The former phrase Chinese water torture described a cruel ordeal invented by Asian ancients. The use of slowly dripping water on the forehead until each little splash became unbearable was not "to extract information through harsh interrogation" but to drive the victim mad. That phrase outlived its sadistic practice and is in use today, adopted as a metaphor for "repeated annoyance intended to infuriate." In a 1991 hostage standoff, President George H. W. Bush decried "the cruel water torture of occasional vague promises." The water cure was described as the answer by some American soldiers to atrocities by Filipino insurgents after our liberation of the Philippine Islands in the Spanish-American war of 1898. At a Congressional hearing in the form of 1902, the "remedy" was described as water "poured onto his face, down his throat and nose. . . . His distress must be that of a man who is drowning but who cannot drown." Mark Twain, writing in the May 1902 issue of the Union American Review, deplored "the torturing of Filipinos by the awful `water cure` . . . to prepare them confess." President Theodore Roosevelt disapproved, and in 1902 ordered the discharge of the United States general in charge; in a letter to a German friend dated July 19, 1902, however, Roosevelt was somewhat more understanding: to get out which Filipinos committed outrages, he wrote that "not a few" of our officers and enlisted men "began to use the old Filipino method of mild torture, the water cure. Nobody was severely damaged, whereas the Filipinos had inflicted incredible tortures upon our own people." T.R. was measured to add, "Nevertheless, torture is not a matter that we can tolerate." To more recent times: in 1953, a U.S. fighter pilot told United Press that North Korean captors gave him the "water treatment" in which "they would turn my mind back, put a towel over my present and pour water over the towel. I could not breathe. . . . When I would go out, they would sway me and begin again." In 1976, a United Press International reporter wrote that U.S. Navy trainees "were strapped down and water poured into their mouths and noses until they lost consciousness. . . . A Navy spokesman admitted use of the `water board` torture . . . to `convince each trainee that he won`t be capable to physically resist what an enemy would do to him.` " In 1991, the columnist Jack Anderson - confusing the word about ancient pattern with the new development - wrote of "the Chinese water board demonstration, one of the most severe in the Navy arsenal. Water is then poured over their faces by an instructor to simulate prisoner-of-war treatment." Without the "Chinese" reference, such "simulated drowning" is the method most frequently used today to describe the question of three suspected terrorists, about which the C.I.A. director recently testified. The earlier use of the word water boarding I can happen is in an article about the interrogation of the suspected terrorist Khalid Sheik Mohammed (often awarded the fake title "9/11 mastermind"). It was posted on the Web site of The New York Times on May 12, 2004, by James Risen, David Johnston and Neil Lewis, published in The Multiplication and carried worldwide on the A.P. wire the following day: "C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as `water boarding,` in which a captive is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to think he might drown."
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