The Chinese seem to do it better than any. They can take everything from  iTunes  to $300 Callaway golf clubs tear it down, meticulously copy it and manufacture it on the fly. The only problem is that, as remarkable as their copycat factories are, they produce an inferior product. But that is the objective- free patents, trademarks and copyrights, added to cheap materials and labor, produce a cheap product that can be sold on ebay at amazing bargain-basement prices! However, the Callalway driver doesn't drive anything like the real Callaway because the metal core has been changed. It looks perfect from the outside; a beautiful Callaway driver, but it is not a Callaway. Outside it looks good; inside it is mush.

For those who still excuse our enhanced interrogation methods as something other than or less than torture, let's look at their origin. (Yes, torture again- the subject, not of the reader, I hope).

Our torture regime is eerily similar to China's reverse engineering, and there is a good reason for that. We have recycled past methods that had been used by China and others- methods that we have always labeled torture and based torture-bans on. The Convention Against Torture was signed by Reagan to criminalize what was being done by those evil, dirty Commie Reds. I believe China also reverse engineered its torture methods from others like the Russians and Japanese who took theirs from Torquemadas past. 

From a 1957 study of the Chinese methods in Korea: We found that the Chinese Communists used methods of coercing behavior from our men in their hands which Communists of other countries had employed for decades and which police and inquisitors had employed for centuries...

It's widely reported that we reverse engineered the SERE program to produce our "enhanced interrogations." SERE was designed to train soldiers to resist, not the usual harsh interrogations that might come from a weaker enemy, but the extreme and absolute torture used by the Chinese, Russians, etc. So you could say it was reverse engineering itself. And two reverses make a forward.

But our use of Communist torture techniques did not just emerge from the SERE program. In fact we had an engineering program of our own; experimenting for decades to find "useful" regimes. We imprisoned a Japanese officer for waterboarding in WWII, but could they have adopted the method from "others"?

From the 1957 study: The methods they used to shape compliance into the now familiar pattern of the forced confession, we believe, can be understood as essentially a teaching procedure--teaching the prisoner how to comply.

Sounds remarkably like former American Psychologist Assn. President Martin Seligman's "learned helplessness" which was used in SERE (although Seligman used electric shock on dogs to "teach" helplessness in his experiments). We basically just adopted the Chinese and Russian Gulag methods studied at length in the past but converted from the reverse SERE program, which was based on those same Communist methods. Senator Durbin, labeled a traitor, had to get up and tearfully apologize to the country for calling Guantanamo a gulag, but he was right. And techniques with similar objectives were used against our soldiers in Iraq as elsewhere. 

To state the obvious, we have been using the very torture techniques that we have condemned for decades (centuries?).  And the object was not to maim or inflict physical harm on the suspect; it was to break him down mentally through a systemic combination of sustained abuses and deprivations. It was to damage the core of a suspect to get him to talk. And it does get them to talk, to say whatever their, by now, fragile minds think the interrogator wants to hear. That this talk might be babble, doesn't mean it's useless. The value of the information extracted by squeezing the mental life out of a person is, in all likelihood, going to be worthless as "actionable intelligence" but not worthless for other means.

The only question, then, is how did we profit from this? What did we get out of it? I do not doubt that there was more than a little vengeance involved, at least initially. Emotions were running high after 9/11, not without reason and I believe the military and intelligence agencies have been used that way before. But the real motivation could not have been only that. And I doubt they were getting much good intelligence for the effort expended. If real intelligence that thwarted real attacks had been uncovered, the Bush administration would have broadcast it, in some way, far and wide. After all, they broadcast many trumped-up or overblown plots and arrests of mentally deranged "terrorists." They trumpeted info from one case, obtained from a laptop, without torture I presume, even though the announcements blew a months long extensive British investigation into the group.

But, think of the Bush administration pre- vs. post- 9/11. They obtained their power and mandate from the WOT. I think if one scans the literature on these recycled torture techniques, one will find that they do not produce good intel, generally, but they do produce confessions and leads, even if they are false ones. And confessions were proof that our WOT was effective. Leads needed to be chased down. The US Government was keeping America and the world safe from terrorists, and oh, by the way, needed unlimited powers to do that. The Bush admin produced its own propaganda justifying their power grabs through torture and other WOT production techniques, sold it to congress and the press and much of the public, and profited greatly from it.