Water cure (torture)
In this variation, emphasis is placed on inducing the sensation of drowning rather than forcing the individual to consume, and subsequently regurgitate, large quantities of water.
The use of the water cure by the Dutch in the East-Indies is documented by the English merchants of the East India Company after the Amboyna massacre in February 1623 (O. S.).
In this manner they handled him three or four several times with water, until his body was swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead.Water torture was used extensively and legally by the courts of France from the Middle Ages to the 17th and 18th centuries.
Whereat the alcalde enraging, set my teeth asunder with a pair of iron cadges, detaining them there, at every several turn, both mainly and manually; whereupon my hunger-clunged belly waxing great, grew drum-like imbolstered: for it being a suffocating pain, in regard of my head hanging downward, and the water reingorging itself in my throat with a struggling force; it strangled and swallowed up my breath from yowling and groaning.Before pouring the water, torturers often inserted an iron prong (known as the bostezo) into a victim's mouth to keep it open, as well as a strip of linen (known as the toca) on which the victim would choke and suffocate while swallowing the water.
However, a report at the time noted its lethality; "a soldier who was with General Funston had stated that he helped to administer the water cure to one hundred and sixty natives, all but twenty-six of whom died".
U.S. Army Major Edwin Forbes Glenn was suspended from command for one month and fined $50 for using the water cure in an incident which occurred on November 27, 1900.
[26] In his book The Forging of the American Empire Sidney Lens recounted:A reporter for the New York Evening Post (April 8, 1902) gave some harrowing details.
The native, he said, is thrown on the ground, his arms and legs pinned down, and head partially raised "so as to make pouring in the water an easier matter".
In this condition, of course, speech is impossible, so the water is squeezed out of the victim, sometimes naturally, and sometimes—as a young soldier with a smile told the correspondent—"we jump on them to get it out quick."
[1]The use of "third-degree interrogation" techniques to compel confession, ranging from "psychological duress such as prolonged confinement to extreme violence and torture", was widespread in early American policing as late as the 1930s.
[28]: 42 The publication of this information in 1931 as part of the Wickersham Commission's "Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement" led to a decline in the use of third-degree police interrogation techniques in the 1930s and 1940s.
The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness.
[29]Chase J. Nielsen, who was captured in the Doolittle Raid, testified at the trial of his captors, "I was given several types of torture … I was given what they call the water cure" and it felt "more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.
[32][33] The practice was widely documented by organizations such as the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, the World Council of Churches, the International Commission of Jurists, among others.
