The torture files continue. In this morning's New York Times, we learn that the Bush administration was so eager to torture prisoners in the War on Terror that they agreed to adopt tactics that were actually used by Chinese communists many years ago during the Cold War. No one realized that waterboarding and other acts of torture approved by Bush's advisors were condemned by the United States many years ago.

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

This is what it comes down to. September 11 shocked us all, but no one stopped to consider what it really means to torture. According to the Times, "'The process was 'a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,' a former C.I.A. official said. Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House."

What do we really know about this? Investigative reports can only learn so much. We did not have to learn about any of this at all. We really find out about torture and U.S. policy by accident. According to ThinkProgress.org, "In 2005, former State Department counselor Phillip Zelikow wrote a legal memo holding an 'opposing view' from the infamous OLC torture memos. But '[t]he White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives,' he writes. Zelikow discussed the matter on the Rachel Maddow Show last night." More here. All of this was against the law. This country was run by criminals for eight years.