The waterboard form of torture dates back at least to the Renaissance. ABC took a stab at a history in 2006. 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 about Amnesty International’s anti-torture efforts.
Finally, here are some additional pictures by Jonah Blank from DavidCorn.com. Blank, Corn writes, is an anthropologist and former Senior Editor of US News & World Report. He is a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and has taught at Harvard and Georgetown.
Waterboarding isn’t torture.
I have a really simple litmus test for what is and isn’t torture.
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Water boarding is torture. It’s not even a close call.
Among other tortures, a version of waterboarding called the shower bath was standard punishment at Sing Sing prison in New York through at least the 1860s.
The funniest (not really but most ironic) thing about the torture stuff is that the confessions/information you get out of them aren’t really that good. The idea that we may need to waterboard some dude to prevent an imminent attack is quite silly and there are much better methods to get better information.
Please do enlighten us! I’m no fan of torture, but I’d like to know what you’re talking about.
According to Jack Goldsmith who I had a chance to talk to last week (I took some notes and have been meaning to blog it but havent had time) he argued that forms of psychological torture which created mental pain but no physical pain were more effective, also perhaps similarly ethically challenged. For instance convincing someone his family was in danger, keeping them in dark rooms, lying about other co-conspirators being caught to create a prisoners dilemma, etc. are all more effective methods than waterboarding in the sense that waterboarding will likely create a forced and false confessions and they will be truthful in the other methods.
The FBI was able to get that Egyptian with the aircraft radio in his hotel room to confess simply by telling him his whole family would be tortured back in Eygpt. Jack Goldsmith is right, go for the easy tools first. Certainly neither the United States nor Israel should be limited in their tools of self-preservation.