NATIONAL SECURITY

Intelligence on the Brain

A New Dialogue on Neuro Research and National Security

Interrogations Come Full Circle

In July 2008 a committee of the United States Senate revealed that, beginning in 2002, Guantanamo Bay interrogators had based their methods partly on a chart that appeared in a 1957 paper prepared by an Air Force social scientist. The chart represented a summary of the types of coercive measures used by Chinese Communist interrogators against American P.O.W.’s during the Korean War, causing them to make a number of false confessions of U.S. war crimes. These measures fell under headings that included “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” At the time, consternation about the effectiveness of the Chinese methods led to vague but deep-seated fears of “brain washing.”

The irony that information gleaned from circumstances involving the torture of American soldiers over 50 years ago could be used against detainees in the war on terror was not lost on opponents of the Bush administration’s policies. Yet this incident is but the tip of the iceberg of a much larger set of questions for 21^st century neural and behavioral science and their role in national intelligence operations, and for an increasingly globalized scientific community.

The American intelligence establishment’s infamous Cold War forays into various experiments with hallucinogens and other mind-altering processes can be attributed in part to worries that Eastern bloc Communist governments were both ahead of the intelligence game and less likely to respect ethical constraints than the West. One scenario was that an American nuclear physicist with a high security clearance attending a conference abroad could be invited to an apparently innocent meal and made “indiscreet” with LSD. The CIA’s MKUltra and other top-secret experimental programs were among the excesses that were revealed by government investigations in the mid-1970s.

Some believe that the United States continues to pay the price for these excesses—or, perhaps, for their revelation—even to the extent of blaming intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks on the resultant weakening of the CIA’s covert operations capacity. What does seem indisputable is that the American intelligence community’s internal expertise on matters of the brain and behavior is not what it was in the 1950s. Some of the world’s top scientists were then deeply engaged advisors to military and civilian intelligence agencies, including Harvard University psychologist Henry Murray and Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital’s Henry Beecher, continuing relationships that began during World War II. Whether or not that expertise actually improved performance of national security activities or not is another question.

Upgrading anthropology capacity

Nevertheless, there are some indications that American security officials are concerned that U.S. intelligence capacity has been somewhat degraded in recent years by a failure to integrate the best and most up-to-date academic work in fields like anthropology and cognitive science. Cultural insensitivity is often cited as one of the reasons for the early failure of the occupation of Iraq. Soldiers have often had to learn the nuances of communication with locals themselves. Sometimes failures to make intentions clear, as for example in passing through checkpoints, may have had tragic consequences due to cultural variations in the meaning of seemingly simple hand gestures for “proceed” and “halt.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, formerly president of Texas A&M University who has served as deputy director of the CIA, recently announced a new initiative called the Minerva Consortium. Minerva is intended to provide a group of universities with funding to assist the Department of Defense in areas such as Chinese military and technology studies, perspectives on terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere, religious and ideological studies, and “new disciplines” including history, anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary psychology. In an April 14, 2008 speech the secretary also elaborated at length on the history of complicated relationships between the defense establishment and academic anthropology. With candor that surprised some, Gates noted that, “Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.” He associated these difficulties with a tension that has persisted between the American military and academia since the Vietnam War era.

As the American military establishment reaches out anew to the university system, what will be the reaction? Although Gates urged rapprochement and cited several institutions that have created special programs for injured veterans who might not otherwise qualify for admission, this is a far cry from the kinds of close relationships that characterized the World War II and post-war era. In an era in which federal funding for medical science has in real terms diminished, American academic research leaders have more motivation than patriotism alone to take an interest in a lucrative new government funding source for the generally under-supported “soft” social sciences.

Neuroscience and National Intelligence

Neuroscientists cite evidence that cultural differences may extend even to the way that members of different groups process information, and that these differences are measurable. If it is true that scientific understanding of culture and group dynamics has deepened in the past half century, necessitating renewed interest on the part of security officials, how much more must that be the case for the scientific study of the brain and its functions. Neuroscience conferences now rival the world’s largest medical meetings, bringing together a wide range of disciplines, from psycholinguists to electron microscopists. Even taking into account the hyperbole that seems to accompany much modern science, it’s a good bet that our basic understanding of the brain and its functions is on an impressive growth path.

Smart defense planners are well aware of the buzz about the brain. During the summer of 2008 a U.S. National Research Council committee of which I was a member issued a report on “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies.” The bland title belies the fact that this was, I believe, the first time that the American intelligence community sought systematic and rather public advice on the future of brain research from a group of scientists and academics. Just before being named to this committee I published a book that included a reconstructed history of national security interest in the brain (Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, 2006), so I found this turn of events particularly intriguing.

I cannot speak for my colleagues on the committee, but I think we all found the charge compelling, which was in part to “review the current state of today’s work in neurophysiology and cognitive/neural science, select the manners in which this work could be of interest to security professionals, and trends for future warfighting applications that may warrant continued analysis and tracking by the intelligence community.” We were to have special sensitivity to work that might be done in selected other countries.

Over about a year and a half, the committee’s deliberations congealed around several themes reflected in the final report. In each case the national intelligence implications were paramount: Could new devices overcome challenges to the detection of psychological states and intentions, so that deliberate deception could be identified far more reliably than with traditional “lie detectors”? In what directions might neurologically active drugs take us, perhaps as tools for cognitive enhancement that exceeds normalcy? What if computational biology leads to intelligent machines, or aids in creating human-machine systems that combine and leverage the abilities of both? What are the prospects for acquiring intelligence on cognitive neuroscience developments that might be accomplished by our competitors and adversaries? How will culture and ethics influence both the hypotheses that other countries might find of interest and their willingness to engage in human experiments? Readers should of course consult the report itself for details; none of it is classified. Predictions of specific technical breakthroughs are kept to a minimum, and where disagreements arose among committee members, as for example over the genuine prospects for advances in lie detection, they are duly recorded.

As important as any of the report’s particular findings or recommendations is the fact that it lays a predicate for a series of critical social questions that we must face even if the more extravagant expectations for emerging neuroscience are not realized. For some we may rely on familiar territory, like risk-benefit assessments for clinical research involving implants or more powerful magnets. As advances in imaging and computing establish more reliable correlations between neural activity and behavior, privacy limits may stretch. Governments may have to amend international conventions to establish whether interrogations of prisoners may include investigation of psychological states through real-time measurements of neural function and spatial localization. As the report notes, unethical applications of neuroscience should be at the forefront of our concern.

Professional and Political Ethics

The environment of modern science is far more public and transparent than ever before. Simultaneously, the role of applied science in the manner and methods of political violence (for non-state as well as state actors), seems to be accelerating. Scientists are therefore under far more pressure to assess what “professional ethics” means as they participate in addressing great societal and political challenges. Perhaps only nuclear physicists have previously faced such scrutiny, though biologists, too, have in the past several years been drawn into relatively novel problems like those involving publications concerning biological weapons.

Moreover, in the 21^st century the community of science is less localized than ever. Modern communications and publication technologies make data sharing vastly more efficient. Obstacles to international collegial exchange have largely fallen, with the significant exceptions of government control of web access or the granting of visas. In an abstract sense the culture of science has always resisted political boundaries, a cosmopolitanism that has long earned the suspicion of jealous dictators like Hitler and Stalin. But now a globalized scientific community is a functional reality. Inevitably, that community will be obliged to assess its cultural role and political responsibilities in a far more focused fashion than has previously been the case.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor in Chief of Science Progress.

Tags: military neuroscience, national security, Neuroscience

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