Waterboarding: False Confession Generator

by mtippett | November 14, 2007 at 09:45 am

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To all those who are proponents of waterboarding as a way to keep us all safe, here is an interesting historical note:

Waterboarding was sometimes used in the Deep South to torture African-Americans and to extract false confessions to alleged crimes. And when it emerged in an appeal as long ago as 1926, even the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled it categorically "a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country," and "barbarous." They over-turned a guilty verdict for murder by an African-American man against a white man because such methods invalidated any notion of a reliable confession