A useful reminder:

Elkins’s catalog of British interrogation methods is extensive and horrifying: inserting needles under fingernails (Malaya); stuffing oil-soaked sand into a man’s mouth (Palestine); inserting “gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas” (Kenya); pouring large quantities of water up someone’s nose (Palestine); applying electric shocks from car batteries (Kenya); tightening iron rings around a person’s head (Cyprus); subjecting prisoners to intense noise (Northern Ireland); and applying a lighted cigarette to the testicles (Palestine).

Thank God for civilization!