Truth Serums & Torture

Hundreds of captured Taliban and al-Qaeda belligerents have been grilled, but apparently little useful has been gleaned. Frustrated U.S. interrogators have complained that Afghan battlefield prisoners employ aliases, deceit and other tactics to withstand interrogations.

In discussing this issue, cable-TV commentators and other pundits generally have treated "truth serum" as a softer means of extracting information compared to more traditional torture, with commentators weighing the pros and cons of the two approaches.

But do truth serums actually work? Sodium pentothal, the most commonly known speech-inducing compound, is a mild sedative that makes people more talkative, but not necessarily more honest. Even more problematic, from a human rights standpoint, is a long history of practice that blurs the moral lines between the use of interrogation drugs and more overt methods of torture.

William Webster, former director of both the CIA and FBI, put the "truth serum" issue into prominent play in April when he urged use of drugs to loosen the tongues of suspects, such as Osama bin Laden's aide Abu Zubaydeh and captives held in cages at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The debate soon spread to cable-TV talk shows. On Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor,"  for instance, retired Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan said he doubted "truth serum" would work but hoped Webster's suggestion would lead the Bush administration to try torture. "Maybe it'll be an entrée to take us to the next step," Cowan said. "I kid around with people about plugging them up to a 110-volt outlet and flipping the switch if they don't want to talk."

Guest host John Kasich demurred that many experts don't see torture as an effective interrogation technique either, "and I'm not talking about somebody who's worrying about being politically correct," but even "people inside of some of our best intelligence organizations."

Cowan disputed the view that torture is ineffective. "I'll be honest by saying that I served a lot of time in Vietnam, and in some cases where I worked on prisoner operations, we did go a little bit beyond what normal interrogation techniques would give you, and we got phenomenal information," he said. [Fox News, April 26, 2002]

Wish List

Yet, U.S. spymasters, knowing that torture subjects may simply tell an interrogator what he wants to hear, have long yearned for a drug that could pull reliable information out of an unwilling subject.

A sure-fire truth drug has been high on the wish list of U.S. intelligence agencies at least since 1942, when scientists working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's wartime predecessor, were asked to develop a chemical substance that could break down the psychological defenses of enemy spies and POWs, thereby making it easier to obtain information from them.

After testing several compounds, the OSS scientists selected a potent extract of marijuana as the best available "truth serum." The cannabis concoction was given the code name TD, meaning Truth Drug. When injected into food or tobacco cigarettes, TD helped loosen the reserve of recalcitrant interrogation subjects.

The effects of the drug were described in a once-classified OSS report: TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern an individual s discretion and caution. . . . [G]enerally speaking, the reaction will be one of great loquacity and hilarity.

In the end, marijuana didn't fit the bill as the ultimate "truth serum," but it proved to be a gateway drug that set U.S. military and espionage scientists on a path to creating more powerful and dangerous chemicals. After World War II, American intelligence stepped up efforts to find a more effective "truth serum."

In 1947, the U.S. Navy launched Project Chatter, which included experiments with mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug derived from the peyote cactus (with effects similar to LSD). Mescaline was studied as a possible speech-inducing agent after the Navy learned that Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp had used it in mind-control experiments. The Nazis concluded that it was impossible to impose one's will on another person, even when the strongest dose of mescaline had been given.