In their article "Brainwashing, Conditioning and DDD," Farber, Harlow, and West (1957) examined the techniques used on American POWs to elicit false confessions, self-denunciations, or propagandistic statements in support of their captors during the Korean conflict. Invictus has a lengthy discussion of the article that is an excellent read.

Joseph Margulies, in a controversial piece in the Washington Post, draws an analogy between the methods used by the North Koreans and the Chinese and those approved by the Bush Administration today. Margulies, a law professor at Northwestern University and author of "Guantanamo and the Abuse of Power," argues that history has been ignored by U.S. policy makers and the "touchless torture" employed by the Communists is effective only for producing false confessions. Many disagree with Margulies and object to the moral equivalency he appears to draw between the U.S. and those regimes.

Lewis Carlson provides a less heated accounting of the experience of American POWs in the Korean War. His book Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War is an oral history of American POWs during that conflict.Carlson conducted interviews with Korean POWs in part to determine if the conditions of their confinement helped produce false confessions at higher rates when compared to American prisoners in other wars. Carlson found that the North Koreans used many of the same methods as the Soviet Union, including beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and "never-ending" interrogations. Marathon interrogation sessions, according to his accounts, caused subjects to become so disoriented that they could no longer distinguish what they knew from what they do not know. These conditions, writes Carlson, caused prisoners to break down and "cooperate" with their interrogators to survive. For some, cooperation included falsely confessing to war crimes.