The New York Times is reporting that the interrogation techniques that are being using at Gitmo are actually based (almost exactly) on techniques used by the Chinese against Americans during the Korean War:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."
...
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
...
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 Albert 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.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been "brainwashed," and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies' harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

There are a couple of points to made here.  The first is... did we consider this torture when the Chinese were doing this in the 50's against our soldiers?  If it was, why is it not now?  Secondly, and more disturbingly, why are we using methods that have been proven to illicit false information?  Hell, the Air Force designed an entire training program to help pilots cope with what they might go through, in an effort to keep the enemy from getting false propaganda they could use.  Why are we using those techniques if they won't even work?!

Are we only interested in propaganda?  Because we've been told this was supposed to be getting us valuable information.  Are we potentially using false information and wasting money and manpower chasing after bad leads?  More thoughts on this at The Agitator.