Psyche, Science, and Society

Neuroscience indicates torture bad intelligence strategy

A new paper — Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques’ –  in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science: Science and Society makes the case that torture or “enhanced interrogation” techniques are a very poor way to obtain intelligence as stress interferes with memory. To a psychologist, this is a no-brainer. The fragility of memory is one of the fundamental findings of cognitive psychology. Memory is reconstructive, combining what happened with current thoughts and concerns.

An Associated Press story on the study quotes me on this:

Report: CIA interrogations informed by bad science

By Pamela Hess

WASHINGTON — Prolonged stress from the CIA’s harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.

The methods could even have caused the suspects to create — and believe — false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.

“Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or enhanced interrogation,” according to the paper in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

In the paper, Shane O’Mara, a professor at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, wrote that the severe interrogation techniques appear based on “folk psychology” — a layman’s idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function.

O’Mara told The Associated Press on Monday he reviewed the scientific literature about the effect of stress on memory and brain function after reading descriptions of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation methods. The methods were detailed in previously classified legal memos released in April.

O’Mara did not examine or interview any of those interrogated by the CIA, a fact noted by the agency in commenting on his work.

“The CIA’s former interrogation program was conducted pursuant to legal guidance from the Department of Justice. It produced intelligence on which our government acted to disrupt terrorist operations. Those are facts. The author of this study did not, to my knowledge, have direct contact with individuals who had been part of the agency’s high-value detainee program,” said CIA spokesman George Little.

O’Mara said that in general, “The assumption is that the (methods) are without effect on memory, or indeed facilitate the retrieval of information from memory.”

But overwhelmingly, scientific literature shows the opposite: Chronic stress and trauma — the likely result of the CIA’s methods, particularly for long-term prisoners, according to O’Mara — can damage the hippocampus, the part of the brain that integrates memory.

O’Mara’s findings reflect the review of scientific and medical literature on the effect of acute stress on memory and cognitive function.

“We’ve known for quite a while that stress radically impairs cognition. We know memory is very fragile to begin with,” said Stephen Soldz, president-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and a professor at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. “It’s just amazing that this has not been taken into account.”

Dr. Scott Allen, an internist and Brown University associate professor, is reviewing literature for the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights and told the AP he has yet to find studies that would support the efficacy of harsh interrogation techniques.

“In fact what I’ve found is it seems like it would be a poor strategy,” Allen said.

The list of techniques the CIA used included prolonged sleep deprivation — six days in at least one instance — being chained in painful positions, exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that President Barack Obama has called torture. Three CIA prisoners were waterboarded, two of them extensively.

Those methods cause the brain to release stress hormones that, if their release is repeated and prolonged, may result in compromised brain function and even tissue loss, O’Mara wrote.

He warned that this could lead to brain lobe disorders, making the prisoners vulnerable to confabulation — in this case, the pathological production of false memories based on suggestions from an interrogator. Those false memories mix with true information in the interrogation, making it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated.

Waterboarding is especially stressful “with the potential to cause widespread stress-induced changes in the brain, especially when these are repeated frequently and intensively,” O’Mara wrote.

“The fact that the detrimental effects of these techniques on the brain are not visible to the naked eye makes them no less real,” he wrote.

The paper also asserted that forcibly exposing prisoners to what they are afraid of — the CIA got approval to use a suspect’s fear of insects against him — is actually a method used to cure phobias. The insects were never used, according to the government.

A 2006 Intelligence Science Board report on interrogation also noted possible negative effects of certain methods. For example, isolating suspects can be beneficial to interrogation because it shakes prisoners’ confidence and expectations, but extended isolation can significantly and negatively affect the ability of the source to recall information accurately, according to the report.

The board, created in 2002, provides independent advice to senior intelligence officials on emerging scientific and technical issues of special importance to intelligence work.

1 comment September 21st, 2009

Is there an Afghan Army?

Ann Jones recently returned to Afghanistan and, in a new piece, dissects the myth of the Afghan army as a fighting force.This is the force that Senator Levin and others want the US to build as our colonial surrogates in the Afghan occupation.

A few excerpts:

The soldiers receive training in exchange for pay. It is so successful, that the same people go through the process again and again:

What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of “Basic Warrior Training” 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin — the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets — and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

The Taliban take advantage of US-supplied military training opportuinities to learn about their enemy:

Recently Karen DeYoung noted in the Washington Post that the Taliban now regularly use very sophisticated military techniques — “as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.” Of course, some of them have attended training sessions which teach them to fight in “austere environments,” probably time and time again. If you were a Talib, wouldn’t you scout the training being offered to Afghans on the other side? And wouldn’t you do it more than once if you could get well paid every time?

Such training is bound to come in handy — as it may have for the Talib policeman who, just last week, bumped off eight other comrades at his police post in Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan and turned it over to the Taliban. On the other hand, such training can be deadly to American trainers. Take the case of the American trainer who was shot and wounded that same week by one of his trainees. Reportedly, a dispute arose because the trainer was drinking water “in front of locals,” while the trainees were fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramazan.

There is, by the way, plenty of evidence that Taliban fighters get along just fine, fighting fiercely and well without the training lavished on the ANA and the ANP. Why is it that Afghan Taliban fighters seem so bold and effective, while the Afghan National Police are so dismally corrupt and the Afghan National Army a washout?

Not that they need the training:

When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the U.S.: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on. That’s how Afghan resistance, avoidance, and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe — that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. “Our” Afghans try to get by.

They are now being given weapons that likely won’t work for them, in order to make US weapons manufactorers rich:

Earlier this year, the U.S. training program became slightly more compelling with the introduction of a U.S.-made weapon, the M-16 rifle, which was phased in over four months as a replacement for the venerable Kalashnikov. Even U.S. trainers admit that, in Afghanistan, the Kalashnikov is actually the superior weapon. Light and accurate, it requires no cleaning even in the dust of the high desert, and every man and boy already knows it well. The strange and sensitive M-16, on the other hand, may be more accurate at slightly greater distances, but only if a soldier can keep it clean, while managing to adjust and readjust its notoriously sensitive sights. The struggling soldiers of the ANA may not ace that test, but now that the U.S. military has generously passed on its old M-16s to Afghans, it can buy new ones at taxpayer expense, a prospect certain to gladden the heart of any arms manufacturer. (Incidentally, thanks must go to the Illinois National Guard for risking their lives to make possible such handsome corporate profits.)

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

Finally, Jones cations against learning the wrong lesson:

One small warning: Don’t take the insecurity of the Afghan security forces as an argument for sending yet more American troops to Afghanistan. Aggressive Americans (now numbering 68,000) are likely to be even less successful than reluctant Afghan forces. Afghans want peace, but the kharaji (foreign) troops (100,000, if you include U.S. allies in NATO) bring death and destruction wherever they go. Think instead about what you might have won — and could still win — had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or health care. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/meet-the-afghan-army-is-i_b_292864.html

Read the whole piece here.

September 21st, 2009