Amnesty International: George W. Bush Admits to U.S. Torture

Your boy Hitchens VOLUNTEERED, Einstein. Just like he volunteered for Fidel Castro back in his youth.

I am glad that our great president Bush stopped INNOCENT people from dying by pouring a little water on a nasty terrorist, though.

You wouldn't understand what it means to be a MAN, though, so I forgive you.

After the Spanish-American War of 1898 - After the Spanish American War of 1898 in the Philippines, the U.S. army used waterboarding , called the " water cure" at the time. Reports of "cruelties" from soldiers stationed in the Philippines led to Senate hearings on U.S. activity there. Testimony described the waterboarding of Tobeniano Ealdama "while supervised by ...Captain/Major Edwin F. Glenn. In 1902 Elihu Root, US Secretary of War ordered Glenn to be court marshaled and he was subsequently convicted. President Theodore Roosevelt (The Republican guy on Mount Rushmore) publicly called for efforts to "prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future." In that effort, he ordered the court-martial of General Jacob H. Smith on the island of Samar, "Where some of the worst abuses had occurred." When the court-martial found only that he had acted with excessive zeal, Roosevelt disregarded the verdict and had the General dismissed from the Army. Roosevelt soon declared victory in the Philippines, and the public lost interest in "what had, only months earlier, been alarming revelations.
Police "Third degree" - 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. Lassiter classified the water cure as "orchestrated physical abuse ",] and described the police technique as a "modern day variation of the method of water torture that was popular during the Middle Ages". Such techniques were classified as "'covert' third degree torture" since they left no signs of physical abuse, and became popular after 1910 when the direct application of physical violence to force a confession became a media issue and some courts began to deny obviously compelled confessions.
World War II – Both Japanese troops and the Gestapo used waterboarding as a method of torture. During the Japanese occupation of Singapore waterboarding, by the method of binding or holding down the victim on his back, placing a cloth over his mouth and nose, and pouring water onto the cloth. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the US airmen who flew in the Doolittle raid following the attack on Pearl Harbor, was subjected to waterboarding by his Japanese captors. [At their trial for war crimes following the war, he testified "Well, I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I'd get my breath, then they'd start over again... I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death ."
Algerian War (1954- 1962) The French journalist Henri Alleg was subjected to waterboarding by French paratroopers in Algeria in 1957, [is one of only a few people to have described in writing the first- hand experience of being waterboarded. His book La Question, published in 1958 with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre subsequently banned in France until the end of the Algerian War in 1962, discusses the experience of being strapped to a plank, having his head wrapped in cloth and positioned beneath a running tap:Vietnam War - Waterboarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in the Vietnam War. On January 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a controversial front-page photograph of two U.S soldiers and one South Vietnamese soldier participating in the waterboarding of a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang. The article described the practice as "fairly common". The photograph led to the soldier being court-martialled by a U.S. military court within one month of its publication, and he was discharged from the army. Another waterboarding photograph of the same scene, referred to as "water torture" in the caption, is also exhibited in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.