The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency....

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

So this is what happened: In the 1950s, the Air Force took note of Chinese torture tactics used on Americans during the Korean War. A few years back, in search of torture tactics, which were missing from military manuals because until the Bush era the United States did not torture, the military found the Air Force's (presumably disapproving) study of communist tactics and copied those tactics down, and started teaching them to interrogators at Gitmo. According to the NYT, "The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title."

Other than the fact this should have obviously given someone pause, I think the relevant point is made by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) in the Times piece: "What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence."

We didn't just copy communist tactics. We copied communist tactics specifically intended to elicit fabulous tales.