Neuroskepticism - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 184

may make some people more talkative, but there is no guarantee that what they
say is either accurate or useful. It appears that this may not have prevented the use
of psychoactive drugs as interrogation aids in the “war on terror.” Several detain-
ees have claimed that they were drugged prior to interrogation (Warrick 2008). The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and DoD dispute these claims. However, the
Bush administration commissioned and received legal opinions that took a permis-
sive approach to the use of drugs in interrogation (see Bybee 2002; Yoo 2003). The
CIA has acknowledged that detainee Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in
August 2002 (CIA Inspector General 2004, 90-91). It has also been reported that
Zubaydah was drugged with sodium pentothal (see, e.g., Follmann 2003). If this
allegation is true, Abu Zubaydah's abusive interrogation may speak as much to the
efficacy of so-called truth serums as to the utility of waterboarding.
Not surprisingly, the search for the Holy Grail continues, and neuroscience can-
not resist stepping up to the plate. There has been much discussion in both academic
journals and the media recently about oxytocin. This hormone is released in the bod-
ies of pregnant women during labor (see, e.g., Lee et al. 2009) and there is some
evidence to suggest that “intranasal administration of oxytocin causes a substantial
increase in trusting behavior” (Kosfeld et al. 2005; see also Baumgartner et al. 2008).
As a recent report of the National Research Council (NRC 2009) acknowledged,
the drug is of particular interest to the defense and national security communities,
not simply because of its implications for soldier performance, but also because it
might allow for “new insights into adversary response.” Although the report does not
expressly discuss this, one potential use is its administration as an aid to interroga-
tion—perhaps covertly prior to interrogation in aerosolized form. This may sound
fanciful. However, aerosolized oxytocin is already being marketed by one corpora-
tion, Verolabs, as “Liquid Trust,” promising to deliver “the world at your fingertips,
whether you are single, in sales, an unhappy employee who wants to get ahead”—or
perhaps all three of these. So we should expect interrogators to be tempted to use it
if they have not already done so.
If there were such a thing as a “truth serum,” of course, there would be little need
to direct intelligence efforts toward the detection of lies. But that too is an enterprise
with a long and colorful history—discussed in more detail than is possible here in a
report of the NRC (2003). For the greater part of the last century, “lie detector” was
the monicker associated with the polygraph, although the device does nothing of the
kind suggested by the term. The polygraph does not detect lies; on the contrary, it
only measures physiological changes that tend to be associated with anxiety. This
is problematic because for many polygraph subjects the experience of being tested
itself is sufficient to cause considerable anxiety. As a result, the NRC (2003, 2) con-
cluded, the polygraph is “intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results”—
in particular, false positives. In addition, “countermeasures” are possible: People can
be trained to beat the polygraph by reducing external manifestations of anxiety, cre-
ating false negatives. In spite of these limitations, the “lie detector” label has stuck,
reinforced by countless television series and movies, and figurative labels, like their
literal counterparts, are often hard to peel away.
There is strong evidence that polygraphy was abused in the “war on terror”
and, in my view, this misuse is attributable to misunderstandings of the technology