In the April 6th issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner describes a “a document—labeled ‘confidential’ and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA’s Mr. Rizzo would show it—that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at ‘the black sites’ and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an ‘alternative set of procedures.’”

On Slate yesterday, torture expert Darius Rejali details how these “procedures” fit into the long and dark history of democratic torture–where they’ve appeared before and how they developed.

As Rejali writes, “All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.”

Rejali is the author of Torture and Democracy, the definitive work on tortures that are not intended to leave marks on the body.