https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
Sonja heeft een nieuwe reactie op je bericht "Media Corruptie 48" achtergelaten:
Binnenkort wordt een Senaatsrapport gepubliceerd over de martelpraktijk van de CIA. Ik schrijf 'Senaatsrapport' omdat deze 5500 van de 6000 pagina's uit het oorspronkelijke rapport verwijderd heeft, hetgeen op een enkel geval na in de pers wordt verzwegen. Wanneer het om de VS en de Amerikaanse geheime diensten gaat vermijdt de NOS het woord 'martelen'. Gebruikelijk is het om "harde verhoormethoden" te noemen. Maar de NOS gaat vooruit, en nu heet het "gewelddadige" of "gewelddadiger verhoormethoden". Het ANP schuwt het woord 'martelen' ook, die noemt het "verhoormethodes die niet waren toegestaan".
Water cure as a phrase for a form of torture refers to a method in which the victim is forced to drink large quantities of water in a short time, resulting in gastric distension, water intoxication and possibly death...
Police
The use of "third degree interrogation" techniques in order to compel confession, ranging from "psychological duress such as prolonged confinement to extreme violence and torture", was widespread in early American policing as late as the 1930s. Author Daniel G. Lassiter classified the water cure as "orchestrated physical abuse", and described the police technique as a "modern day variation of the method of water torture that was popular during the Middle Ages." The technique employed by the police involved either holding the head in water until almost drowning, or laying on the back and forcing water into the mouth or nostrils.[18]:47 Such techniques were classified as "'covert' third degree torture" since they left no signs of physical abuse, and became popular after 1910 when the direct application of physical violence in order to force a confession became a media issue and some courts began to deny obviously compelled confessions.[19]:42 The publication of this information in 1931 as part of the Wickersham Commission's "Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement" led to a decline in the use of third degree police interrogation techniques in the 1930s and 1940s.[19]:38
Spanish-American War[edit]
Major Edwin Glenn of the United States was suspended from command for one month and fined $50 for using the water cure. The Army judge advocate said the charges constituted "resort to torture with a view to extort a confession" and recommended disapproval because "the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture".[4]
Philippine-American War[edit]
 | Wikiquote has quotations related to: this topic |
Water cure was among the forms of torture used by American soldiers on Filipinos during the Philippine-American War.[20][21][22][23] President Theodore Roosevelt privately assured a friend that the water cure was "an old Filipino method of mild torture. Nobody was seriously damaged whereas the Filipinos had inflicted incredible tortures on our people."[24] The president went further stating "Nevertheless, torture is not a thing that we can tolerate." However, a report at the time noted its lethality; "a soldier who was with General Funston had stated that he helped to administer the water cure to one hundred and sixty natives, all but twenty-six of whom died".[23]See the Lodge Committee for detailed testimony of the use of the water cure.
Lieutenant Grover Flint during the Philippine-American War:
In his book The Forging of the American Empire Sidney Lens recounted:
Japan[edit]
During World War II, water cure was among the forms of torture used by Japanese troops (especially the Kempeitai) in occupied territory. A report from the postwar International Military Tribunal for the Far East summarized it as follows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cure_(torture)
Waterboarding is a form of torture, more specifically a type of water torture, in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning. Waterboarding can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage, and death.[1] Adverse physical consequences can manifest themselves months after the event, while psychological effects can last for years.[2]
In the most common method of waterboarding, the captive's face is covered with cloth or some other thin material, and the subject is immobilized on his/her back. Interrogators pour water onto the face over the breathing passages, causing an almost immediate gag reflexand creating the sensation for the captive that he is drowning.[3][4][5] Victims of waterboarding are at extreme risk of sudden death due to the aspiration of vomitus. Vomitus travels up the esophagus, which can then be inhaled (mostly into the right lung due to its more direct pathway).
The term water board torture appeared in press reports as early as 1976.[6] In the fall of 2007, it was widely reported that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was using waterboarding on extrajudicial prisoners and that the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice had authorized the procedure among enhanced interrogation techniques.[7][8] Senator John McCain noted that in World War II, the United States military hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners of war.[9] The CIA confirmed having used waterboarding on three Al-Qaeda suspects: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, in 2002 and 2003.[10][11]
In its war on terror, the George W. Bush administration through Jay S. Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, issued in August 2002 and March 2003 what became known in 2004, after being leaked, as the Torture Memos.[12] These legal opinions (including the 2002 Bybee memo) argued for a narrow definition of torture under U.S. law. The first three were addressed to the CIA, which took them as authority to use the described enhanced interrogation techniques (more generally classified as torture) on detainees classified as enemy combatants. In March 2003, John Yoo, the acting Office of Legal Counsel, issued a fourth memo to the General Counsel of DOD, concluding his legal opinion by saying that federal laws related to torture and other abuse did not apply to interrogations overseas, five days before the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq. The legal opinions were withdrawn by Jack Goldsmith of the OLC in June 2004 but reaffirmed by the succeeding head of the OLC in December 2004.[13][14] During the presidency of George W. Bush, U.S. government officials at various times said they did not believe waterboarding to be a form of torture.[15][16][17][18][19]
In January 2009, with a change in administrations, U.S. President Barack Obama banned the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in interrogations of detainees. In April 2009, the U.S. Department of Defenserefused to say whether waterboarding is still used for training (e.g. SERE) U.S. military personnel in resistance to interrogation.[20][21]
Mark Twain on Waterboarding
And more premonitions of imperial America from Samuel Clemens and Theodore Roosevelt.
It was called the 'water cure' when road towards imperialism lay in front of Sam Clemens and Teddy Roosevelt.
Return to the Vertigo Years
It's beginning to look a lot like 1900 again. Yikes.Mark Twain on an E-Reader
Reading this huge autobiography on a Kobo is a good way to ponder the future of books.Mark Twain, Father of the Internet
He saw it all clearly through his 'telelectroscope.'Iconic Teddy, White Supremacist
History suggests Roosevelt created the template for American imperialism.- Read more: Rights + Justice,
- Mark Twain and The Colonel: Samuel Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century
- Rowman & Littlefield (2012)
For most of the 20th century, its first decade was usually forgotten. Historians seemed to think that between Queen Victoria's death in 1901 and the start of World War I in 1914, nothing had really happened.
Now that we're in the same period of another century, we're looking at those prewar years with new interest. History, we're told, doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If so, we are rhyming unpleasantly with the early 1900s. The early 20th century in America was a "Progressive" era, but a hundred years later America has made precious little progress from that grim and violent age.
Philip McFarland doesn't say that in so many words, but it's implicit in this sad, beautiful history built around the lives of two of the most famous Americans of their day. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was a self-educated printer and journalist. Theodore Roosevelt was a Harvard-educated intellectual, descended from a long line of merchant-aristocrats. Both men were enormous successes, and disastrous failures.
Roosevelt, almost 25 years younger than Clemens, was one of his devoted fans, reading him aloud and laughing until he turned purple. Clemens, watching the political rise of Roosevelt, saw much to admire -- but then became his implacable enemy after the Spanish-American War and the U.S. takeover of the Philippines. Roosevelt, in turn, said privately that he'd like to "skin Mark Twain alive."
The two men embodied the American dream, each in his own way. Clemens rose from rural obscurity, going west to Nevada rather than fight for the South in the Civil War. He made no money in the silver mines, but his humorous and observant articles about the other get-rich-quick dreamers made him rich very quickly indeed. Exploiting his early success, he joined a group of rich Americans on a tour of the Holy Land; the result was The Innocents Abroad, the first of his best-sellers.
Frightening success
Clemens's success was so consistent that it scared him. One of his tour companions was a young man from a wealthy family. Clemens fell in love with a photo of his friend's sister, and married her. He set up his own publishing company, which brought out not only his own books but the memoirs of U.S. Grant -- an enormous success. Between his wife's wealth and his own, he was astoundingly rich and, by the end of the 19th century, arguably the most famous American in the world.
A high-tech visionary who wanted to become a great American capitalist, Clemens poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a new typesetting technology that failed. Rather than go bankrupt and leave his creditors high and dry, he embarked with his family on a worldwide lecture tour that covered his debts and renewed his wealth.
But by the end of the century, Sam Clemens had suffered worse reversals: the death of an infant son, and then that of a brilliant and promising daughter who stayed home while the family went around the world. Then his beloved wife Olivia died after a long illness, leaving Clemens adrift.
His country seemed to be drifting as well. Clemens had lived as an expatriate through most of the 1890s, finding it cheaper to maintain his large household in Europe. Perhaps that gave him a detached view of his own country's growing strength. Clemens admired much of what the young president Roosevelt was doing, such as building up a powerful navy and sending it around the world.
He had also initially supported the Spanish-American War, which had lifted Roosevelt to national stature as leader of the Rough Riders in Cuba. The war was supposed to liberate Cuba, with the Philippines as a kind of afterthought. When it became clear that the Filipinos had merely exchanged colonial masters, Clemens became a strong anti-imperialist.
Attacking 'uniformed assassins'
Here is where we rhyme with his era: Like Iraq, the "liberation" of the Philippines turned into an insurrection by the people to be liberated. Clemens furiously condemned his countrymen's war crimes, which included a form of torture he bitterly called the "water cure" -- we know it as waterboarding. "To make them confess -- what? Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless."
Clemens also condemned the 1906 Moro massacre, when 900 men, women and children were slaughtered by the troops of General Leonard Wood. He damned the general and his men as "uniformed assassins" and "Christian butchers," and sarcastically quoted Roosevelt’s letter of praise to Wood.
"In Clemens's view," says McFarland, "Roosevelt was insane about war anyway, and feats of arms, and the honor of the American flag no matter in what sordid way the 'honor' was upheld."
Coming from Sam Clemens, such criticism was vitriol. But the mood in the U.S. was already pro-war and pro-empire, and Clemens wrote several such polemics that he didn't publish, knowing they would hurt his reputation (and sales) if he published them. (The Moros, as Filipino Muslims were known, are still battling for their freedom.)
In his own way, Roosevelt too was a self-made man. He came from a wealthy family, but he had been a sickly, asthmatic little boy. As a youth he worked out, rode, hunted, and created the image of a man's man. Like Clemens, he wrote popular books on life in the west, where he bought and ran his own ranch. He was a formidable intellectual, energetically cranking out a naval history of the War of 1812, a multi-volume series of books on "The Winning of the West," and countless articles and speeches.
Like Clemens, Roosevelt was a husband who worshiped his wife. But when she died he almost never again mentioned her name and transferred his worship to his second wife. Both men romped with their children and basked in the attention of their large families.
Not a simple right-left conflict
Their conflict was not even a matter of right versus left. In many ways, Theodore Roosevelt was farther left than any president before or after him. He attacked the mega-corporations and the "malefactors of great wealth" who ran them. He was the first great conservationist and environmentalist, and an advocate for safe food and drugs. Yet he was also a racist, trained by his Harvard professors to believe in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon over all other races.
Clemens meanwhile was friends with the likes of Andrew Carnegie and Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who put Clemens's finances on a sound footing after the collapse of his publishing house and his investments in the failed typesetting machine. And while he had grown up accepting slavery as natural, he outgrew the bigotry of his times and condemned it as "The United States of Lyncherdom."
Each man embodied one aspect of the American contradiction. One wanted to be rich, while seeing the folly in that ambition right from the start. The other wanted to be great, and saw the folly in that ambition all too late.
Roosevelt had fallen into the presidency after the assassination of William McKinley. He won re-election on his own, and promised he would not seek another term. His hand-picked successor, William Taft, was a disappointment, and Roosevelt went back into politics as leader of the Bull Moose Party in 1912. By splitting the Republicans, he handed victory to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson kept the U.S. out of World War I until 1917, when Roosevelt would have joined Britain and France years at the outset. War, he believed, made a nation "manly" and improved its character. When the U.S. did enter the war, Roosevelt offered to raise and lead a new American division like the Rough Riders. Wilson ignored him, but three of Roosevelt's sons did go into combat. Two were wounded in action. And Quentin Roosevelt was shot down in a July 1918 dogfight.
"Roosevelt never recovered from Quentin's death," McFarland writes, "although he bore it stoically... Yet privately, alone, the father felt the loss of poor Quinikens to his core, and to the very last." He died in his sleep in early 1919, a few weeks after the Armistice.
From success to disaster
Both men had become symbols of American success, and had pursued that success into disaster. Each man stood for an America that rebuked the other. Yet each retained a profound respect for the other. When Clemens came home to the U.S. after his wife's death in Europe, Roosevelt ordered the customs office to admit the widowed author's luggage without inspection. And Clemens never again spoke a critical word in public about the first imperial president.
Philip McFarland observes, late in his book, "The humorist could never have foreseen -- though he seems sometimes to have intuited -- the America of our own day. Back then nobody could have: the more than 800 permanent United States military bases set up in foreign countries on every continent but Antarctica, not counting bases at present (2012) in Afghanistan and (still) in Iraq;... and the chief executive himself invested with swelling imperial powers assumed on the all but unchallengeable grounds of national security... Even his own times, at the outset of our progress toward policing the globe, was proving too much for the humorist.
"'The 20th century is a stranger to me,' he wrote in his notebook. 'I wish it well but my heart is all for my own century. I took 65 years of it... just on a risk, but if I had known as much about it as I know now I would have taken the whole of it.'"
The 19th century as we know it was largely created by Samuel Clemens. The 20th century, and our own 21st, were largely created by Theodore Roosevelt. ![[Tyee]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sS4fXndyB5m9_XoHJGT24wD-Xt-Qvfd5CvICZ5EpKNTqL6JpIDciOnmuTDYF-N__mzFMLtj6Rz5xWdKDVyLdHfGURS2w1OqoSIWfExqmqt58F3IA=s0-d)
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