Adam Grzelak Criminal Law and Procedure Week 10 Response

 "Probable Cause Reasonable Suspicion and Arrests"    

After reading the first sentence of "Outsourcing Torture" I started laughing so loud my mom came in my room and asked me if everything was okay. I'm serious! President Bush's statement "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture" is obviously the biggest load of crap.  Maher Arar an innocent man coming home from a family vacation to be detained and tortured by our "government" makes me sick. His story reminds me very much of the movie "Rendition" which I think should be seen in class because it shows you the true meaning behind the CIA's "dirty work".  Torture is being used to get shit out of people even if they have nothing to do with whatever they're accused of and that is what pisses me off.  Solitary Confinement will make anyone and everyone go crazy no matter how strong of a person you are. Admitting you are guilty to a crime you haven't even commited is exactly what the government wants to get out of innocent people who have names that sound like "terrorists".  This topic reminds me of when you told me that you drove to Arizona instead of taking a plane because your husband deals with too much shit at the airport because he is Muslim and that he basically doesn't want to deal with all the bullshit at the airport  That really made me think.  I don't give a shit if your name is Ahmed Hussein Bin Laden or Joe Sikorski, a name doesn't mean anything to me.  I speak from experience because one of my friends is Muslim and his name according to MEDIA "sounds" like a "terrorists" name.  My friend (don't want to give out his name) asked me to take him to the airport because he was going on vacation to see his family in Pakistan.  He went through so much shit because he has black hair, dark skin, and a beard.  Everyone was looking at him like he was criminal.  I got so pissed I wanted to tell everyone off but I know that would get me arrested. Ha Ha. Oh wait, that's another topic.  I truly hope that all this corruption and bullshit will end soon because inoccent people are getting hurt and tortured on a daily basis even if the media portrays it to be isolated it happens all the time.  Let's do something about it!! Adam Grzelak 

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Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda Suspects

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE, ABCNews

April 9, 2008 In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said. Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding. The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were "hundreds of [Principals] meetings" on a wide variety of topics and that he was "not at liberty to discuss private meetings." The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment today. Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture. "I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us the information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and across the world," Bush said in a speech in September 2006. In interview with ABC's Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: "It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States." But this is the first time sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them. The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said the extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim details of exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted showed how seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat. It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided by Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was shot three times during the gun battle. At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed another attack as imminent -- and with information on al Qaeda scarce -- the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical breakthrough. Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah's capture, was ordered to remain at the wounded captive's side at all times. "I ripped up a sheet and tied him to the bed," Kiriakou said. But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative. "I told him I had heard he was being a jerk," Kiriakou recalled. "I said, 'These guys can make it easy on you or they can make it hard.' It was after that he became defiant." The CIA wanted to use more aggressive -- and physical -- methods to get information. The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council's Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Advisor Rice and including then-Attorney General Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA's plans for Zubaydah. The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects subjected to waterboarding. After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Mohammad was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. At a hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation. COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of the treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006? Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive from these people? KSM: Statement for whom? COURT: To any of these interrogators. KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me... Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government interrogators to use the "enhanced" questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called "Golden Shield" for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations became public. Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era "Phoenix Program" of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a "rogue agency" out of control. But even after the "Golden Shield" was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal. According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said. Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas. "It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'" Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved. "These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it's legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it." Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said. According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News. At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Vice President Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source. A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program. But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques." Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."   Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Annals of American History

The Water Cure

Debating torture and counterinsurgency-a century ago.

by Paul Kramer February 25, 2008

A picture of a "water detail," reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. "It is a terrible torture," one soldier wrote.

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain's largest colony, might serve as an effective "stepping stone" to China's markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

During the next half year, it became clear that American and Filipino visions for the islands' future were at odds. U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain-keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city-and President William McKinley refused to recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos' need for "benevolent assimilation." Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops waged a war to "free" the islands' population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces-the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners-began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn't censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller's unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the "water cure." "Now, this is the way we give them the water cure," he explained. "Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don't give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I'll tell you it is a terrible torture."

On occasion, someone-a local antiwar activist, one suspects-forwarded these clippings to centers of anti-imperialist publishing in the Northeast. But the war's critics were at first hesitant to do much with them: they were hard to substantiate, and they would, it was felt, subject the publishers to charges of anti-Americanism. This was especially true as the politics of imperialism became entangled in the 1900 Presidential campaign. As the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, clashed with the Republican incumbent over imperialism, which the Democrats called "the paramount issue," critics of the war had to defend themselves against accusations of having treasonously inspired the insurgency, prolonged the conflict, and betrayed American soldiers. But, after McKinley won a second term, the critics may have felt that they had little to lose.

Ultimately, outraged dissenters-chief among them the relentless Philadelphia-based reformer Herbert Welsh-forced the question of U.S. atrocities into the light. Welsh, who was descended from a wealthy merchant family, might have seemed an unlikely investigator of military abuse at the edge of empire. His main antagonists had previously been Philadelphia's party bosses, whose sordid machinations were extensively reported in Welsh's earnest upstart weekly, City and State. Yet he had also been a founder of the "Indian rights" movement, which attempted to curtail white violence and fraud while pursuing Native American "civilization" through Christianity, U.S. citizenship, and individual land tenure. An expansive concern with bloodshed and corruption at the nation's periphery is perhaps what drew Welsh's imagination from the Dakotas to Southeast Asia. He had initially been skeptical of reports of misconduct by U.S. troops. But by late 1901, faced with what he considered "overwhelming" proof, Welsh emerged as a single-minded campaigner for the exposure and punishment of atrocities, running an idiosyncratic investigation out of his Philadelphia offices. As one who "professes to believe in the gospel of Christ," he declared, he felt obliged to condemn "the cruelties and barbarities which have been perpetrated under our flag in the Philippines." Only the vigorous pursuit of justice could restore "the credit of the American nation in the eyes of the civilized world." By early 1902, three assistants to Welsh were chasing down returning soldiers for their testimony, and Philippine "cruelties" began to crowd Philadelphia's party bosses from the pages of City and State.

At about the same time, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of Massachusetts, an eloquent speaker and one of the few Republican opponents of the war, was persuaded by "letters in large numbers" from soldiers to call for a special investigation. He proposed the formation of an independent committee, but Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, another Massachusetts Republican, insisted that the hearings take place inside his own, majority-Republican Committee on the Philippines. The investigation began at the end of January, 1902, and, in the months that followed, two distinct visions of the hearings emerged. Hoar had hoped for a broad examination of the conduct of the war; Lodge, along with the Republican majority, wanted to keep the focus on the present, and was "not convinced" of the need to delve into "some of the disputed questions of the past." For the next ten weeks, prominent military and civilian officials expounded on the progress of American arms, the illegitimacy of Aguinaldo's government, its victimization of Filipinos, and the population's incapacity for self-government and hunger for American tutelage.

Still, the subject of what was called, with a late-Victorian delicacy, "cruelties" by U.S. troops arose a few days into the hearings, at the outset of three weeks' testimony by William Howard Taft. A Republican judge from Ohio, Taft had been sent to the islands to head the Philippine Commission, the core of the still prospective "postwar" government. He was speaking about the Federal Party, an élite body of collaborating Filipinos who were aiding "pacification," when Senator Thomas Patterson, a Democrat from Colorado, abruptly inquired about "the use of the so-called water cure in securing the surrender of guns." Taft replied that he "had intended to speak of the charges of torture which were made from time to time." He then allowed himself to be redirected by the young Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, an ardent imperialist who wanted to discuss the deportation of Filipino "irreconcilables" to Guam. But antiwar senators proved persistent. Minutes later, Senator Charles A. Culberson, a Democrat from Texas, pushed again. This time, Taft conceded:

That cruelties have been inflicted; that people have been shot when they ought not to have been; that there have been in individual instances of water cure, that torture which I believe involves pouring water down the throat so that the man swells and gets the impression that he is going to be suffocated and then tells what he knows, which was a frequent treatment under the Spaniards, I am told-all these things are true.

Taft then immediately tried to contain the moral and political implications of the admission. Military officers had repeatedly issued statements condemning "such methods," he claimed, backing up their warnings with investigations and courts-martial. He also pointed to "some rather amusing instances" in which, he maintained, Filipinos had invited torture. Eager to share intelligence with the Americans, but needing a plausible cover, these Filipinos, in Taft's recounting, had presented themselves and "said they would not say anything until they were tortured." In many cases, it appeared, American forces had been only too happy to oblige them.

Less than two weeks later, on February 17, 1902, the Administration delivered to the Lodge committee a fervent response that was tonally at odds with Taft's jocular testimony. Submitted by Secretary of War Elihu Root, the report proclaimed that "charges in the public press of cruelty and oppression exercised by our soldiers towards natives of the Philippines" had been either "unfounded or grossly exaggerated." The document, entitled "Charges of Cruelty, Etc., to the Natives of the Philippines," was an unsubtle exercise in the politics of proportion. A meagre forty-four pages related to allegations of torture and abuse of Filipinos by U.S. soldiers; almost four hundred pages were devoted to records of military tribunals convened to try Filipinos for "cruelties" against their countrymen. If the committee sought atrocities, Root suggested, it need look no further than the Filipino insurgency, which had been "conducted with the barbarous cruelty common among uncivilized races." The relatively slender ledger of courts-martial was not, for Root, evidence of the unevenness of U.S. military justice on the islands. Rather, it showed that the American campaign had been carried out "with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare, with careful and genuine consideration for the prisoner and the noncombatant, with self-restraint, and with humanity never surpassed, if ever equaled, in any conflict, worthy only of praise, and reflecting credit on the American people."

The scale of abuses in the Philippines remains unknowable, but, as early as March, rhetoric like Root's was being undercut by further revelations from the islands. When Major Littleton Waller, of the Marines, appeared before a court-martial in Manila that month, unprecedented public attention fell on the brutal extremities of U.S. combat, specifically on the island of Samar in late 1901. In the wake of a surprise attack by Filipino revolutionaries on American troops in the town of Balangiga, which had killed forty-eight of seventy-four members of an American Army company, Waller and his forces were deployed on a search-and-destroy mission across the island. During an ill-fated march into the island's uncharted interior, Waller had become lost, feverish, and paranoid. Believing that Filipino guides and carriers in the service of his marines were guilty of treachery, he ordered eleven of them summarily shot. During his court-martial, Waller testified that he had been under orders from the volatile, aging Brigadier General Jacob Smith ("Hell-Roaring Jake," to his comrades) to transform the island into a "howling wilderness," to "kill and burn" to the greatest degree possible-"The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me"-and to shoot anyone "capable of bearing arms." According to Waller, when he asked Smith what this last stipulation meant in practical terms, Smith had clarified that he thought that ten-year-old Filipino boys were capable of bearing arms. (In light of those orders, Waller was acquitted.)

The disclosures stirred indignation in the United States but also prompted rousing defenses. Smith was court-martialled that spring, and was found guilty of "conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline." Yet the penalty was slight: he was simply reprimanded and made to retire early. Root then used the opportunity to tout the restraint that the U.S. forces had shown, given their "desperate struggle" against "a cruel and savage foe." The Lodge committee, meanwhile, maintained its equanimity, with a steady procession of generals and officials recounting the success and benevolence of American operations.

That is what, on April 14th, made the testimony of Charles S. Riley, a clerk at a Massachusetts plumbing-and-steam-fitting company, so explosive. A letter from Riley had been published in the Northampton Daily Herald in March of the previous year, describing the water-cure torture of Tobeniano Ealdama, the presidente of the town of Igbaras, where Riley, then a sergeant in the 26th Volunteer Infantry, had been stationed. Herbert Welsh had learned of Riley, and enlisted him, among other soldiers, to testify before the committee. Amid the bullying questions of pro-war senators, Riley's account of the events of November 27, 1900, unfolded, and it was startlingly at odds with most official accounts. Upon entering the town's convent, which had been seized as a headquarters, Riley had witnessed Ealdama being bound and forced full of water, while supervised by a contract surgeon and Captain Edwin Glenn, a judge advocate. Ealdama's throat had been "held so he could not prevent swallowing the water, so that he had to allow the water to run into his stomach"; the water was then "forced out of him by pressing a foot on his stomach or else with [the soldiers'] hands." The ostensible goal of the water cure was to obtain intelligence: after a second round of torture, carried out in front of the convent by a "water detail" of five or six men, Ealdama confessed to serving as a captain in the insurgency. He then led U.S. forces into the bush in search of insurgents. After their return to Igbaras, that night, Glenn had ordered that the town, consisting of between four and five hundred houses, be burned to the ground, as Riley explained, "on account of the condition of affairs exposed by the treatment."

Riley's testimony, which was confirmed by another member of the unit, was inconvenient, especially coming after official declarations about America's "civilized" warfare. The next day, Secretary of War Root directed that a court-martial be held in San Francisco and cabled the general in charge of the Philippines to transport to the West Coast Glenn and any witnesses who could be located. "The President desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts, nothing concealed and no man being for any reason favored or shielded," Root declared. Yet in the cable Root assured the general, well in advance of the facts, that "the violations of law and humanity, of which these cases, if true, are examples, will prove to be few and occasional, and not to characterize the conduct of the army generally in the Philippines." Most significant, though, was the decision, possibly at Glenn's request, to shift the location of the court-martial from San Francisco to Catbalogan, in the Philippines, close to sympathetic officers fighting a war, and an ocean away from the accusing witnesses, whose units had returned home. Glenn had objected to a trial in America because, he said, there was a "high state of excitement in the United States upon the subject of the so-called water cure and the consequent misunderstanding of what was meant by that term."

The trial lasted a week. When Ealdama testified about his experience-"My stomach and throat pained me, and also the nose where they passed the salt water through"-Glenn interrupted, trying to minimize the man's suffering by claiming (incorrectly) that Ealdama had stated that he had experienced pain only "as [the water] passed through." Glenn defended his innocence by defending the water cure itself. He maintained that the torture of Ealdama was "a legitimate exercise of force under the laws of war," being "justified by military necessity." In making this case, Glenn shifted the focus to the enemy's tactics. He emphasized the treachery of Ealdama, who had been tried and convicted by a military commission a year earlier as a "war traitor," for aiding the insurgency. Testimony was presented by U.S. military officers and Filipinos concerning the insurgency's guerrilla tactics, which violated the norms of "civilized war." Found guilty, Glenn was sentenced to a one-month suspension and a fifty-dollar fine. "The court is thus lenient," the sentence read, "on account of the circumstances as shown in evidence." (Glenn retired from the Army, in 1919, as a brigadier general.) Meanwhile, Ealdama, twice tortured by Glenn's forces, was serving a sentence of ten years' hard labor; he had been temporarily released to enable him to testify against his torturer.

The vote of the court-martial at Catbalogan had been unanimous, but at least one prominent dissenter within the Army registered his disapproval. Judge Advocate General George B. Davis, forwarding the trial records to Root, wrote an introductory memorandum that seethed with indignation. Glenn's sentence, in his view, was "inadequate to the offense established by the testimony of the witnesses and the admission of the accused." Paragraph 16 of the General Orders, No. 100, the Army's Civil War-era combat regulations, could not have been clearer: "Military necessity does not admit of cruelty-that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions." Davis conceded that, in a "rare or isolated case," force might legitimately be used in "obtaining the unwilling service" of a guide, if justified as a "measure of emergency." But a careful examination of the events preceding the tortures at Igbaras revealed that "no such case existed." Furthermore, Glenn had described the water cure as "the habitual method of obtaining information from individual insurgents"-in other words, as "a method of conducting operations." But the operational use of torture, Davis stressed, was strictly forbidden. Regarding a subsequent water-cure court-martial, he wrote, "No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations." Otherwise, he inquired, "where is the line to be drawn?" And he rehearsed an unsettling, judicial calibration of pain:

Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; shall he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

The questions were so vile and absurd-they were the kind that the Filipinos' Spanish tormentors had once asked-that it seemed "hardly necessary to pursue the subject further." The United States, he concluded, "can not afford to sanction the addition of torture to the several forms of force which may be legitimately employed in war." Glenn's sentence, however, stood. This would be perhaps the most intensive effort by the War Department to punish those who practiced the water cure in the Philippines.

Confronted with the facts provided by the Waller, Smith, and Glenn courts-martial, and with the testimony of a dozen more soldier witnesses who had followed Riley, Administration officials, military officers, and pro-war journalists launched a vigorous campaign in defense of the Army and the war. Their arguments were passionate and wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory. Some simply attacked the war's critics, those who sought political advantage by crying out that "our soldiers are barbarous savages," as one major general put it. Some contended that atrocities were the exclusive province of the Macabebe Scouts, collaborationist Filipino troops over whom, it was alleged, U.S. officers had little control. Some denied, on racial grounds, that Filipinos were owed the "protective" limits of "civilized warfare." When, during the committee hearings, Senator Joseph Rawlins had asked General Robert Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing U.S. troops was "within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare," Hughes had replied succinctly, "These people are not civilized." More generally, some people, while conceding that American soldiers had engaged in "cruelties," insisted that the behavior reflected the barbaric sensibilities of the Filipinos. "I think I know why these things have happened," Lodge offered in a Senate speech in May. They had "grown out of the conditions of warfare, of the war that was waged by the Filipinos themselves, a semicivilized people, with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics, with the Asiatic indifference to life, with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiatic cruelty, all tinctured and increased by three hundred years of subjection to Spain." As the military physician Henry Rowland later phrased it, the American soldiers' "lust of slaughter" was "reflected from the faces of those around them."

In his private and public considerations of the question of "cruelties," Theodore Roosevelt-who had been President since McKinley's assassination, in September of 1901-lurched from intolerance for torture to attempts to rationalize it and outrage at the antiwar activists who made it a public issue. Writing to a friend, he admitted that, faced with a "very treacherous" enemy, "not a few of the officers, especially those of the native scouts, and not a few of the enlisted men, began to use the old Filipino method of mild torture, the water cure." Roosevelt was convinced that "nobody was seriously damaged," whereas "the Filipinos had inflicted incredible tortures upon our own people." Still, he wrote, "torture is not a thing that we can tolerate." In a May, 1902, Memorial Day address before assembled veterans at Arlington National Cemetery, Roosevelt deplored the "wholly exceptional" atrocities by American troops: "Determined and unswerving effort must be made, and has been and is being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future." But he deplored the nation's betrayal by anti-imperialist critics "who traduce our armies in the Philippines." In conquering the Philippines, he claimed, the United States was, in fact, dissolving "cruelty" in the form of Aguinaldo's regime. "Our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order," he said. "They bring freedom." Such wars were as historically necessary as they were difficult to contain: "The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity. Yet from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses."

There was, of course, an easier way than argument to end the debate. On July 4, 1902 (as if on cue from John Philip Sousa), Roosevelt declared victory in the Philippines. Remaining insurgents would be politically downgraded to "brigands." Although the United States ruled over the Philippines for the next four decades, the violence was now, in some sense, a problem in someone else's country. Activists in the United States continued to pursue witnesses and urge renewed Senate investigation, but with little success; in February, 1903, Lodge's Republican-controlled committee voted to end its inquiry into the allegations of torture. The public became inured to what had, only months earlier, been alarming revelations. As early as April 16, 1902, the New York World described the "American Public" sitting down to eat its breakfast with a newspaper full of Philippine atrocities:

It sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the "water cure" to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until their bodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the "treatment" can begin all over again. The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, "How very unpleasant!"

"But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of such news?" the World asked. "Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by the darker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which the wrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?"

Responding to the verdict in the Glenn court-martial, Judge Advocate General Davis had suggested that the question it implicitly posed-how much was global power worth in other people's pain?-was one no moral nation could legitimately ask. As the investigation of the water cure ended and the memory of faraway torture faded, Americans answered it with their silence. ♦

PHOTOGRAPH: ATTRIBUTED TO CORPORAL GEORGE J. VENNAGE/OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS LIBRARY