How for Home and Freedom

The act of forcing water down a person’s throat to make them think they’re drowning. The panic it produces is primal, intense, and uncontrollable. Known today as water-boarding, we deemed it criminal enough to put Japanese prisoners on trial and execute as war criminals after WW2 because of it.

The previous president, George W. Bush, wrote in his memoirs that he approved its use with a “damn right” bravado. Some might consider that to be  a confession to war crimes and a clear violation of the rules of the Geneva Convention.

But this is not the first time in U.S. history that the controversy of water-boarding was in the spotlight. Torture by water-boarding has been around for a very long time. It’s not some new technique developed after 9/11.

In fact, water-boarding was actually investigated by a Senate Committee…. way back in 1902.

“Torturing 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.”

To whom would you guess can be attributed that quote? Maybe Cindy Sheehan? Or perhaps the latest spokesperson for Amnesty International?

No, the quote is from Mark Twain. The same person that wrote “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

In 1898, the U.S. had decided to invade the Philippines in what would become the Philippine-America war. Support for American actions in the Philippines was justified by those in the U.S. government and media who supported the conflict through the use of moralistic grounds.

Stuart Creighton Miller writes, “America’s job was to protect the Filipinos from European predators waiting in the wings for an American withdrawal and to tutor them in American-style democracy.”

In reality, it was to gain a important trade route for Far East China by not allowing the Philippines to declare sovereignty after their revolt from Spain. But the Philippine invasion wasn’t going so well for Americans, quickly turning into a “damnable quagmire” that lasted over 12 years.

Harsh methods began when American Brigadier General Jacob Smith instructed soldiers to transform the island into a “howling wilderness,” to “kill and burn” to the greatest degree possible—“The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me”—and to shoot anyone “capable of bearing arms.”

When asked to clarify what this last stipulation meant in practical terms, General Smith defined it as any male over the age of 10 years old. Officers routinely resorted to the “water cure” in order to extract information from Philippine suspects as necessary to gain information.

Some of the U.S. soldiers that were in the middle of this scorched earth policy started mentioning the atrocities when they wrote letters back home. These letters came to attention of Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of Massachusetts, an opponent of the war, who called for an investigation.

He proposed the formation of an independent committee, but Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge insisted that the hearings take place inside his own, majority-Republican Committee on the Philippines.

The Lodge Committee investigation began at the end of January 1902. In the months that followed, two distinct visions of the hearings emerged. Anti-war Democrats hoped for a broad examination of the conduct of the war. Lodge, along with the Republican majority, wanted to keep the focus on the present and was “not convinced” of the need to delve into “some of the disputed questions of the past.”

Some testimony during the investigation was given by William Howard Taft, who was appointed governor of the Philippines. He shocked many people when he testified before Congress that the “so-called water cure” was used “on some occasions to extract information.”

Testimony was conflicted. One witness would state that nobody was actually harmed by the “water cure.” Paradoxically, a soldier would reveal that he had used the “water cure” on 160 people and only 26 had survived. But with little success in February 1903, Lodge’s Republican-controlled committee voted to end its inquiry into the allegations of torture. The public was no longer interested in something that only months earlier been alarming revelations.

As early as April 16, 1902, the New York World described the “American Public” sitting down to eat its breakfast with a newspaper full of Philippine atrocities:

It sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the “water cure” to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until their bodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the “treatment” can begin all over again.

The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

As to my opinion of “Is water-boarding torture and did it effect America?” I will answer with part of a poem from Katharine Bates:

The flag that dreamed of delivering
Shudders and droops like a broken wing.

1902 Picture of Philippine “Water Cure”

Here in it’s entirety ..
“In the Philippines”  was composed by Katharine Lee Bates,  author of “America the Beautiful,” and written in response to the war against the Philippine insurgents in 1899.

Silvery rice-fields whisper wide
How for home and freedom their owners died.
We’ve set the torch to their bamboo town,
And out they come in a scampering rush,

Little brown men with spears.
Shoot!
Down they go in a crush,
Sickening smears,

Hideous writhing huddles and heaps
Under the palms and the mango-trees.
More, still more! Shoot ‘em down
Like brown jack-rabbits that scoot

With comical leaps
Out of the brush.
No loot?
No prisoners, then. As for these— Hush!

The flag that dreamed of delivering
Shudders and droops like a broken wing.
Silvery rice-fields whisper wide
How for home and freedom their owners died.

(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1911).