Washington, September 22: Recent studies of harsh interrogations in CIA-run prisons reveal the devastating results of controversial techniques on the minds of detainees.
Prolonged stress from interrogations could have impaired the memories of inmates, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the elaborate information the intelligence agency wanted to elicit, said a scientific paper published in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences on Monday.
Investigating Bush-era interrogation techniques from a neurobiological point of view, Shane O’Mara questioned the information obtained by the CIA, saying the methods employed could even have caused the suspects to create an undistinguishable mixture of true and false memories.
“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,” said O’Mara.
The professor at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience based his research on a review of scientific studies about the effect of stress on memory and brain function after reading descriptions of the CIA’s interrogation methods described in formerly classified legal memos released in April.
CIA spokesman George Little, dismissed the finding, however, arguing that the agency’s interrogation program “produced intelligence on which our government acted to disrupt terrorist operations,” and that O’Mara had no direct contact with individuals who underwent the agency’s ‘high-value detainee program’.
But O’Mara maintains (despite the ‘layman’s’ assumption that such methods do not affect memory) that chronic stress and trauma — as were likely caused by CIA methods, particularly for long-term prisoners — can damage the hippocampus, the part of the brain that integrates memory.
Prolonged sleep deprivation, chaining prisoners in painful positions, exploitation of suspects’ phobias, and waterboarding are among the techniques allowed for interrogations of terror suspects by the Bush administration.
Those methods cause the brain to release stress hormones, which, if prolonged, could result in compromised brain function and even tissue loss, O’Mara wrote.
He warned that this could bring about brain lobe disorders, making the prisoners vulnerable to confabulation – in this case, the pathological production of false memories upon suggestions by an interrogator.
“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 stressed.
—–Agencies