High-tech interrogations may promote abuse

There is evidence that brain imaging technology is being used to interrogate suspected terrorists despite concerns that it may not be reliable, and that it might inadvertently promote abuse of detainees, according to a Penn State researcher. He says the risk that such technology could license further abuse of detainees remains ever present, given President Bush's March 8 veto of legislation that would have prohibited the CIA from conducting aggressive interrogations.

The technology — functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI — has been around since the 1990s. Neurosurgeons routinely use it to scan for brain tumors, and to diagnose and treat various disorders of the central nervous system.

But in recent times, fMRI has gained support from many in the intelligence community, who feel it could be a reliable tool in identifying terrorists from a group of suspects or detecting lies during an interrogation.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, military psychologists attached to intelligence units advised interrogators how to increase interrogation stressors and exploit detainees' fears to make suspects talk, according to Jonathan Marks, associate professor of bioethics, humanities and law at Penn State.

"The problem is, if you apply pressure, people will say anything they think will make you stop. And that means anything they think you want to hear," he said.

There are also reports that psychotropic drugs — so-called truth serums — have been administered. The use of brain imaging technologies appears to offer an alternative to such approaches.

The adoption of fMRI is not surprising given the limitations of other lie detection techniques such as a polygraph test, said Marks, whose analysis is published in a recent issue of the American Journal of Law and Medicine.

A polygraph relies on detecting accentuated signs of anxiety such as changes in skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration. But it is useless against sociopaths, and those trained to beat it. Counterintelligence experts also say the device is especially unreliable when questions and answers are translated with the help of an interpreter, as has been the case in Iraq.

Intelligence personnel believe fMRI could circumvent such limitations, and some commentators have argued that fMRI could render torture and interrogation obsolete. But Marks, who has critiqued the use of aggressive interrogation techniques in the war on terror, makes a case that "such claims are unfounded, and that the uncritical acceptance of fMRI as an interrogation tool could be potentially hazardous both to the health of the detainee and to the counterterrorism mission."

Unlike a polygraph, an fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields to detect tiny changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. Since active neurons take up more oxygen than inactive ones, these tiny changes are believed to be signatures of cognitive processes.