Modern torture involves a full gamut of techniques, many crafted in the minds of psychologists.

The men who have experienced what authorities euphemistically call "enhanced interrogation techniques" have described enduring everything from severe beatings to cruel and unusual psychological torment, such as being deprived of sunlight and fresh air.

Other methods, perhaps more traditionally defined as torture, were also used, including severe beatings and long periods of solitary confinement.

The techniques were described by 14 al-Qaeda prisoners held in CIA prisons, and who spoke with International Committee of the Red Cross officials in October 2006.

Three of the 14 described being suffocated by water using the technique known as waterboarding.

"I was put on what looked like a hospital bed and strapped down very tightly with belts," said Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian national arrested in Pakistan in 2002.

"A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe.

"After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position.

"The pressure of the straps on my wounds caused severe pain. I vomited."

The bed was lowered and the "drowning" technique applied again, he said.

"I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine."

The detainees also described being subjected to "prolonged stress standing positions", such as when their arms were shackled above their heads for days.

One man, Walid Bin Attash, said one one occasion his artificial leg was removed to amplify the stress and pain of the position.

In a similar technique, Abu Zubaydah, told Red Cross officials he was held inside various boxes in awkward positions, with a cover on the box that made it hot and difficult to breathe.

"As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds.

"The stress on my legs held in this position mean that my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful."

Zubaydah said at other times he was deprived of sleep, sprayed with water if he started to doze. His cell was also kept very cold and loud music, or loud noises, were played on a loop.

A number of the detainees also reported being kept cold and naked for long periods.

Similar allegations were made in a BBC report this month on abuse at a US prison in Afghanistan.

"They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death," an ex-inmate said.

"They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you."

The al Qaeda detainees in the Red Cross report described being sprayed with cold water while in the "prolonged stress standing positions", while others said they endured an "immersion bath" of cold water.

Bin Attash told how guards filled the makeshift bath with buckets.

"They did not have a hosepipe to fill the sheet more easily. This jail was not so well equipped for torture."

Detainees also described severe beatings, including the use of a collar on detainees to slam them against concrete walls, long periods shackled in handcuffs, being starved, enduring threats, and forced shaving.

Sexual abuse and electric shock were used as methods of torture by Indonesian police, a recent report by Amnesty International found.

The report described the case of a 21-year-old sex worker, Dita, who was arrested in 2006 and described being sexually abused by police.

"On the way to (the station) they were grabbing me and touching me saying, 'You're so young, why aren't you in school?'," she said.

At the station she was told they could buy their freedom with money or sex.

In another case, a man was beaten and forced to stand wet and stripped to his underwear for nine hours in a cell, with his hands cuffed behind his back.

Police doctors would not treat his injuries until his wife arrived and paid money, the report said.

In yet another case, a man and his gay partner were forced to strip naked and perform oral sex and other sex acts in front of police.

Prisoners also faced shootings, electric shocks and beatings, sometimes for days on end, the report said.

A 2007 Vanity Fair investigation said many of the techniques used during the "war on terror" were crafted by two psychologists - James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen - who had trained soldiers on how to handle being captured by an enemy.

From that experience, the pair "reverse-engineered'' tactics such as waterboarding and were later contracted by the CIA to train interrogators in the techniques they had discovered, Vanity Fair found.

The way many torture techniques work is by making captives feel so helpless that they feel dependent on their captors and want to talk.

"If you deprive people of all their senses, they'll turn to you like their daddy,'' Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin who has investigated the CIA's experiments in coercing its subjects, told The New Yorker in 2007.

The CIA discovered that after just a few hours confined in a dark room or suspended in a water tank, captives became so desperate for human interaction that "they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him'', McCoy said.

Some said the techniques tactically flawed.

Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations, said Mitchell and Jessen had no background in intelligence and had never proven whether their methods worked when the CIA hired them.

"[Mitchell and Jessen] argue: 'We can make people talk' ... I have one question: 'About what?'," he told Vanity Fair.

Maybe these two "psychologists " could do with a bit of their own scientific method themselves!

Zacharek: "And while we're all supposed to tread carefully around the land mines of gender generalizations, there's no escaping the fact that "The Hurt Locker" is a war movie made by a woman. Even though women fight wars too -- more so today than ever before -- Bigelow happens to be focusing on three men here ... The point, maybe, is that you don't have to have a dick to understand what they're going through."

Personally, at this point it seems a little patronizing to call out Bigelow because she's a woman. The question of why there aren't more female directors in Hollywood is an interesting one, but it's also irrelevant to the quality of "The Hurt Locker." That is, I don't get the sense that the movie would be any better/worse if directed by a man, and I doubt Bigelow would want her direction to be evaluated on the basis of her gender. Instead I'd think she'd want to be evaluated on the overall, gender-neutral quality of the film.

I also think the "you don't have to have a dick to understand..." line is rather jarring. Imagine if Zacharek had written about a male director whose film was set in a world dominated by females, and so she'd written, "The point is that you don't have to have a vagina to understand what these women are going through." Again, that wouldn't be a very useful critical approach, even within the narrow analytical confines of auteur theory (as if Bigelow was the only one with creative input on the story). It gives the sense that there are actually people out there who would argue that you "have to have a dick" to portray military machismo accurately.

Otherwise, this is a fine review.