Some of the best brains in the United States, together with some of the weaker ones, have combined recently to try to decide whether "waterboarding" is or is not a form of torture. This problem seems to occupy a surprising amount of time and involves not only very senior people but also President Bush personally.
I know the answer to this difficulty and I will supply it later in this article. Indeed, the solution is quite simple, but it requires personal experience. There is really no scope for argument at all.
It is easy to confuse torture and ill-treatment, both of which have been widespread throughout the whole of history. In everyday terms, ill-treatment is self-explanatory and implies deliberate bad treatment, often as a form of punishment. It is today widespread and looks like being with us until the end of time. Sometimes the intention is that the victim should not survive.
Torture, on the other hand, is ill-treatment but with a specific purpose. This purpose is almost always to persuade the victim to provide information that he has and that he does not want to disclose. It follows that it is preferable that the victim should be kept alive because death puts an end to the prospect of obtaining information. Sometimes victims die, however, because of the ferocity of the torture, which is a very dreadful death indeed. Perhaps even worse, victims are sometimes killed when they have provided the information required.
The variety of forms of torture embraces the full range of human ingenuity. Indeed, there have been people who as a form of employment have specialised in devising treatment and procedures that give rise to ever-increasing decrees of pain and discomfort. There seems to be no limit to the techniques and to the pain itself.
For historical and cultural reasons, which we need not explore here, many of the most dreadful tortures have been devised and used in China and Japan, up to quite recent times and including the Second World War.
One of these has been widely known in the Far East as the water torture and it is this which, with adjustments, is now quoted in the US as "waterboarding". The water torture was extensively used by the Kempeitai, the military police branch of the Imperial Japanese Army, in South East Asia during the Japanese occupation which came to an end in 1945.
I am probably the only person in the UK, and possibly even in the Western world, to have suffered personally the full-scale traditional water torture and to have survived. This arose from having been a lieutenant in the Royal Signals in the Second World War. My personal experience of systematic organised and deliberate torture dates from August 1943. In that year I was in a small PoW camp in Kanchanaburi, Siam, [now Thailand] known as the Sakamoto Butai. This was the PoW camp supporting the main Japanese Army mechanical workshops, responsible for maintaining the machinery used on the construction of the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. The Japanese troops working there were almost all technical personnel, and were mostly reasonable and fairly civilised men. The PoW camp consisted of about 200 men, mostly British and mostly captured in Singapore the previous year. We also were supposed to be technicians of various kinds. The main problem in being a PoW is usually not the physical problem of food, or even of basic survival. The problem is one of noninformation. No one receives any reliable information about the outside world. This is a very serious matter psychologically.
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Eventually, after several days, we reached the point where the Kempeitai clearly felt they were not getting anywhere. They announced that they were going to take '"further steps".
This is the beginning of the classic torture situation. The interrogators, unable to learn what they want by conventional question and answer, decide that they have to resort to conventional torture.
One morning I was led out to the back of the Kempeitai building, where the simple apparatus for the historic water torture was laid out. From its availability I wondered if they used it quite often. I was laid on my back on a bench; my arms, still broken and almost useless, were placed across my chest, my face was covered by a cloth and a tap feeding a hose-pipe was turned on. It was all so simple. To encourage me to say something the senior Japanese man beat me from time to time with the branch of a tree. This did not do my arms any good at all. The interpreter, who did not seem sympathetic to the whole procedure, held my left hand. I suspected that he wanted to make sure that I remained alive.
The whole operation was a long and agonising sequence of near-drowning, choking, vomiting and muscular struggling with the water flowing with ever-changing force. To put it mildly, it was ghastly, quite the worst experience of my life. There were occasional intervals for interrogation. How long the torture lasted, I do not know. It covered a period of some days, with periods of unconsciousness and semi-consciousness. Eventually I was dumped in my cell, which was so small it offered little scope for movement. At about this time two of my colleagues were beaten to death. Their bodies were dumped in a latrine where they may well remain to this day.
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