Front Page: US cribs from China on torture

I feel pretty strongly about torture as a moral issue, but Scott Shane's article China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo makes it pretty clear this isn't a big moral dilemma, balancing the needs of the many against one person's human rights, if torture doesn't produce actionable intelligence. Or any intelligence at all, really. Leaving aside the fact that when China practised the techniques we've adopted on American soldiers we called it torture, here's the real money quote:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. [emphasis added]

So we've adopted as protocol for intelligence work techniques designed to produce false information. With the White House pushing to keep Gitmo in the shadows, what on earth do we need false, coerced confessions for?