The U.S. military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in 2002 reportedly based their interrogation classes on techniques used by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s, techniques which had been labeled as torture by the American Government, The New York Times reported.

Although the Guantanamo trainers probably did not know, the chart used by them in training classes was a copy from a 1957 Air Force study of techniques used by the Chinese Communists to obtain the information they needed from U.S. prisoners during the Korean War.

The documents which show the techniques used at Guantanamo were brought to light in June during a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting. However, the committee investigators did not know the source. An independent expert was the one who indicated the link to the Air Force 1957 study.

Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D- Mich., said that every American citizen would be stunned to find out that the chart’s source is actually a verbatim copy from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques.

"What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions," Levin added.

Some of those methods, which were mainly used to get false confessions, were used against some prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, the year when the use of coercion was banned by the Congress. Only the C.I.A. is still allowed to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

The chart was copied from a 1957 article entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”. Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist who worked for the Air Force during the Korea War, was the author of the article.