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.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the CIA and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE programme appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

A Defence Department spokesman, Lt Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current DOD policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current DOD policy is clear— we treat all detainees humanely.”

Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods”, sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold”. Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and CIA interrogators against terrorist suspects.

... contd.