commentary by Patrick H. Moore
When we think waterboarding we are cast into the clandestine world of torture and all that entails.
In our ignoble but all too human moments, some of us may have breathed a sigh of relief believing that the waterboarding and the torturing is done to them over there. rather than to us here at home.
Yet it turns out that an American doctor living in Delaware, a retired pediatrician no less, may have practiced the delicate art of waterboarding in a somewhat modified form on his stepdaughter as a kind of experiment in behavior modification.
A girl who claims she was waterboarded by her mother’s companion, a former pediatrician, told a Delaware jury on Monday the man held her face under a running faucet several times as punishment.
Swiveling back and forth in the witness chair and smiling at times, the 12-year-old recounted how Melvin Morse, who she learned only recently was not her father, punished her in a variety of ways, including waterboarding and putting his hands over her nose and mouth.
The girl said Morse used the term waterboarding, and she was punished for spilling milk, shaking a ketchup bottle and vomiting into a cat’s litter box after being made to eat too much.
“Sometimes I think I heard him yell ‘Die!’” she said, describing the waterboarding.
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This is an exceptionally interesting case.
The former doctor Morse appears to be a bit of a maverick with at least some clout. He has authored several books and articles on paranormal science and near-death experiences involving children. His TV cred is good with appearances on “Larry King Live” and the “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to discuss his research. He has been featured on an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” and in an article in “Rolling Stone” magazine.
This 60-year-old is not exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be facing endangerment and assault charges. Yet he is.
Defense attorney Joseph Hurley told has jurors that the girl and her mother, Pauline, have told many conflicting and false stories to authorities over the years and that the waterboarding charges are unfounded.
Morse has specifically denied the accusation that he may have been experimenting on the girl, who testified that she ran away from home in July 2012, following an incident that led to Morse’s arrest.
The allegation is that the former Dr. Morse grabbed the child by the ankle and dragged her across a gravel driveway into the family’s home. This led to his arrest. The girl told investigators that Morse also had disciplined her at least four times by waterboarding, which in turn led to additional charges against Morse and the girl’s mother, Pauline Morse.
During Monday’s testimony, the girl described how she decided to run away the morning after the driveway incident. She said that Morse had punished her that night and had scared her when he told her, “there will be more.”
“I was scared he was going to hurt me…. I thought he meant, like, more pain.”
The prosecutors have presented inconclusive photographs of scratches and bruises on the girl. She said herself on Monday that several of them came from a bicycle she was pushing along the road when she ran away from home.
Much more damning were the four homemade videos documenting Morse’s encounters with the girl in which he tries to influence her behavior.
If the first video is any indication, Morse was determined to make the girl recognize the need to “fix the damage” when she misbehaves. You might say he’s looking for some kind of practical retribution.
“Why don’t you try to repair things when you do something wrong, sweetheart?” he calmly asked the girl.
Something about this guy bugs me. The child could be exaggerating plenty but I still don’t like him. It gets worse in another video where Morse asks the girl why she doesn’t recognize that it us “a major crime” to break the house rules. At some point in the conversation, he demands:
“Has your therapist ever told you that you have to obey your parents?”
To her credit, the girl responds affirmatively. But she got her digs in during Monday’s testimony when she said referring to the video:
“It kind of gets on my nerves the way he talked to me.”
Although she was very young, Morse gave her antidepressants, which, of course, is not uncommon today.
Now if it wasn’t for the four alleged waterboarding/drowning allegations, not to mention dragging the child across the driveway by the ankle, the doctor’s regimen of rules, though repellant, would not result in criminal charges (unless they were against the girl for losing it and murdering the stepfather which fortunately did not come to pass).
Naturally, a twisted martinet like the Doc had to put it in writing to give it an official stamp. He kept a “behavior book” in which he added or subtracted points to determine her disciplinary “level.”
Level One meant you were on the shit list. No television, no allowance and you are not allowed to eat with the family. At Level Two you’re allowed to come back to the table; At Level Three you get to choose your own sandwich. The girl never made it to Level Four.
And of course there were other punishments designed to drive the girl crazy such as being forced to stand with her arms outstretched and her head against the wall. A real nasty one was confining her in her room without access to the bathroom, forcing her to wet herself or use her toy box as a toilet.
“I tried to stay out of his way so he wouldn’t see me and remember something and make me do stuff,” she said.
And yet the child is psychologically tied to the martinet. She acknowledges trying to contact him twice after his arrest, including sending him an email in December of 2012.
“Are you okay. I’m okay. I accept all apologies,” she wrote.
And she misses him as she explains in a voicemail:
“I was confused and I was wondering if he was feeling the same way,” she explained. “… I just kind of wanted to say hello and I miss you.”
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Lacey Johnson of Reuters reports on Tuesday’s testimony:
The child’s mother Pauline has struck a deal to plead guilty to misdemeanor child endangerment charges and to testify against Melvin Morse.
Her testimony included the somewhat laughable claim that she refrained from intervening in order not to undermine her celebrated husband, Dr. Melvin Morse, the best-selling author on near-death experiences.
In what is certainly some of the key testimony to date, Pauline described the time she saw the Doc holding her daughter’s head under a faucet. “He called it ‘washing her hair,’ but I knew it wasn’t washing her hair because there was no soap or anything,” she said inanely. “It didn’t occur to me what was happening.”
Pauline told the court that when she walked into the kitchen and saw Morse holding the child’s head under the faucet, Morse released the girl, who then started coughing and crying.
The girl’s credibility was impugned somewhat during cross on Tuesday when she admitted that she had lied under oath about being molested by a family member in 2010.
Morse’s attorneys have claimed that the girl had a history of lying to adults, including counselors.
According to Pauline, however, shortly after Morse was arrested, they “talked about ways of trying to cover it up” while he was home on bail.
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Scary doctor. Particularly when you figure that he heads the Institute for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
It seems pretty clear that this guy doesn’t like children very much. I wonder how he is with animals.