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