Paul Kramer, a historian at Vanderbilt University, via George Mason University’s History News Network: “Just over one hundred years ago, in 1902, Americans participated in a brief, intense and mostly forgotten debate on the practice of torture in a context of imperial warfare and counter-insurgency. The setting was the U. S. invasion of the Philippines, a war of conquest waged against the forces of the Philippine Republic begun in 1899. Within a year, it had developed into a guerrilla conflict, one that aroused considerable anti-war opposition in the United States. The controversy was sparked when letters from ordinary American soldiers in the Islands surfaced in hometown newspapers in the United States containing sometimes graphic accounts of torture, and activists within the anti-imperialist movement pressed for public exposure, investigation and accountability. At the center of the storm was what American soldiers called the ‘water cure,’ a form of torture which involved the drowning of prisoners, often but not always for purposes of interrogation. [...] At the same time, past and present seem to come together in official declarations that U. S. military actions are dictated by the mandates of an ‘exceptional’ kind of war against a uniquely treacherous and broadly-defined ‘enemy.’ And at both moments, the alchemy of exposure and impunity produced a troubling normalization of the atrocious. Where Americans actively defend torture, or sanction it through their silence, it is their willingness to assimilate the pain of others into their senses of safety, prosperity and power that stretches the darkest thread between past and present.”
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:00:37 +0000
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