Waterboarding is big news and a big headache for Barack Obama these days, and it seems the president doesn't quite know what to do about it.
Is it a crime, and if it is, who ordered it done, and shouldn't somebody pay for that? And if it is not a crime, why not?
Decisions, decisions.
Well, as it turns out, the reluctant Obama isn't the first president who's had the problem. Teddy Roosevelt dealt with it in the Philippine Islands more than 100 years ago.
Author Edmund Morris tells about that in the second volume of his biography of Teddy, "Theodore Rex."
Roosevelt had become president in 1901 upon the assassination of William McKinley. He inherited, among other things, a brutal guerrilla war between native Filipinos and the United States Army.
The islanders had suffered for three centuries under Spanish rule, and when that ended with the Spanish-American War, what happened to them? A treaty was signed in Paris handing them over to the United States.
The Filipinos, who all along had the quaint notion they deserved to be free, seemed to hate us as much as the Spaniards, and they kept right on fighting. To some of them, unfortunately, this meant they could commit horrible acts of mayhem and torture on individual U.S. soldiers,
Our soldiers responded in kind, to such an extent that it aroused national protests at home and even led to congressional hearings. According to biographer Morris, witness after witness testified to widespread use of the "water cure," which, the author says, had been "developed by Spanish priests as a means of instilling reverence for the Holy Ghost."
Also reported to Congress were flogging, "toasting," and stringing up by the thumbs.
Waterboarding methods apparently have differed slightly over the centuries, but the basics are the same: the victim is strapped or held firmly down, face up. A cloth is placed over his face, and water is poured on the cloth until the choking victim truly believes he is drowning.
Dismayed by these disclosures, the bustling young president met with his cabinet early in 1902 and demanded a full briefing. Told that one general had been ordered to report for trial. he decided that wasn't enough.
He directed his secretary of state to send a cable to the general in command of the army in the Philippines. In that cable, Morris writes, Teddy pledged to back the army "in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work . . .(but}. . . nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army."
He also ordered the court-martial of a general.
Yes. Waterboarding was a crime in the Inquisition, a crime in the Philippines in 1901 and a crime wherever and whenever committed just recently by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Genealogy, they say, is the history of a person’s descent, and I suspect it means more and more to a fellow as he grows old. I know it meant little to me when I was young, and that’s a shame.
I’ll try to explain.
Once a fellow is old, you see, it’s too late to learn much of what’s really important about his family history -- not just when and where his forebears lived, whom they married, how many children they had, what they did for a living, when they died. Those are statistics.
The real story is how they lived – the games they played, what they laughed at, what they cried about, when they were good, when they weren’t, what they celebrated, what they fought about, how they made peace, how they spent their spare time, how they coped with grief, isolation, betrayal, hard times, sinfulness, violent weather, disease and separation.. No one is left to tell.
What brought this to mind was a recent column in the Denver Post. The writer, while visiting the homeland of her ancestors, happened to discover a cousin she didn’t know she had. Somehow this account of a look into the past brought back some memories to me -- guilty memories, in a way, -- of my own, dear maternal grandmother, Annie Maria Stout Steeper, of McLouth, Jefferson County, Kansas.
Now of course I know many things about Annie Steeper. I know she was born in 1864 in Boston, England, to William T. and Sarah Stout and came with the family to the United States in 1871. But I don’t know just why they came to the U.S. in that year, why they came to Kansas, of all places, or why they settled almost immediately on a farm near where a town called McLouth would soon be organized.
I know Annie’s mother died in 1876 of what was then called “consumption,” leaving Annie, the older sister at 12, with much of the responsibility for the care of brothers and sisters. I know her father married a second time, in 1881, and Annie, the very next year, at age 18, married Charles Henry Steeper, who had also come from England and had bought a nearby farm..
I know Charley Steeper, in 1883, moved with Annie and their four children to the new town of McLouth, built a two-story house, got into insurance and joined his father-in-law and a couple of others to form the town bank. I know Charley and Annie Steeper had four children and eventually seven grandchildren, all of whom , at least briefly, lived within one long block of each other..
I know Charley Steeper died in 1916, of leukemia I think, but my grandma lived to be 80, loved and leaned on by three generations. All of which is why I still have a sort of guilty feeling.
: I was born in her house, you see, and lived there for some years. We were close for many, many years, and I have collected lots of statistics about the early times, but I must confess this: I never once sat down, as I should have, and talked with her about important things in her day-by-day life, her family’s life, in those early days. I just didn’t bother.
For instance, what was it like for her, at age seven, to be torn away from friends, from a comfortable home in a historic English town, where her father had been in business and her mother had conducted a school for young ladies, and to be plunked down on a farm in raw, mostly barren northeast Kansas?
What did she think of her family duty, toiling away, starting at age 12, with helping raise her father’s other children? How far away was a doctor? What about schooling? There probably was a one-room country school, with one poorly equipped teacher, but there was no town yet.
How did she get together with Charley Steeper? Were there others?
And what kind of a husband did he turn out to be? I know he was a pillar of the community and a banker and all that, but was he good to his young bride? Did he tell her he loved her? Did he consult with her on important decisions? Did he remember birthdays? Did he allow let her to spend money, real money?
Did he go off with the boys and stay half the night? According to an old news item, before leaving England he had been a reporter for two years for the Western Daily Mercury in Plymouth, and everyone knows how riotous the life of a single young newspaperman can be.
In later life, after and settling down in town, Charley made at least three long railroad trips -- to Colorado, the Pacific coast and England. By himself? Notes that he left don’t indicate Annie was along.
And what about all those one-day train trips to Leavenworth he recorded in his skimpy little business diary? He rode up there in the morning and rode back in the afternoon. What was he doing?
Well, on one particular day, he noted that he had bought two gallons of whiskey. Did he take the booze home – to the home of a very committed member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union? If he did, what did she have to say?
Also, along that line, in later years, how did my grandma get along with the men who married her two daughters -- men from families who were much more friendly toward alcohol, men who, of my certain knowledge, didn’t abide by the law called “Prohibition.”
(In my mother’s family it was commonly known as “temperance,” but there was nothing temperate about it, It was prohibition. It was living as dry as a sun-bleached buffalo bone.}
When I was maybe six or seven, at Sunday School, I was instructed one day to sign a card bearing this “temperance” pledge: “That I may give my best service to home and country, I promise, God helping me, not to use intoxicating liquor in any form.”
I signed it, and I still have that little card, and once, long afterward, my grandma reminded me of it. But by then even she knew it was too late -- way too late..
Being the great lady she was, she always loved me anyway, but I knew I disappointed her. We could have sat down and talked about that.
.
I’ll try to explain.
Once a fellow is old, you see, it’s too late to learn much of what’s really important about his family history -- not just when and where his forebears lived, whom they married, how many children they had, what they did for a living, when they died. Those are statistics.
The real story is how they lived – the games they played, what they laughed at, what they cried about, when they were good, when they weren’t, what they celebrated, what they fought about, how they made peace, how they spent their spare time, how they coped with grief, isolation, betrayal, hard times, sinfulness, violent weather, disease and separation.. No one is left to tell.
What brought this to mind was a recent column in the Denver Post. The writer, while visiting the homeland of her ancestors, happened to discover a cousin she didn’t know she had. Somehow this account of a look into the past brought back some memories to me -- guilty memories, in a way, -- of my own, dear maternal grandmother, Annie Maria Stout Steeper, of McLouth, Jefferson County, Kansas.
Now of course I know many things about Annie Steeper. I know she was born in 1864 in Boston, England, to William T. and Sarah Stout and came with the family to the United States in 1871. But I don’t know just why they came to the U.S. in that year, why they came to Kansas, of all places, or why they settled almost immediately on a farm near where a town called McLouth would soon be organized.
I know Annie’s mother died in 1876 of what was then called “consumption,” leaving Annie, the older sister at 12, with much of the responsibility for the care of brothers and sisters. I know her father married a second time, in 1881, and Annie, the very next year, at age 18, married Charles Henry Steeper, who had also come from England and had bought a nearby farm..
I know Charley Steeper, in 1883, moved with Annie and their four children to the new town of McLouth, built a two-story house, got into insurance and joined his father-in-law and a couple of others to form the town bank. I know Charley and Annie Steeper had four children and eventually seven grandchildren, all of whom , at least briefly, lived within one long block of each other..
I know Charley Steeper died in 1916, of leukemia I think, but my grandma lived to be 80, loved and leaned on by three generations. All of which is why I still have a sort of guilty feeling.
: I was born in her house, you see, and lived there for some years. We were close for many, many years, and I have collected lots of statistics about the early times, but I must confess this: I never once sat down, as I should have, and talked with her about important things in her day-by-day life, her family’s life, in those early days. I just didn’t bother.
For instance, what was it like for her, at age seven, to be torn away from friends, from a comfortable home in a historic English town, where her father had been in business and her mother had conducted a school for young ladies, and to be plunked down on a farm in raw, mostly barren northeast Kansas?
What did she think of her family duty, toiling away, starting at age 12, with helping raise her father’s other children? How far away was a doctor? What about schooling? There probably was a one-room country school, with one poorly equipped teacher, but there was no town yet.
How did she get together with Charley Steeper? Were there others?
And what kind of a husband did he turn out to be? I know he was a pillar of the community and a banker and all that, but was he good to his young bride? Did he tell her he loved her? Did he consult with her on important decisions? Did he remember birthdays? Did he allow let her to spend money, real money?
Did he go off with the boys and stay half the night? According to an old news item, before leaving England he had been a reporter for two years for the Western Daily Mercury in Plymouth, and everyone knows how riotous the life of a single young newspaperman can be.
In later life, after and settling down in town, Charley made at least three long railroad trips -- to Colorado, the Pacific coast and England. By himself? Notes that he left don’t indicate Annie was along.
And what about all those one-day train trips to Leavenworth he recorded in his skimpy little business diary? He rode up there in the morning and rode back in the afternoon. What was he doing?
Well, on one particular day, he noted that he had bought two gallons of whiskey. Did he take the booze home – to the home of a very committed member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union? If he did, what did she have to say?
Also, along that line, in later years, how did my grandma get along with the men who married her two daughters -- men from families who were much more friendly toward alcohol, men who, of my certain knowledge, didn’t abide by the law called “Prohibition.”
(In my mother’s family it was commonly known as “temperance,” but there was nothing temperate about it, It was prohibition. It was living as dry as a sun-bleached buffalo bone.}
When I was maybe six or seven, at Sunday School, I was instructed one day to sign a card bearing this “temperance” pledge: “That I may give my best service to home and country, I promise, God helping me, not to use intoxicating liquor in any form.”
I signed it, and I still have that little card, and once, long afterward, my grandma reminded me of it. But by then even she knew it was too late -- way too late..
Being the great lady she was, she always loved me anyway, but I knew I disappointed her. We could have sat down and talked about that.
.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
The pressure is on, from every which way, to make sure I'm eating nutritious meals. It's partly family, it's medical, it's generational, it's even governmental. And, as they all say, I should know it's for my own good.
Really? I'm not as sure about that as they are.
In gentler times, the diet experts used to be more diplomatic. They might have suggested a scoop of Jell-o for dessert instead of a piece of pie. And I might have said okay.
But that was then. Now they make it seem almost like life-or-death. It's too late now to be fooling around. It's urgent business.
What we've done is emerge into what I call tofu time. We're expected to shun salt, skimp on sugar, drink fat-free milk, trim the fat off the beef.
Like it or not.
We must learn to love broccoli, Brussels sprouts, arugula, cauliflower, spinach and such. We should recognize that even seaweed, as a food, has medicinal value.
Well!
Obviously this is revolutionary change for a guy who grew up in the rural Midwest when meals meant bacon-and-eggs, meat-and-potatoes, hefty desserts. When the side vegetable was likely to be green peas, some kind of bean, corn, perhaps a carrot, beet or turnip.
Salt and sugar were our friends.
While it is true that my family, once in great while, would put a bowl of cauliflower or spinach on the table, I never ate them. To this day I wouldn't touch spinach with a ten-foot fork.
Nowadays, in promoting its campaign of what's-good-for-you, the tofu/fat-free establishment will occasionally issue a list of "basic foods." These commonly include chunks of stark, naked, tasteless fish, strips of skinless chicken, clumps of green, leafy stuff my uncle used to call rabbit food.
It's all disappointing.
But now, in closing what I admit is a biased rant, I want to make something clear. I would never presume to consider myself any sort of expert on food. My only credential is that I really enjoy things that taste good, tolerate others and ignore the rest.
And finally, just for the hell of it, I will take the liberty of suggesting a few of my own "basic" foods:
They are: butter, bacon, corn bread, prime rib, mashed potatoes and gravy, cherry pie, fried catfish, shrimp fried rice, chocolate ice cream, green chili, peaches, Irish whiskey, cheesecake and zucchini (if properly cooked with onion and jalapeno].
Yes, I know. It's been drilled into me, over and over, that this sort of diet is so unhealthy it's dangerous. It means I can never hope to reach a ripe old age.
I'll take the chance.
Charley Roos, age 87.
Really? I'm not as sure about that as they are.
In gentler times, the diet experts used to be more diplomatic. They might have suggested a scoop of Jell-o for dessert instead of a piece of pie. And I might have said okay.
But that was then. Now they make it seem almost like life-or-death. It's too late now to be fooling around. It's urgent business.
What we've done is emerge into what I call tofu time. We're expected to shun salt, skimp on sugar, drink fat-free milk, trim the fat off the beef.
Like it or not.
We must learn to love broccoli, Brussels sprouts, arugula, cauliflower, spinach and such. We should recognize that even seaweed, as a food, has medicinal value.
Well!
Obviously this is revolutionary change for a guy who grew up in the rural Midwest when meals meant bacon-and-eggs, meat-and-potatoes, hefty desserts. When the side vegetable was likely to be green peas, some kind of bean, corn, perhaps a carrot, beet or turnip.
Salt and sugar were our friends.
While it is true that my family, once in great while, would put a bowl of cauliflower or spinach on the table, I never ate them. To this day I wouldn't touch spinach with a ten-foot fork.
Nowadays, in promoting its campaign of what's-good-for-you, the tofu/fat-free establishment will occasionally issue a list of "basic foods." These commonly include chunks of stark, naked, tasteless fish, strips of skinless chicken, clumps of green, leafy stuff my uncle used to call rabbit food.
It's all disappointing.
But now, in closing what I admit is a biased rant, I want to make something clear. I would never presume to consider myself any sort of expert on food. My only credential is that I really enjoy things that taste good, tolerate others and ignore the rest.
And finally, just for the hell of it, I will take the liberty of suggesting a few of my own "basic" foods:
They are: butter, bacon, corn bread, prime rib, mashed potatoes and gravy, cherry pie, fried catfish, shrimp fried rice, chocolate ice cream, green chili, peaches, Irish whiskey, cheesecake and zucchini (if properly cooked with onion and jalapeno].
Yes, I know. It's been drilled into me, over and over, that this sort of diet is so unhealthy it's dangerous. It means I can never hope to reach a ripe old age.
I'll take the chance.
Charley Roos, age 87.
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