water to the body was considered therapeutic. By using this term to name an excruciating torture, the soldiers were making what ethicist Jonathan Glover calls a “cold joke” — a humorless witticism that distances the torturer from his own action by making nonsense of the victim’s suffering.

As far as I know, no one has yet uncovered the origin of the term “waterboarding.” But if it was coined by the men who practice it today, it probably also originates in a cold joke — possibly an attempt to call the torture an “extreme sport,” by analogy with snowboarding, sandboarding, dirtboarding, etc. [Update: Why we call it waterboarding]