In the mid fifties, the U.S. military got worried because American soldiers, captured by the Chinese in the Korean conflict had "confessed" publicly that the Americans were using germ warfare. We knew the confessions were false and so we began studying how the Chinese got these men to tell lies. As usual, the Army commissioned an academic study.

The 1957 article 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.

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.

So when Dick Cheney wanted to get a manual for "enhanced interrogation techniques" for Guantanamo, what did he do? He used the Chinese torture techniques! Let me get this right. We knew this torture caused prisoners to lie. So we used them and then believed the lies.

Amazing.