It turns out that Americans were debating waterboarding over 100 years ago, according to a really interesting New Yorker article. Apparently, U.S. troops were using the technique to extract information during the 1899-1902 Philippine-American War.
“A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the ‘water cure.’ ‘Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,’ he explained. ‘Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.’”
When the news broke, it didn’t go over well back home, but the military didn’t face the enormous public outcry it had feared. Then, as now, anti-waterboarding advocates wondered how their fellow citizens could stay mostly ambivalent about torture.
“But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of such news?” the World asked. “Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by the darker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which the wrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?”
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