has been to use techniques such as waterboarding, sexual humiliation and sexual abuse, and dogs to intimidate or pressure prisoners in a manner claimed to be legal under national or international law. Electric shock techniques such as the use of stun belts and tasers have been considered appropriate provided that they are used to "control" prisoners or suspects, even non-violent ones, rather than to extract information. These techniques have been widely criticized as torture. Technology Methods of torture are often quite crude, a number of new technologies of control have been used by torturers in recent years. The Brazilian government devised a number of new electrical and mechanical means of torture during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and proceeded to train military officials from other right-wing Latin American countries in their techniques. One is the use of tasers and electro-shock devices now widely sold to prison authorities around the world. Minor refinements of ancient techniques—including tearing out fingernails and toenails with iron tools, burning the soles of the feet with clothes irons, and probing between the toes with electric wood-burning pencils—are also widely applied. Some African nations employ an iron foot-squeezing device patterned after the medieval French boot. Inter-state collaboration Substantial cooperation between states in the methods and coordination of torture has been documented. Through the Phoenix Program, the United States helped South Vietnam co-ordinate a system of detention, torture and assassination of suspected members of the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong. During the 1980s wars in Central America, the U.S. government provided manuals and training on interrogation that extended to the use of torture (see U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals). The manuals were also distributed by Special Forces Mobile Training teams to military personnel and intelligence schools in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. The manuals have a chapter devoted to "coercive techniques". The southern cone governments of South America – Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil – involved in Operation Condor co-ordinated the disappearance, torture and execution of dissidents in the 1970s. Hundreds were killed in coordinated operations, and the bodies of those recovered were often mutilated and showed signs of torture. This system operated with the knowledge and support of the United States government through the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department. The United States government has, at least since the Bush administration, used the tactic of legal