Waterboarding Then and Now
I came across an appalling artifact from Boing Boing via Progressive Historians and Kos. It’s from an 1858 article in Harper’s Weekly.
… We need no longer, it seems, travel to China or Japan for illustrations of torture. A visit to our own penitentiaries and prisons will furnish all the horrors that the curious appetite can desire… The convict, More, was a negro. He is certified to have been a man of naturally pleasant temper, but violent when crossed. On 1st inst. he was said to have been in a bad humor; he was seen, or is said to have been seen, to sharpen a knife, and mutter threats against someone; on the strength of which he was, on 24 inst., seized by several keepers or deputy-keepers of the State Prison, and by them dragged toward the shower-bath for punishment. It seems he stood in dire dread of the the shower-baths; all the water that was in the tank — amounting to from three to five barrels, the quantity is uncertain — was showered upon him in spite of his piteous cries; a few minutes after his release from the bath he fell prostrate, was carried to his cell, and died in five minutes. It is this homicide that we this week illustrate.
- New York Public Library Digital Gallery
So here we are nearly 150 years later and the leaders of the United States of America haven’t yet adopted the view of an 1858 publication that the use of water to inflict severe physical discomfort and instill fear amounts to torture.
I recently spoke to Rudy Michaels, a 90 year-old World War II veteran who was a member of an elite US Army interrogation unit known as the Ritchie Boys. Rudy is Jewish, a German native who fled his country in 1938. He returned to Europe in 1944 to interrogate Nazis. Today, Rudy, a retired judge and law professor, is angry. His adopted country taught him that the Geneva Conventions were to be “honored,” and now he hears that physical abuse of prisoners is justified and doesn’t always amount to torture. He heard Vice President Cheney say that “a dunk in water” wasn’t torture but rather a “very important tool.” Rudy told me,
I was absolutely appalled by what Cheney said… I never touched a guy the whole time…The first time I saw one of the Gitmo guys in an orange suit in shackles, I thought what the hell are these people doing? They’re not going to get anything useful out them. If I spoke Arabic as fluently as I spoke German, and you let me loose in that prison, I’d milk the entire population.
Well, more than five years after 9-11, it seems we still don’t have many Arabic speakers in the CIA or the military. But during that time, the Bush administration has managed to bring us back to early 19th century definitions of torture.
Note: I will be publishing a longer article about how the Ritchie Boys’ experience relates to today… more to come on that soon.