Failures of Memory--Big and Small

By now, we all know that Brian Williams “misremembered” that a helicopter he was in was hit by enemy fire in Iraq twelve years ago. The video below shows how his account of the incident changed over the years. Since the memory was self-serving, many people have characterized Williams' account as a lie rather than an accidental memory lapse. To people who have never been in a war zone, the idea that someone might forget whether his helicopter was hit by gunfire is a pretty tough sell. NBC News implicitly took this position when it punished him by suspending him without pay for six months. Several other well-known people, such as Hillary Clinton, have been caught in similar fabrications, and several of Williams' other recollections have come under suspicion.

Cognitive psychologists point out that the average person dramatically underestimates the malleability of human memory. False memory syndrome refers to cases in which people have an important memory that they truly believe, but which is factually incorrect. Some people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit, such as sexual abuse of children, on the basis of memories “recovered” by alleged victims, usually with the aid of mental health practitioners. Other innocent defendants have been convicted of crimes to which they confessed under police interrogation, and of which they believed they were guilty, at least for a time. A new study by Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter provides some of the best evidence yet for the construction of detailed and important false memories.

The authors used a paradign developed by Elizabeth Loftus for her “lost in a shopping mall” study, in which some college students were induced to develop this false memory. After 126 Canadian students had volunteered to participate in the study, their parents or primary caregivers were interviewed. The purpose of the interview was to identify one highly emotional event of a non-criminal nature that had occurred to the students during their adolescence, and to ascertain that they had never been arrested and charged with a crime. The first 60 students who met these criteria participated in a series of three interviews, each about one week apart.

In the first interview, they were asked to recall and describe the true event and a false event allegedly reported by their parents. In half the cases, the false event was that they were arrested and charged with a crime—ten cases each of assault, assault with a weapon, and theft. The other thirty false events were non-criminal: an accidental injury, being attacked by a dog, and losing a large amount of money. Since none of the participants reported remembering the false event during the first interview, they were given false contextual cues, were asked to try to recover the memory, and were given advice as to how to recover it. They were asked again to describe both events and answer several questions about them during the second and third interviews. At the end of the third interview, they were fully debriefed.

Participants were said to have accepted the false memory if they met two criteria: (1) they reported ten or more details of the incident not suggested by the interviewer, and (2) they reported during the debriefing that they truly believed the event had occurred. Forty-four of sixty participants (73%) met these criteria. The percentages did not differ very much among the six types of false events.

The researchers were impressed not only by the large number of participants who accepted the false memory but also by their “richly detailed” descriptions of it. They compared responses to the true and false memories among the 44 participants who experienced the false memory. These students recalled more details of the true memory (92, on average) than the false memory (72)—but 72 details is still fairly impressive for a false memory. They had greater confidence in the true memory, and experienced it as more vivid, but the amount of anxiety generated by the true and false memories did not differ.

There are some important differences between Brian Williams' false memory and those created in the Shaw and Porter study. As far as we know, Williams' memory was not prompted by anyone else. However, Loftus has suggested that he might have been influenced by “audience tuning.” To paraphrase Jon Stewart, audience responses to his tale might have excited the pleasure centers in his brain and caused his story to drift toward greater bravery over time. In addition, the memories created in the study were not self-serving. Just the opposite. They remembered being charged with a crime. Would their misremembering have been even greater if the memory had been flattering to them?

Leslie Savan expressed her satisfaction that at least someone is being punished for lying about our invasion of Iraq, even if it's not one of the right people. Others have spoken about the relative unimportance of Brian Williams' battlefield exaggeration when compared to the many other lies he routinely told on behalf of the government and his corporate sponsors every weekday night. In fact, we might speculate that NBC's main reason for suspending him was not that he told a false story but his loss of credibility, which might adversely affect public acceptance of their nightly propaganda report.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman reports that he was in the Monroeville Mall last week when three people were shot, although he didn't see or hear the incident. When he posted his experience on Twitter, one person wryly commented, “in five years, he will say he was shot.”

By the way, did I ever tell you about the time I rescued a dog from a burning building?

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A Stroll Down Memory Lane

This Man is Truly and Finally Hopeless

I've never been quite as angry at President Obama, or regretted as much having voted for him in 2008, as when I saw and read this part of his speech in Brussels yesterday.

Let's skip the introduction, in which he congratulates himself for having opposed our invasion of Iraq, and go directly to the substance of his remarks.

          But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system.

Yes. We presented our case to the United Nations, they said “no,” and we went ahead and invaded anyway. Is this morally superior to not having asked? It is our failure to abide by the terms of the UN charter that makes the invasion of Iraq a clear violation of international law.

          We did not claim or annex Iraq's territory.

True, but . . .

          We did not grab its resources for our own gain.

This is false. One of the first things we did was insist that Iraq's oil, which previously belonged to the Iraqi people, be privatized and the drilling rights sold to American and international oil companies. Of course, energy corporations were not the only ones to profit from the war. Millions of dollars went to weapons manufacturers and politically connected contractors such as Halliburton. Among those who didn't benefit were the American people. According to the Pentagon, 4487 soldiers lost their lives in Iraq, and tens of thousands more suffered life-changing injuries. The American people are also left with more than $3 trillion in debt.

I think we can now say without fear of contradiction that control of Iraqi oil was the primary reason the Bush administration went to war in Iraq. If you have not yet seen Rachel Maddow's March 13 documentary, Why We Did It, you should watch it.

   
          Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people . . .

About a million fewer of them than when the war started.

          . . . in a fully sovereign Iraqi state that can make decisions about its own future.

We also left them with a totally devastated infrastructure, contaminated by depleted uranium which will leave future generations of Iraqis to suffer from cancer and birth defects. We unleashed sectarian violence which continues to kill Iraqis almost every day. Whether the future of Iraq will include democratic elections remains to be seen. Their current President Nouri al-Malaki, running for a third term, seems to be systematically eliminating his competition from the upcoming elections.

How many people died and how much property was destroyed during the annexation of Crimea? And speaking of people determining their own future, we are told that 83% of Crimeans voted in the March 16 referendum, and 97% of those who voted chose annexation by Russia. Even if those figures are not entirely accurate, or are tainted in some way by the presence of Russian troops in the country, no one is seriously denying that annexation by Russia was the overwhelming preference of the Crimean people.

I saw a former American diplomat (whose name I unfortunately don't recall) interviewed on television by Chris Hayes. When he parroted the administration's claim that the annexation of Crimea violates international law, Hayes asked him the obvious question about American hypocrisy, given our past history in Iraq and other places. His answer was, basically, “Yes, but two wrongs don't make a right.” Wouldn't it have been refreshing had Obama said something similar, something like this?

We were wrong to invade Iraq, and in doing so, we contributed to the breakdown of international law which made the takeover of Crimea seem more permissible. But our foreign policy will change. We will not engage in illegal wars during the remainder of my presidency.

Our course, if he had said that, he would have to (among other things) end his illegal drone strikes in at least four countries.

The most interesting question that remains to be answered about Barack Obama is this: Is his dramatic conservative shift in attitudes the inevitable result of time spent in the office of the presidency, or did he actively deceive the American people about his intentions during his two political campaigns?

Update (3/29/14):

I now believe the diplomat I referred to was Michael McFaul, former Ambassador to Russia. He has written an op-ed that mentions the difficult he had defending international law in Russia when they always asked, "What about Iraq?"

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Talking Back to the Media

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Here's Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, the documentary that was shown on Rachel Maddow's program Monday night. If you didn't see it, it's about 45 minutes long and well worth watching. In fact, we should all watch a brief clip every morning before we pick up the newspaper.

The film traces the origin of most of the false reports leading up to the war. However, it only mentions in passing the body of information coming from United Nations weapons inspectors that rebutted the claim that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction." When I predicted in 2002 that no WMDs would be found, I relied heavily on the testimony of Scott Ritter.

Not surprisingly, they don't take a clear stand on whether the Bush administration fell victim to confirmatory bias or this was a deliberate deception.

While they take a few swipes at the media, including the New York Times, they fail to mention MSNBC's own role in selling the war. On February 25, 2003, MSNBC cancelled its highest rated program, Donahue, due to host Phil Donahue's opposition to the upcoming invasion of Iraq.  A leaked memo stated that Donahue would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."

In Hot Water

This post doesn't have a social science connection. It involves a legal case that, to the best of my knowledge, is only being covered in Pittsburgh. I believe it deserves to be more widely known because of what it says about the attitudes of the Army and major defense contractors toward American soldiers.

In 2008, Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret from Shaler, PA (a Pittsburgh suburb), serving in Iraq, was electrocuted while taking a shower on an Army base in Baghdad. He was one of 18 soldiers in Iraq to be electrocuted by faulty wiring. In Sgt. Maseth's case, a water pump shorted out, electrifying the water in which he was showering. The building's electrical system was ungrounded.

The installation and maintenance of the electrical system was the responsibility of Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), formerly a division of Halliburton. Both Halliburton and KBR made a millions of dollars contracting various services to the Defense Department in Iraq. Many of these were no-bid contracts, obtained no doubt with the help of Vice President Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton.

Sgt. Maseth's family is suing KBR on the grounds that their negligence was responsible for the soldier's death. On March 30, KBR asked Judge Nora Barry Fischer to dismiss the suit. KBR's contract says it is “responsible for quality” in its work. KBR's lawyer, Lawrence Ebner, says this is just “biolerplate language” and doesn't mean what it says. He says the U. S. Army is responsible for Sgt. Maseth's death.

Mr. Ebner said that the Army decided use old Iraqi buildings to house soldiers rather than build new structures for three reasons:

• The old buildings provided good protection against gunfire.
• New construction would have created the impression the U. S. was preparing for a permanent occupation.
• Using old buildings was less expensive.

Then, even though they knew these old buildings were unsafe, the Army decided they were “good enough” and required only that they be maintained rather than refurbished. However, Patrick Cavanaugh, lawyer for Sgt. Maseth's parents, said the Army had given KBR about a dozen work orders to fix the building. An electrical expert estimated that it would have taken $100 and a half-hour's work to prevent Sgt. Maseth's death, he said.

The significance of this argument is that under U. S. law, soldiers and their families cannot sue the Army for injuries incurred during a war regardless of the amount of negligence involved. If the Court accepts KBR's motion, no one is legally accountable for Sgt. Maseth's death.

Not content just to blame the Army, KBR also attempted to blame the victim. Mr. Ebner said that Sgt. Maseth knew the showers were unsafe and chose to take the risk of showering there. (Maybe he should have taken his shower in one of downtown Baghdad's luxury health spas.) Mr. Cavanaugh replied that although Sgt. Maseth knew the showers were dangerous, he had reason to believe they had been repaired.

The Army declined to comment. Judge Fischer will decide whether to dismiss the suit. Stay tuned.