IN AN attempt to draw a line under the dubious intelligence-gathering practices of the Bush administration, the White House last week announced the creation of a that will use “scientifically proven means” to extract information from detainees believed to have links to “violent extremist groups”. It also indicated it is initiating research aimed at comparing the effectiveness of different interrogation methods.
But what part can science play in interrogation techniques? So far, its role has been minimal.
The last of the effectiveness of interrogation methods, published in 2006 by the US Intelligence Science Board, found there had been little or no empirical research in this field in 40 years. Interrogators “make it up on the fly”, wrote forensic psychologist Robert Fein, who chaired the review. The lack of research-based methods, he said, may have led to “unfortunate cases of abuse”.
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Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, and others claim the use of waterboarding and similar methods on Al-Qaida suspects has led to significant intelligence breakthroughs. Yet at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who has written extensively on modern torture and interrogation, claims there is no scientific basis for such approaches, as people vary greatly in their capacity to withstand different kinds of pain. “There is little empirical evidence of a science of torture, only misleading folklore about pain,” he says. Furthermore, several studies have shown that coercive interrogation or torture increases the risk of false confessions, as people may say anything just to make it stop.
The biggest challenge could be convincing the interrogators themselves that empirical research can improve results. Interrogators tend to look on their work as a craft. “If you have the same person being interrogated in the same environment with all the same treatment but by two different interrogators, you’re going to get two different outcomes,” one US field interrogator told 91av.
Whether a particular interrogation technique is effective is not the only question the US government must consider. It must also ask whether or when its use is morally justifiable. Scientists are no better placed than anyone else to answer this, but they can help with a related question: are there any coercive methods that have been shown to cause no lasting damage (91av, 20 November 2004, p 42)?
Most psychologists who deal with victims of torture and interrogation are clear about this: there are none. “Any interrogation technique can cause psychological damage if applied inappropriately or if the technique itself is psychologically coercive,” says Gisli Gudjonsson, a forensic psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.
The US government will want to be sure that when it sanctions interrogation methods, “scientifically proven” means just that – and to resist any temptation to give interrogators a spurious cloak of scientific respectability.