Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

Facts, fiction or the fog of drugs?

Praveen Swami

Much of the Mumbai Police's account of the train bombings comes from narcoanalysis of suspects. How truthful is the truth that truth drugs have yielded?

"IT is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper in a poor devil's eyes," wrote James Stephen in his 1883 classic, The History of Criminal Law, "than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence."

Stephen's wry commentary on colonial Indian police practices offers a prism through which to examine the Mumbai Police's investigation of the July 11 serial bombing of suburban trains. Much of the Mumbai Police's account has emerged from narcoanalysis of key suspects — a practice its proponents have marketed as a humane, scientific and, above all, reliable alternative to extracting confessions through old-fashioned torture.

Mumbai Police officials say they succeeded in seeing through the multiple veils of deceit and denial behind which key suspects hid the truth about the bombings by using hypnosis-inducing drugs. At a September 30 press conference, Mumbai Police commissioner M.N. Roy said the investigation "relied heavily on scientific procedures like narcoanalysis tests." It was only after psychiatrists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences conducted tests on the suspects, Mr. Roy said, that "the pieces fell in place."

Ever since similar tests on stamp paper scam accused Abdul Karim Telgi yielded a vast mass of information on his purported high-level facilitators, both courts and criminal investigators have come to have an increasing faith in hypnosis-inducing drugs. However, a mass of scientific literature and practitioner accounts exists to dispute this deepening consensus.

In 1922, obstetrician Robert House began to explore the possibility that scopolamine, then used to sedate women during childbirth, might be of use in criminal interrogation. Dr. House proceeded to arrange to interview two prisoners at the Dallas County Jail. Under the influence of scopolamine the men protested their innocence — and later won their freedom in court. Dr. House concluded that patients under scopolamine "cannot create a lie," since they no longer had the power "to think or reason." But his notion that hypnotic states yield the truth, it turned out, stemmed from a simplistic and misleading understanding of how human memory works.

In 1989, the Supreme Court of New Jersey disallowed the use of evidence obtained from sodium amytal-induced interviews, after finding that it was not a valid scientific technique. Among other things, the court heard expert evidence that drug-induced interrogations could cause "hyper-amnesia," a state where subjects fill in gaps in their stories with imaginary or false material; "hypnotic recall," where non-existent thoughts or feelings became embedded in the original memory; and "memory hardening," a process by which subjects come to confidently believe that hypnosis-induced imaginary events were, in fact, true.

Experts seem to agree that the outpourings produced by hypnosis-inducing truth drugs such as sodium pentothal and sodium amytal often fall short of the truth. In a recent paper prepared for the Andhra Pradesh Police's Criminal Investigation Department, Superintendent of Police M. Sivananda Reddy pointed to the "baffling mixture of truth and fantasy in drug-induced output." By disrupting suspects' defences, Mr. Reddy noted, drugs "may sometimes be helpful in interrogation, but even under the best conditions they will elicit an output which is partially contaminated by deception [and] fantasy." At best, they "provide rapid access to information that is psychiatrically useful but of doubtful validity as empirical truth."

Mr. Reddy observed that the United States' 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of U.S. v. Solomon, after a comprehensive examination of the issue, had concluded, "narcoanalysis does not produce reasonably reliable statements." "The almost total absence of controlled experimental studies of `truth drugs' and the spotty and anecdotal nature of psychiatric and police evidence," he concluded, "require that extrapolations to intelligence operations be made with care."

Psychiatrists involved in narcoanalysis have long been clear about the limitations of the science. As early as 1954, American psychiatrist John McDonald noted that suspects subjected to narcoanalysis sometimes confessed to crimes they could not have committed — or continued to practise deceit. Dr. McDonald pointed, in his presentation to the American Psychiatric Association, to cases where suspects confessed to crimes which it could be proven they had not committed. "It is clear from these accounts," Dr. McDonald observed, "that narcoanalysis is often unsuccessful in eliciting the truth."

While defending the utility of narcoanalysis under specific circumstances, Dr. McDonald flatly stated that it could neither be used to "determine the truthfulness of a statement made to the police" nor to "obtain confessions from suspects." Noting that police officers, not trained psychiatrists, conducted much of the questioning, Dr. McDonald argued that standard questioning techniques were "unrewarding and to be deplored in narcoanalysis." This was because the "highly suggestible state of the drugged person may give rise to false or misleading answers especially when the questions are improperly phrased." In Dr. McDonald's view, psychiatrists called on to participate in such exercises "should on ethical grounds refuse to perform narcoanalysis."

A declassified 1963 Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence interrogation manual, too, flatly asserted that "drugs are no more the answer to the interrogator's prayer than the polygraph, hypnosis, or other aids." "Not only may the inveterate criminal psychopath lie under the influence of drugs which have been tested," it concluded, "but the relatively normal and well-adjusted individual may also successfully disguise factual data."

Proponents of the use of psychiatric technology for criminal investigation note, with justification, that both truth-seeking science and its administration have been refined in recent years. Brain fingerprinting, for example, matches evidence from crime scene with information stored in the human mind. Sounds, words or images from a crime scene — information that investigators take care to first confirm would be known only to perpetrators — are shown to suspects. Then, the suspects' P-300 brain wave responses are measured to determine whether their memories contain this information.

P-300 brain wave mapping, as brain fingerprinting is also known, is highly regarded among interrogators. However, its limitations are also well known. Deposing in a 2000 criminal trial, P-300 technology guru Lawrence Farwell made clear that in cases "where there are two people at a crime scene and only one committed the crime, all brain fingerprinting can do is to narrow down the search to two subjects." Moreover, P-300 mapping is only of use in the small percentage of criminal cases where appropriate images or sounds are available — a limitation it shares with DNA or conventional fingerprint tests.

Flights of fantasy?

All of this points to the need to assess the evidence so far available on the Mumbai bombings with great care. Some of what has emerged from suspects' statements seems liberally laced with fantasy. For example, key suspect Faisal Sheikh told interrogators that one member of his cell received instructions from the "ISI chief" to assassinate the former Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani. To anyone even remotely familiar with the workings of covert services, it seems unlikely that the then Director-General of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Ehsan-ul-Haq, would have met with a low-level agent to discuss such plans. Another suspect, CNN-IBN television recently reported, claimed to have seen top Al-Qaeda operative Mohammad Atta while training in Pakistan — a disclosure that would have been sensational were it not for the fact that the terrorist died during the New York terror bombings of 2001.

Several points of detail also need clarification. Suspects, for example, have told the Mumbai Police that a Pakistani national fabricated the devices used in the bombing — a somewhat mystifying act, since the suspects themselves are stated to have received training in Pakistan. Finally, why so many Pakistani nationals were despatched to carry out the strikes when local Lashkar cadre were available needs to be explained.

It is possible the Mumbai Police do have answers to these and other questions — answers they wish to disclose in a court of law, rather than to journalists. As things stand, though, it is hard to see just what this evidence might be. Key suspects such as top Maharashtra Lashkar-e-Taiba organisers Rahil Sheikh and Zabiuddin Ansari are thought to have fled the country, while Pakistan has made clear it will not allow Indian interrogators to question the terrorist group's top leadership. Neither the Intelligence Bureau nor the Research and Analysis Wing is likely to allow intercepted communications between the bombers and their bosses in Pakistan to be produced in a court of law, for fear of disclosing India's technical capabilities — and limitations. As such, providing a coherent account of the command-level planning and execution of the Mumbai bombings could prove difficult.

Questions still remain on both the integrity and the content of the suspects' stories. Before evidence persuasive enough to shame Pakistan into acting against the Lashkar and its ISI friends can be placed on the table, criminal investigators might need to spend a little more time in the sun.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Farcical exercise
Doping and cricket
Facts, fiction or the fog of drugs?
Planning for cities of the future
More problems for the U.S. in West Asia
A tale of two cities
Poor women get the Nobel Prize
China to conserve land
Corrections and clarifications
Nobel for Gandhiji
Remarkable writer
Abdullah's remarks
Court ruling

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu