Functional MRI can act like a high-tech lie detector. Relatively safe psychopharmaceuticals can reduce the ability — or inclination — to lie. But does that make using them for interrogation okay?
Of course, the advent of these new drugs and brain-scanning techniques doesn’t remove the moral questions about whether they should be used on detainees. Consider a hypothetical pill, whose only side effect is slight nausea and a headache, that makes anyone who takes it tell the truth for 90 minutes. Should military and intelligence interrogators be able to force POWs or unlawful combatants to take the pill?
It’s still a hard call. Critics always envision Manchurian Candidate-like brainwashing scenarios. Human rights advocates constantly worry that forcing the pill on prisoners would violate their rights to be free from self-incrimination. But it’s not clear that these minimally invasive interrogation options would cross a hallowed legal line. After all, even in American criminal proceedings, the state can legally draw blood, take fingerprints, and obtain DNA for testing. And POWs and unlawful combatants are not in a criminal system but one where less-stringent protections are typically afforded. At the least, public policy debates should explore the possibility that the new interrogation techniques, if conducted appropriately, aren’t inherently torture or abuse.
It isn’t obvious, for example, that being attached to a Functional MRI scanner is the moral equivalent of being deprived of sleep for 36 hours in a cold cell. Being made to take a Paxil-like derivative isn’t necessarily the legal equivalent of being forced to strip naked and simulate sex with another inmate. Interrogation methods based on non-consensual and passive medical interventions would give rise to criticism, but it’s certainly plausible that in the eyes of international law they would be less objectionable than methods based on the threat and reality of physical beatings.
These are questions that will need to be dealt with — and that will have implications in the criminal justice system as well, Fifth Amendment or no.
(via GeekPress)
I’ll have more to say about this later; it’s really got me thinking. For now, the only thing I want to say is that the fMRI should have similar status to existing lie detectors that work using sensors stuck on your skin. I think the pills are another matter, and will require more thought, but the only difference I can see between the fMRI and the old style lie detectors is not an ethical one: an fMRI is a much more intimidating process, so it’s probably going to be much harder to get people to agree to it. As I recall fMRI involves putting your head into a small opening in a big donut-shaped magnet.
… the only difference I can see between the fMRI and the old style lie detectors …
… is that the latter are rarely worth the paper they scrawl on, from what I understand.