British MPs have alleged that intelligence gathered under torture abroad has found its way into UK counterterrorism work, even as the government insists it holds to a firm principle against the practice. This film traces how that principle has bent and broken across the twentieth century, filming in France, Israel, the United States, Algeria, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, and the UK to interview the interrogators and torturers themselves rather than only their victims. Former practitioners describe, in their own words, why they believed beatings, stress positions, and psychological pressure worked, and the film uses their testimony to show how techniques developed in colonial wars and Cold War prisons resurface almost unchanged in the war on terror: dogs used to terrify detainees, waterboarding, sexual humiliation. The geographic sweep matters here, tying Algeria's independence war and Argentina's dirty war to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib as links in one continuous history rather than isolated scandals. The film sits with the discomfort of practitioners who still defend what they did, and lets that defense stand unanswered.