From Philippines to Guantanamo
Torture: U.S. policy then and now
By
Greg Butterfield
Published Mar 2, 2008 5:45 PM
By now most people have heard the term “waterboarding.” Newspapers
and television talking-heads shows are filled with debate over whether the CIA
should have the right to use this and other “enhanced interrogation
techniques” to question suspected terrorists. President George W. Bush
has vowed to veto a congressional bill to ban “coercive
interrogations.”
But how many people really know what these euphemisms mean?
Waterboarding is torture. It is not a new practice. It has gone under other
names—the water detail, the water cure. Its first recorded use was by the
Spanish Inquisition. And exactly 100 years ago, it was a preferred method of
torture used by the U.S. military.
A timely article by Paul Kramer appears in the Feb. 25 edition of the New
Yorker magazine, entitled “The Water Cure: Debating Torture and
Counterinsurgency—A Century Ago.” Kramer’s piece powerfully
illustrates how today’s debate over whether it is “OK” to
torture people of color accused of fighting U.S. domination—and to what
degree—eerily mirrors the debate a century ago over the torture of
Filipino rebels fighting the U.S. takeover of their country.
Kramer quotes firsthand accounts from returned soldiers, like this from A.F.
Miller of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha
World-Herald in May 1900: “Now this is the way we give them the water
cure. 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.”
According to a fact sheet issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights’
Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, waterboarding is “a form of
mock execution where a detainee is strapped to a board and water is poured over
the detainee, causing him to believe and physically experience the sensation of
drowning.”
This is the reality behind today’s debate on “harsh
interrogations.”
‘Evidence obtained through torture’
At the Guantánamo Bay naval base, illegally occupied by the U.S. in
violation of Cuban sovereignty, and at so-called “black sites”
spread across the globe, the CIA has used waterboarding and other forms of
“cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” to obtain evidence and
confessions from detainees.
On Feb. 11, a Bush administration-created military commission announced it was
seeking the death penalty for murder and war crimes against CCR client Mohammed
al Qahtani and five other men alleged to have participated in planning the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They, like hundreds of other men captured in
Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, have been held
captive for six years without access to courts or the protections guaranteed to
prisoners of war under international law.
Al Qahtani’s attorneys are challenging the validity of the military
commissions and what they call “evidence obtained through torture”
in these death penalty cases. According to CCR, al Qahtani was subject to the
“First Special Interrogation Plan” personally approved by former
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The “aggressive interrogation methods” used included beatings;
sleep deprivation combined with 20-hour interrogations; explicit threats
against family members; strip searches and forced nudity; sexual humiliation;
attacks by dogs; forcible administration of drugs during interrogation; stress
positions; tight restraints for long periods; extremes of temperature; at least
160 days of severe isolation; and more.
With anger escalating over the Bush administration’s use of torture, the
Justice Department announced Feb. 22 that its ethics office was investigating
the department’s legal approval of waterboarding and would make public an
unclassified version of its report.
An Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo had declared that interrogation
methods were not torture unless they “produced pain equivalent to that
associated with organ failure or death.” The use of waterboarding and
other torture was reaffirmed by Steven G. Bradbury, the acting head of the
Office of Legal Counsel, in 2005.
‘The water cure’
Outside of school textbooks, the colonial war to dominate the Philippines is
little discussed today in this country. But it is well remembered in the
Philippines, where the people have lived under the boot heel of U.S.
imperialism and its lackeys ever since—as an outright colony for more
than 40 years, and later as a neocolony.
Posing as liberators, U.S. naval forces attacked the Spanish fleet at Manila
Bay in May 1898 and returned exiled Filipinos to help mop up the crumbling
Spanish colonial regime. But when the new Philippine government asserted its
right to independence, U.S. President William McKinley refused to recognize
it.
Instead, while the Senate “purchased” the islands from defeated
Spain for $20 million, U.S. forces launched a three-year war to overthrow the
government it had helped to install. The bloody conflict killed hundreds of
thousands of Filipinos.
Atrocities by U.S. troops were widespread, including torching of villages and
murder of prisoners. But what grabbed public attention and outrage were the
reports by returning U.S. soldiers of barbaric water torture—the same
methods being used by the CIA today.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley after he was assassinated,
cut off the debate by declaring a U.S. victory and continuing the war quietly
under the auspices of a puppet government.
But U.S. war crimes against the people of the Philippines are not distant
history. They continue to this very day, under the rubric of “the war on
terror.”
Chito Quijano, chair of BAYAN-USA, a mass organization of progressive and
revolutionary Filipinos in the U.S., reported Feb. 21 on “the involvement
of U.S. troops in a fatal raid of a Sulu village, south of Mindanao, killing
eight innocent bystanders, including two children and a pregnant
woman.”
Villager Sandrawina Wahid reported that at least four U.S. soldiers
participated in the raid on her village. Soldiers burned down houses and
harassed residents. Wahid’s husband, a vacationing army private, was one
of those killed in the raid.
Noting that U.S. troops are “prohibited under Philippine law to engage in
direct combat,” Quijano called for the removal of all U.S. troops from
the Philippines.
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