Prison Camp or “Prison Clinic?” - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 212

I will begin with the issue of the danger of hypothetically effective brain scans.
Let us assume once more, for the sake of argument, that the use of fMRI tech-
nology for lie detection is sufficiently effective to produce consistently accurate
results. The use of fMRI technology on vulnerable populations does not neces-
sarily result in the creation of a new ethical dilemma, at least at first glance. That
is to say, an fMRI lie detector test may not add new problems to the extensive list
of human rights abuses perpetrated in place such as Guantanamo Bay. In fact, if
it is an extremely effective tool, it may help to right some of the wrongs associ-
ated with this prison camp. Take, for example, Naqib Ullah. Naqib is a Pakistani
national who was captured in a Taliban camp in Afghanistan and transferred to
Guantanamo Bay in January 2003 (United States Department of Defense 2011).
This 14-year-old boy was armed at the time of his capture, but did not fire his
weapon. It took the Joint Task Force of Guantanamo until August 11 of the same
year to determine that Naqib was an extremely low-level threat. Naqib had not
voluntarily joined the Taliban. He had been kidnapped and served as a forced
conscript when captured. This oversight on the part of the United States is but one
example of many where either wholly innocent or low-level threats are mistakenly
treated as high-level enemy combatants (Bell 2011). 14 While an effective use of
fMRI could not wholly solve the human rights violations at Guantanamo, it is
possible that it could lead to the expedited release of parties whom no one could
reasonably claim are enemy combatants.
Be that as it may, the sinister side of biopower still hangs over the clinical char-
acter of the prison camp. An extremely effective diagnostic tool, such as this hypo-
thetical use of brain scanning technology, could actually lead to increased rights
violations, rather than a decrease. How might this be possible? By providing the
DoD and DHS with an extremely effective tool to measure veracity, they could over-
come one of the most significant barriers to the use of torture in interrogation set-
tings. They would have a tool that could parse which information is accurate and
which information is simply supplied in order to “make the pain stop.” Allow me to
clarify: One of the leading arguments against the effectiveness of torture is that the
victim will tell the torturer anything to get them to stop (Horton 2009). As such, any
information gathered through torture is potentially unreliable, making the practice
questionable on factual as well as moral grounds. An extremely accurate lie detector,
such as hypothetically precise neuroimaging technology, would remove the factual
barrier due to an ability to cross-check information. If the victim is lying, then the
process of torture would begin again. The likelihood of this occurring in a place
such as Guantanamo Bay seems quite high given our biopolitical analysis. The State
is clearly not concerned with the rights of those subjected to State racism. As previ-
ously asserted, these individuals are dehumanized and viewed as little more than
biological threats. For the biopolitical State there are no moral grounds for refraining
from torture, only factual grounds. Torture is, as we have seen, illegitimate only in
that it does not produce accurate results. If neuroimaging were to provide an effec-
tive way around this factual barrier, then it seems likely that the State could resort
to more rather than less torture. This leaves us in a rather murky place from a neu-
roethical standpoint, but it seems reasonable to address this sort of issue before the
technology outpaces our analysis.