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 published Monday in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Of course, getting real intelligence doesn't seem to have been Cheney's intentions. It looks more like he was trying to force false confessions in order to justify the Bush/Cheney administration's actions. This does, however, prove that torture is never justifiable, no matter what "folk psychology" clamors to proclaim.
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