Initially, the techniques had been taught to British soldiers as a way to resist harsh interrogation and torture. But eventually these methods migrated from the portion of the curriculum that was concerned with defense into the portion that dealt with offense. They had been employed for nearly two decades against insurgents in British-controlled territories—in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. But they had never been memorialized in any written manual and instead were passed down from one generation of interrogators to the next, an oral tradition of human cruelty.
