Wherever the Kubark method has been taught, certain clear patterns--all designed to induce, deepen and sustain shock--have emerged: prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, the use of electroshock is ubiquitous.

This was not, of course, all the influence of Cameron or MKUltra. Torture is always an improvisation, a combination of learned technique and the human instinct for brutality that is unleashed wherever impunity reigns. By the mid-fifties, electroshock was being routinely used against liberation fighters by French soliders in Algeria, often with the help of psychiatrists. In this period, French military leaders conducted seminars at a U.S. military "counterinsurgency" school in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which they trained students in the Algeria techniques. It is also clear, however, that Cameron's particular model of using massive doses of shock not just to inflict pain but for the specific goal of erasing structured personalities made an impression on the CIA.

[Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine]