A story in the Times this morning reveals that the US military learned the “coercive management techniques it used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from the Chinese. Yes, sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint and exposure were all gags used on American servicemen during the Korean War and they copied them not merely because they admired them but because they worked. By making GIs stand in extreme cold, say, for long periods of time the Chinese were able to elicit confessions from them. Problem was they confessed to things they didn’t necessarily do.

Lest you think that this fine point was hidden somewhere, the chart of fun things to do to bad people that the military used against a select number of Gitmo prisoners (before these methods were banned in 2005) came from an 1957 Air Force study entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” — false as in untrue. Bad intelligence and bad karma.

There have been many incidents of us becoming the thing we profess to hate since 9.11 but few more glaring than this. After all, our ideas of Chinese torture come mostly from movies like The Manchurian Candidate, in which a group of soldiers captured while on patrol in Korea are brainwashed to kill each other. Many a college student has been reminded of the negative effects of sleep deprivation while in the midst of finals, and has paused to wonder just what kind of people could sink so low.

Here, use my mirror.

These weren’t the only techniques the military trainers were pushing; “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings” had some great effects, including “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.” While Bush apologists will say that this was a ticking-bomb situation, and torturing these combatants saved untold American lives, that ticking sound might actually be from our own morality going down the drain. As the Times notes, “Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.”

Proving, once again, that these methods produce results, just as surely as sin begets damnation.