With Senate confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General
apparently hanging on whether or not he will state that waterboarding is
torture, I thought I'd mention that this is something Mark Twain wrote
about. The U.S. military's use of waterboarding began during the
Philippine-American War when it was called the "water cure." It was said
to be a form of torture the U.S. military "inherited from the Spanish" who
had used it since the Inquisition.

In "A Defense of General Funston" Mark Twain wrote:

"Funston’s example has bred many imitators, and many ghastly
additions to our history: the torturing of Filipinos by the awful 'water-
cure,' for instance, 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. Yet upon such evidence American officers have
actually -- but you know about those atrocities which the War Office has
been hiding a year or two...."

In 1903, Twain was asked to write about the torture-to-death by "water
cure" of Father Augustine, a Filipino priest, by Captain Cornelius
Brownell. Brownell later confessed that "the water cure was
administered by my order several times to different natives" and that
"every officer and every man, both in my regiment and of every other
regiment with which I served, knew when it was given, and I was never
criticised by any officer while in the service for administering it."

Twain began an article about this that was tentatively titled "Brownell's
Conscience." Albert Bigelow Paine wrote that he "undertook to give
expression to his feelings on this subject, but he boiled so when he
touched pen to paper to write of it that it was simply impossible for him
to say anything within the bounds of print."

Jim Zwick