Year: 2013

by Chris Bodenner

A reader adds a first-hand perspective to a recent post:

I have no idea whether narcoanalysis will be useful as a psycho-diagnostic technique or as a law enforcement or intelligence gathering device, although it does seem less onerous than waterboarding. I do know that it can be very useful to the criminal defense attorney in certain limited instances. In the early part of my career I defended more than 50 homicide cases and found the technique to be very useful in three cases. I was fortunate to have the services of an experienced psychiatrist who had used it in treating what we now call PTSD in WW2 veterans suffering from repressed memories of traumatic events.

My first and most helpful experience was with a man who had undoubtedly shot and killed his wife but could not recall exactly how or why. When pressed to recall the event he could do so up to a point and then would start belching – a rather bizarre response. He was under indictment for second-degree murder under circumstances that suggested an execution-style killing. He had come back from a visit to the factory where he was employed while it was on strike.

The first indication that he was being truthful while undergoing the amytal interview came when he contradicted an earlier account of the reason for his visit to the strike scene. Before the medicated interview he said he had gone there to see how it was going. Under amytal he said he had gone there to try to get on television.

At the crucial point in the interview, for the first time he described how while he was pointing the gun at his wife to try to get her to admit a marital indiscretion, she grabbed the gun and jerked it downward, causing it to discharge. The 15-degree downward angulated entrance wound suggested she might have been on her knees begging for mercy without the revered memory he had suppressed.  I played the recording of the interview for the grand jury, who returned a superseding indictment for manslaughter, based on causing death while in the commission of the unlawful act of threatening her with a gun.

On another occasion I used the technique to gain some confirmation of my client’s claim that although he had gone along on a burglary, it was his partner who suddenly displayed a gun and killed two elderly people. His account of this was accompanied by the emotional response one would expect under these circumstances. He still went to prison for murder, but his partner was sentenced to death.

In another case the client admitted the complicity of another that he had refused to acknowledge even when confronted with evidence that only made sense if another was involved. More that admitting the involvement of another, he identified the person, which he confirmed when confronted with the tape recording.

All these people were of modest intellect. It is accepted that a thoroughgoing sociopath can lie even under  the influence of amytal. Ordinarily, an attorney would not bother to use the technique with that kind of defendant.

The above video is a scene from John Huston’s Let There Be Light, a 1946 documentary about the experimental treatment program for traumatized WWII veterans that employed hypnosis and sodium amytal. From the film’s Wiki page:

The film, commissioned by the United States Army Signal Corps, was the final entry in a John Huston trilogy of films produced at the request of the U.S. Government. This documentary film follows 75 U.S. soldiers who have sustained debilitating emotional trauma and depression. … The film was controversial in its portrayal of shell-shocked soldiers from the war. “Twenty percent of our army casualties”, the narrator says, “suffered psychoneurotic symptoms: a sense of impending disaster, hopelessness, fear, and isolation.” Apparently due to the potentially demoralizing effects the film might have on recruitment, it was subsequently banned by the Army after its production, although some pirated copies had been made.

by Brendan James

The UN is putting some teeth on its peacekeeping mission in the DRC, authorizing a 3,000-strong “intervention brigade” to put down militia violence in the eastern part of the country. David Bosco reminds us that the last attempt to do so turned ugly, fast:

In 2006, a group of Guatemalan special forces soldiers assigned to the peacekeeping mission attempted to hunt down units of the Lord’s Resistance Army operating in Congo’s Garamba National Park. The operation turned into a disaster. Several U.N. soldiers were killed (likely by friendly fire), and the LRA forces escaped. In early 2009, U.N. forces began actively supporting the offensive operations of the Congolese armed forces. But that collaboration was dialed back as criticism of Congolese army tactics mounted.

He argues these missions are almost always hobbled by inadequate forces sent with ambitious goals:

Part of the problem with offensive U.N. operations is that the training and resources of the forces doing the fighting often doesn’t match the mandate. It’s one thing for the Security Council to authorize offensive operations from New York; it’s quite another thing for peacekeeping commanders to manage them successfully on the ground. During the U.N.’s Bosnia operation in the 1990s, that gap between the Council’s proclamations and the actual work of peacekeepers grew to tragic proportions.

By Zoe Pollock

Graeme Wood ventured out to the Iranian resort island of Kish to understand the effect of American sanctions on Iran’s economy:

The Iranian rial trades semi-openly, and as this magazine went to press, its value was hovering under 40,000 to one U.S. dollar, weaker by nearly half compared with six months earlier. Authorities tried to ban currency trading for a few weeks in October, when the inflation rate peaked, but they failed. Finally they just asked money changers not to advertise the depressing new rates in their windows.

Wood’s First Rule of Budget Travel applies here: where there is runaway inflation, there are great deals for travelers with hard cash. … The first sign of rising prices was the hotel rate card. I had agreed over the phone to pay 370 dirhams, or about $100, for a night at a five-star hotel, including breakfast and lunch. (I had originally been told that the hotel had no vacancies, but when I asked again in English, with the implication of payment in foreign currency, a room materialized.) The rates for Iranians were quoted in Iranian rials, and to me—I had not been in Iran in more than three years—they looked not high but simply wrong. A zero in Persian writing is represented by a dot, and here I saw dots leading far off to the right, as if someone had left an ellipsis on the rate card instead of the full price. The Iranian price was 1.8 million rials.

Max Fisher has mixed feelings about taking a hyperinflation vacation:

Imagine the money in your wallet suddenly increasing value by a factor of four and a half — your nightly hotel budget rising from $70 to the equivalent of $340 — and you can see the appeal of a hyperinflation vacation.

Still, it feels a little weird to profit off of someone else’s pain. In this case, that someone is the entire Iranian middle and lower class. (Something Wood is very aware of and discusses with great care in his article.) The Post’s Jason Rezaian has reported from Tehran on the pain that ordinary Iranians feel from inflation, with everything from food to medicine becoming tougher to afford. And Wood points out that wealthy Iranians — those more likely to be affiliated with the regime, and thus desired targets of the economic sanctions driving so much of the inflation — are actually able to profit off of the inflation, for example with well-timed imports or by taking out the fixed-interest loans available only to those with political connections.

(Chart of the official Iranian rial-U.S. dollar exchange rate and the black market rates diverging by Steve H. Hanke of CATO)