waterboard

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.