The Water Cure
Debating torture and counterinsurgency -- a century ago.
by Paul Kramer
The New Yorker
February 25, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer

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.