This
 is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of 
modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading 
experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to
 the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to 
electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British 
colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of 
Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin 
America and Europe.
 As Rejali traces the development and 
application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he
 reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he 
argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace 
for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more 
indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered 
and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern 
torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of 
reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the 
world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim
 was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even 
existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such 
as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress 
positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so 
too did these methods.
 Rejali makes this troubling case in 
fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented 
research--conducted in multiple languages and on several 
continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin 
Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, 
Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really
 works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave
 and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future 
studies of modern torture will be measured.