WASHINGTON — Prolonged stress from the CIA’s harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
The methods could even have caused the suspects to create and believe false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. The study did not involve interviews with any of those interrogated by the CIA.
“The CIA’s former interrogation program . . . produced intelligence on which our government acted to disrupt terrorist operations. Those are facts,” said CIA spokesman George Little.
