A Short History of the Water Board

June, according to Amnesty International, is torture awareness month. The Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture, which allows visits by NGOs to detention facities, came into effect last Thursday. The US is not participating. Indeed, Bush has announced that he does not consider himself bound by a recent law passed by Congress that forbids torture. With  that in mind, I thought a brief history of one of the most horrific tortures inflicted in our names might be useful: the water board.

I first saw a water board at Tuol Sleng prison, the Khmer Rouge torture facility in Phnom Penh Cambodia, built in a former high school. “I saw a big wooden box with hand and leg cuffs set into its base that was filled with water and used to suffocate people,”  I wrote at the time. Our CIA interrogators content themselves with plastic wrap and an inclined board.

This form of torture dates back at least to the Renaissance. ABC took a stab at a history a few months ago. The news organization traced the practice to the  little-known Italian Inquisition of the 1500s. The most comprehensive review I was able to locate is in the estimable 1993 primer Rack, Rope and Red-hot Pincers: A History of Torture and its Instruments by Geoffrey Abbott, retired Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London. If anyone should know about torture, I suppose Warder Abbott is our man.

Abbott agrees the Catholic Church came up with the idea, but blames the Spanish. “The responsibility for the introduction of this inhumane torture can more or less be blamed on the Spanish Inquisition,” he writes (114). This dates the origin of the practice to the late 1400s. About two hundred years later, according to Abbott, Ernestus Eremundus Frisius wrote in The History of the Low Countries Disturbances: “There is a bench, which they call the wooden horse, made hollow like a trough, so at to contain a man lying on his back at full length … with his feet much higher than his head. … [T]he torturer throws over his mouth and nostrils a thin cloth, so that he is scarecely able to breath thro’ them, and then in mean while a small stream of water like a thread, not drop by drop, falls from on high, upon the mouth of the person lying in this miserable condition, and so easily sinks down the thin cloth to the bottom of his throat, so that there is no possibility of breathing, his mouth being stopped with water and his nostrils with the cloth, so that the poor wretch is in the same agony as persons ready to die, and breathing out their last. When the cloth is drawn out of the throat, as it often is, so that he may answer to the questions, it is all wet with water and blood, and is like pulling his bowels through his mouth.” Wikipedia offers a good illustration from Antwerp in 1556, although this appears to be the “drinking torture” as opposed to the suffocation technique employed by the Dutch in the citation above, the Khmer Rouge, and our CIA.

Later in the 1600s, Abbott concludes, Dutch colonial authorities in Indonesia refined the technique. “[T]he victim was bound immovable to a vertical board, and cloths were wrapped tightly around his neck and piled high about his face and head. Into this funnel-like receptacle water was slowly poured, soaking into the cloth and mounting higher and higher until it covered his nose and mouth. Half-choking, unable to breathe without taking more and more water into his lungs, the torment continued until the victim showed signs of imminent death by drowning. Only then was he temporarily released, and urged to confess,” he writes. (116).

All in our name. Click here to find out more about Amnesty’s anti-torture efforts.

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