Waterboarding - Etymology

Etymology

While the technique has been used in various forms for centuries, the term water board appeared in public in a 1976 UPI report: "A Navy spokesman admitted use of the ‘water board’ torture . . . to ‘convince each trainee that he won’t be able to physically resist what an enemy would do to him.’” The verb-noun waterboarding dates from 2004. First appearance of the term in the mass media was in a New York Times article on 13 May 2004:

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as 'water boarding', in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

The U.S. attorney Alan Dershowitz is reported to have shortened the term to a single word in a Boston Globe article two days later: "After all, the administration did approve rough interrogation methods for some high valued detainees. These included waterboarding, in which a detainee is pushed under water and made to believe he will drown unless he provides information, as well as sensory deprivation, painful stress positions, and simulated dog attacks". He later told the New York Times columnist William Safire that, "when I first used the word, nobody knew what it meant."

Techniques using forcible drowning to extract information had hitherto been referred to as "water torture," "water treatment," "water cure" or simply "torture."

Professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, author of Torture and Democracy (2007), speculates that the term waterboarding probably has its origin in the need for a euphemism. "There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding"– a word found as early as 1929– "they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them".

Webster's Dictionary first included the term in 2009: "n interrogation technique in which water is forced into a detainee's mouth and nose so as to induce the sensation of drowning."