Neuroskepticism - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 183

[Mitchell and Jessen] had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in
the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D.
dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language
skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment
regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get
tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough. (Shane 2009)
Mitchell and Jessen drew on their experience of the survival, evasion, resistance,
escape (SERE) training program—a program designed to inoculate the U.S. service
personnel against abusive treatment at the hands of enemy captors by exposing them
to the kinds of treatment that they had historically received, for example, during the
Korean War. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered those techniques and used them
as the basis for a new aggressive interrogation regime in the “war on terror” (Mayer
2008). But the reverse engineering of SERE tactics not only violated fundamental
human rights norms and the baseline protections for detainees found in Common
Article III of the Geneva Conventions (Marks 2007a), it was also premised on a fun-
damental strategic error. As several experienced interrogators have repeatedly made
clear (see, e.g., Bennett 2007; Soufan 2009) and as some psychologists tried to warn
the Bush administration (Fink 2009), these techniques are not reliable methods for
the extraction of intelligence. On the contrary, as the North Koreans demonstrated
in the 1950s (Margulies 2006) and the British government discovered in the wake of
several questionable convictions for terrorism in the 1970s (Gudjonsson 2003), these
techniques tend to be excellent methods for extracting sham confessions and getting
detainees to say whatever they believe their captors want to hear. While this was the
intended effect in the former case, in the latter it was not. As a result, several Irish
Republican Army (IRA) suspects were falsely convicted, while those responsible for
the mainland terror attacks in Britain continued to roam free. However, this vital
element was lost in the translation of stress tactics from the SERE training program
to the U.S. detention and interrogation operations.
In my view, this account demonstrates the perils arising from a lack of critical
engagement with purported scientific expertise, in this case behavioral psychology,
in a national security context. These perils arise, in part, from the seductive nature of
national security terminology—such as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—that
exaggerates or misrepresents the scientific foundations of a particular practice. Two
related examples from the interrogation context are “truth serum” and, its even more
troublesome cousin, “lie detector.” These terms reflect a profound lack of precision
and tend to reinforce the operation of mental heuristics that deprive us of the oppor-
tunity to think critically.
The U.S. military and intelligence communities have long had a fascination for
psychoactive drugs as interrogation aids (see, e.g., Intelligence Studies Board 2006,
73-74). The term “truth serum” is loosely used to describe a variety of psychoac-
tive drugs including scopolamine, sodium pentothal, and sodium amytal. The col-
loquialism seems to promise the Holy Grail—detainees in a drug-induced state of
compliance were unable to resist imparting explosive nuggets of actionable intel-
ligence. However, there is, to date, no drug that can live up to this title. These drugs