Teddy and the "water cure"
The president who took a stand against waterboarding
Teddy and the "water cure"
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
In his news conference on Wednesday night, President Obama was asked whether he believes that the Bush administration sanctioned torture. In response, he sought to rebuke Bush by invoking Winston Churchill. From the transcript:
Waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture...I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, "we don't torture," when the - the entire British - all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And - and - and the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what's - what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
You can rarely go wrong quoting Churchill, although some observers contend that Obama was wrong to invoke him on the torture issue. Churchill aside, however, Obama did miss a golden opportunity. His point would have been far stronger had he simply quoted the Republican president who railed against torture, and punished a top military general for war crimes, more than a century ago.
Somehow, the precedent set by Theodore Roosevelt didn't get much attention from the Bush Justice Department lawyers who crafted the legal justifications for torture. So let's review the record here. It would have been great grist for Obama.
Having defeated Spain in the Spanish-American war, U.S. troops occupied the Philippines and other former Spanish territories. But the Filipinos were not anxious to be annexed. They fought back, and a long guerrilla war ensured. That's when the American military discovered waterboarding - a technique brought to the island by the Spanish, who had first employed it against heretics during the Inquisition). The Americans adopted it for use against the Filipino insurgents, as a means of extracting information.
The "water cure" scandal first surfaced in 1902, when the U.S. governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft, spilled the beans under oath in front of a congressional committee. One newspaper called his testimony "a most humiliating admission that should strike horror in the mind of every American." The subsequent official report described the workings of the water cure:
"A man is thrown down on his back, and three or four men sit in his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a pin...is simply thrust into his jaws...and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose...until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious...His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown."
Apparently the details of the practice varied a bit, depending on which Americans were doing the water cure. A New York newspaper reported: "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."
Many Americans condemned the practice, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. As one critic wrote, "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 endurable pain, a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless."
That argument sound familiar? Yet those words were penned more than a century ago...by Mark Twain.
To refute critics such as Twain, a pro-water lobby quickly developed. For instance, a church official named Homer Stunz wrote a piece entitled "The 'Water Cure' From a Missionary Point of View," and argued that the practice wasn't torture because the suspect could make it stop at any time simply by agreeing to provide the requested information. Others argued that the security of American troops was at stake, thus requiring that strong measures be taken to extract intelligence.
But Theodore Roosevelt, the new president, didn't buy those arguments. He didn't try to manufacture any legal justifications. He didn't bless the errant behavior by claiming that it was all conducted at the behest of his all-powerful executive authority. Instead, he kicked butt in a cable sent to the U.S. military authorities in the Philippines. The text can be found on page 100 of "Theodore Rex," the second volume of the TR biography written by Edmund Morris. The key passage:
The president desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts...for the very reason that the president intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work; he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American military.
(Roosevelt also ordered the court martial of General Jacob "Howling Jack" Smith, who got his nickname when he directed his troops to reduce one particular province to "a howling wilderness." When Smith was subsequently cleared of war crimes charges, Roosevelt - insisting on "the right of review" - had him thrown out of the army.)
But, with respect to Roosevelt's cable, the meaning is clear: Waterboarding was deemed to be a crime by the Republican president of the United States, who declared that "nothing can justify" its use. Today's Republicans, including those who are defending the Bush torture memos, keep talking about the importance of returning to their party roots, so perhaps they should start with this issue and heed the GOP leader whose face is on Mt. Rushmore.
In fact, with TR's words in mind, perhaps we should all remember what philosopher George Santayana once warned: "Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
CD75, talking and making treaties are two very different things. Only a simpleton would suggest that talking to someone, even indirectly, is equal to appeasement. Stick to being a partisan hack.— p-diddy
Comment removed.- Xi, you're a real Munson.— p-diddy
- Comment removed.
- Wouldn't "Olbermannaged" be funnier, Xi Jah? It sounds like "over managed." Kind of like "Hannitized" hearkens unto the process once performed by hotel cleaning staff on personal waste receptacles. Can you say "Sanitized for your protection?"— Phrossty
- Comment removed.
- p-diddly: So far, the messiah's "let's be pals" plan has not stopped Iran from enriching Uranium (in violation of the UN), North Korea from testing and planning more nulcear tests (in violation of the UN) and from Russia taking for land from Georgia. You cannot appease some people, but Obama thinks he can. "don't know much about history..." Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, nothing.— CD75
- CD----are you implying that since weapons are becoming more deadly, the tactics used to counter their effect can be increasingly ruthless? Better be careful where you go with this.— liberal
- Do you expect us to attack Russia, Iran and N.Korea CD? Nothing short of that is going to stop these countries from developing these weapons. The trick is to negotiate with them and try to make sure they never use them. An A-bomb hasn't been used for 64 years now. Hope that continues...— James TL
- 1939-2009. Hillary testified yesterday that Obama has offered millions of dollars in aid to North Korea if they resume 6 party talks. That is called appeasement, and it has never worked. Your foes never respect you, and know you are a wimp. Did you see that the White House (after hours of course) announced that North Korea is ready to test a bomb at any time? Welcome to the age of Obama.— CD75
- I think President Obama got it right by quoting Churchill instead of Roosevelt.— scrooge1
- Comment removed.
- Without offering an opinion, the difference is that Bush et al did not consider water boarding to be torture...there is the difference. As for the other techniques, the European Court of Human Rights in 1978 rules they were not torture, which is partially what the memos were based upon. One thing I do not understand...the Democrat Congress twice passed a law saying these techniques constituted torture while Bush was president, but he vetoed them. Now that they have majorities in both houses and a Democrat president to sign the bill, why not just pass the same law Bush vetoed and end all the discussion. We can have it codified in our legal system and end all debate. What is the hold up in them standing behind their convictions as they did before the Age of Obama?— tom - wilmington, de
- still_independent, the proof is in the memos about the interrogation techniques and their results, which Obama has not yet released. Also, in the originally released memo's, there was evidence redacted of information gotten from the techniques...I saw that reported not only on Fox but also on MSNBC. Until Obama allows for the declassification and release, all we have is information from Tenet, Hayden and Blair (who wrote as much in a memo to his staff, but that was omitted from the version released to the media..Blair is in Obama's cabinet remember).— tom - wilmington, de
- Just my opinion on the torture issue. I find no moral equivalent between waterboarding, loud music, pesky insects in the holding cell, confined spaces, or uncomfortable standing positions and what the terrorists did to Nick Berg and Danny Pearl. The Pol Pot regime killed children by picking them up by their legs and smashing their head into a tree. The Germans systematically killed over 6 million people by gassing them. Yet here we are trying to score political points over minor techniques that saved thousands of American lives.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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