Imagine the pride we could have in good old-fashioned American ingenuity with a headline like that, splashed across the corporate media machine. If only Americans were smart and creative enough to create a technology that produced 100% accuracy in lie detection.
For several years, I have seen stories pop up now and then regarding "brain fingerprinting." It's an American-made technology that....um...produced, like, 100% accuracy in lie detection.
But while they touch on the potential for suspect interrogation, Fifth Amendment issues are what have dominated the focus of most of these articles. My question: if we already have the ability to make torture obsolete, then why hasn't brain fingerprinting even been sniffed at during the torture debates?
I am just as concerned as any alert American about the erosion of my Constitutional rights over the past six years. But if this FMRI technology does consistently produce flawless results, then why does our government insist on using techniques that have been scientifically proven to be ineffective? What is the upside to mimicking the Spanish Inquistion, the Nazis, or the Khmer Rouge?
"Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging" was covered here in 2006 by diarist intrepidliberal. If I may indulge in a Cliff Notes version: a brain scan measures activity in the brain. When you try to cover something up, a certain pattern of brain activity follows. One can beat the obsolete Polygraph test, but one cannot fool one's own brain. Intrepidliberal also points out that the technology is already in use in India for many purposes, including early detection of Alzheimer's.
According to Wikipedia:
Despite claims of high accuracy, Farwell's "brain fingerprinting" technique has been criticized on a number of fronts [1] most notably in a number of papers by J. Peter Rosenfeld of Northwestern University. [2] Contrary to research by Farwell and others suggesting that brain fingerprinting has a 100% accuracy rate, research by Rosenfeld and others has suggested that, in the presence of learned countermeasures, the wider class of P300-based tests, which includes the brain fingerprinting technique may give results close to those obtained by chance.[3]
If "learned countermeasures" are the only thing standing in the way of FMRI's reliability, then I'm sold. What is the countermeasure for waterboarding? Lying. Telling your torturer whatever the hell he or she wants to hear in order to spare one's own life. Oh, and by the way, how many al Qaeda members do you think have the remotest clue what these learned countermeasures are?
Pardon the obvious, but this is a no-brainer. If I am on trial for my life (assuming we still have the right to a trial in the future), I want the FMRI as an available option. I want to clear my name, right? I know I'm innocent, but apparently no one else does. GIVE ME THE DAMN BRAIN SCAN AND LET ME PROVE IT. You don't need to simulate my drowning death to get accurate information. I have a right to remain silent, I have the right to an attorney, and I have a right to clear my name in whichever manner the court finds admissible. (And that ain't a Polygraph.)
We could be the beacon of the world, showing off how our greatest asset--Americans--found a way to forever abolish and render useless an archaic, barbaric, and ineffective method of interrogation. Tonight, Keith Olbermann's Special Comment focused on Daniel Levin, who volunteered to undergo waterboarding in order to properly define whether it was torture. His "Yes" was the end of his employment. As a part of their training, police officers must be jolted with tasers before they can use them on suspects. I believe every member of Congress and the Executive Branch who supports and defends waterboarding should have the courage to do when Levin did, and undergo waterboarding before they cast their vote on whether or not it is torture.
It has become apparent to me that the current Administration and the Democrats who enable them have no creativity, no awareness of the 21st century, and no clue whatsoever that torture is terrorism. If the only obstacle to implementing the FMRI "brain fingerprinting" is the Fifth Amendment, then this Administration would have been using it from the start, that much is obvious. What I am unclear on is what general malfunction our government has considering its sick obsession with obsolete sadomasochism.