As the first suspects in the terrorist war on the West prepare to stand trial, their defenders and apologists are invoking a word from the Cold War. Last week the father of the alleged shoe bomber, Briton Richard Reid, insisted his son was brainwashed. A friend of American terror suspect John Walker told People magazine that Walker had been brainwashed by al-Qaeda. And recently it was reported that Abd-Samad Moussaoui, the brother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so called 20th hijacker, believes that, in Britain, his brother "became prey to an extremist brainwashing cult".
But what is brainwashing, and is there any scientific basis for believing it works?
British journalist Edward Hunter coined the term in his 1953 book, Brain-Washing in Red China, which described Communist techniques for controlling the minds of non-believers. Scholars, journalists and the public loved the term and the Western world was sold on the possibility that evil Communists could brainwash normal citizens into becoming robotic assassins. (In 1968, when Michigan Governor George Romney claimed that the Johnson administration had brainwashed him about Vietnam, Senator Eugene McCarthy quipped that in Romney’s case "a light rinse would have done").
Later, amid the emergence of new cults and sects, brainwashed became the best explanation we could muster to explain seemingly normal people’s decisions to commit mass suicide or troll airports in unflattering saffron robes.
The "Moonies/Scientologists/Hare Krishnas made me do it" defence has received a good bit of play in courtrooms over the last 25 years - much of it successful. The most famous attempt at the defence came in the US, in the Patty Hearst case. Hearst, a 19-year-old heiress to a publishing fortune, was kidnapped, held in a cupboard, and tortured for several months by the Symbionese Liberation Army, whom she then joined in several armed robberies.
At the trial, Hearst’s lawyer F Lee Bailey argued a "duress" defence; she would never have robbed the bank had the SLA not "brainwashed" her. But the jury didn’t believe it and Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Hearst’s brainwashing claim ultimately succeeded - in the court of public opinion. Six of Hearst’s former jurors joined a massive national movement to commute her sentence, and John Wayne, one of her many famous defenders, declared, after the tragedy in Jonestown, Guyana: "It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash 900 human beings into mass suicide, but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation and confinement."
President Carter commuted her sentence, and President Clinton granted her a pardon.
There is good empirical evidence to shore up such claims about brainwashing, primarily in studies done on former prisoners of war by Edgar Schein and Robert Lifton in the early 1960s.
According to Lifton, the standard requirements for a really sparkling clean brainwash include: isolation of the subjects, control over their information, debilitation, degradation, discipline and fear, peer pressure, performance of repetitive tasks and renunciation of formerly held values.
Where the empirical proof really broke down, however, and where the anti-cult movement unleashed a witch hunt, was in the "second-generation" brainwashing theory: a branch of scholarship trying to prove that subjects could be brainwashed without physical coercion. It requires a long, airy leap of logic to believe that a subject released from physical restraint will continue to obey the commands of their captors for protracted periods of time. But two US scholars, sociologist Richard Ofshe and psychologist Margaret Singer, made names for themselves in the 1980s with theories "wherein manipulation, exploitation, and misrepresentation by cult leaders can substitute for physical coercion". This became the most satisfying public explanation for why people were joining the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church or the Krishnas.
And while the second-generation, non-coercive theory of brainwashing is almost entirely without empirical support, Ofshe and Singer managed to corner the expert witness market in a host of post-Jonestown, post-Cold-War brainwashing cases.
The vast majority of brainwashing cases are civil. Mostly, they involved former cult members suing the groups for false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress or fraud.
Some have resulted in multi-million dollar jury verdicts. But all junk-science has its limit. The watershed for the second-generation brainwashing defence (and the end of Ofshe’s and Singer’s impressive run as unbeatable expert witnesses) came in 1990 with US v Fishman, a California federal criminal action in which a defendant put forth an insanity defence in a postal fraud case, alleging that he’d been brainwashed by the Scientologists.
The judge threw out the brainwashing testimony, holding that the views did not represent the consensual view of the scientific community.
More and more, the idea of brainwashing is dismissed by courts as either Cold War hysteria or the anti-cult mania of the 1970s and 80s. There is a new tolerance for cults (now respectfully renamed "new religious movements") and a dearth of empirical evidence that evil geniuses can force innocents to do what they would not normally do.
But still the public love the idea of brainwashing. Studies show jurors overwhelmingly believe brainwashing is a highly potent psychological phenomenon. In one much-cited 1991 survey of 383 random subjects, nearly 78 per cent believed brainwashing can occur even if the subject "is not actually held captive against their will".
In a 1992 American survey of 1,000 New Yorkers, about 43 per cent of respondents believed that brainwashing is absolutely necessary to make someone join a religious cult.
What is it about the Moonies or the Branch Davidians that makes the public so certain that their adherents must have been brainwashed into compliance?
Firstly, brainwashing offers a clinical/scientific explanation for unusual levels of religious fervour. Some religion is acceptable; the sort that comes with a tasteful choir and topical sermons. But head-shavings, communes, and the eating of too many legumes make us nervous. So does mass suicide.
Secondly, we place a high premium on personal freedom, so much so that any religion that restricts movement, choices or association smacks of cults to us.
Believing in brainwashing allows us to consider our own religious beliefs normal, even rational, while allowing us to dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and Scientologists as zombies. We can feel sorry for them and still go to church on Sunday.
It remains to be seen whether we will also decide that fundamentalist Islam is merely a "cult" that has subjected its members to relentless brainwashing.
Ambivalence about fundamentalist Islam is clear. We can’t decide whether Muslim fundamentalists are an enemy to be vanquished or a cult to be "deprogrammed". A search of cuttings since September 11 reveals hundreds of references to Islam in tandem with brainwashing, including numerous assertions that all madrasahs are Islamic mindcontrol factories.
Already the cult experts are arguing that Walker, Reid, and Moussaoui are victims of extremist cults. Rick Ross, a lecturer, deprogrammer and expert witness on cults, recently told Time magazine that the Taleban "is an apparitional cult".
Former Moonie and author Steven Hassan claims to see unmistakable signs of brainwashing in both Walker and Moussaoui, both of whom apparently underwent radical personality changes upon converting to Islam. But in the terror trials of 2002, defence attorneys will be hard pressed to find a brainwashing expert to testify that Osama bin Laden can somehow control the minds of thousands of innocent young men by remote control.
The real problem is that jurors, and the public, may still believe it regardless. A perfectly credible legal narrative can be crafted to play on the same sympathies that ultimately freed Patty Hearst: Reid, Moussaoui, and Walker - young converts to a religion that is a vicious brainwashing cult.
If anyone has been brainwashed, it’s the millions of ordinary people who still view new, radicalised or unusual religions as "cults" and their leaders as masters of mind control. These terror cases must be tried free from the patronising assumption that strange, even crazy beliefs are necessarily products of illness or undue influence.
The proper word to describe a savage act committed at the behest of a charismatic lunatic is not "brainwashed". It’s evil.
The al-Qaeda argument
THE TERRORISTS who destroyed the World Trade Centre on 11 September could have been subjected to what used to be termed brainwashing, says Ian Haworth, an authority on the methods used by cults. The 300 al-Qaeda suspects kept at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba offer an invaluable chance - so far unexploited - to gain an insight into their mental condition and motivations, he believes.
Haworth, general secretary and founder of the London-based Cult Information Centre, says the fact that the al-Qaeda suspects are not being questioned by experts in "exit therapy" techniques used to rehabilitate those brainwashed by cults is "an opportunity sadly being missed on a daily basis".
"Look at the families in Birmingham who have sons out there," says Haworth, the author of Cults: A Practical Guide, and the victim of a therapy cult in Canada during the 1970s. "They say their sons were brainwashed. One argument is that this is just a convenient excuse - and it is; it means you can say they were not responsible, blame it all on Osama bin Laden. But the other argument is: what if it’s true? Are they victims? Do they need help?"
Haworth says the terms "de-programming" and "brainwashing" are both out of date, talking instead in terms of mind control, thought reform or psychological coercion, rather than brainwashing, which he identifies with the techniques used against prisoners of war in Indochina and Korea. "What we’re dealing with today is far more subtle," he says.
Similarly, the term "exit counselling" has been preferred to describe the rehabilitation of cult victims since the 1980s, rather than "de-programming".
Following 11 September, Haworth was reluctant to ascribe mind control to those responsible for the atrocities: "I didn’t want to be seen to be exploiting an awful tragedy for our own purposes," he says.
However, since a newspaper approached him, pointing out that some of the suicide terrorists’ families were talking in terms of the kind of personality change and alienation associated with cultist mind control, he now believes that what is so far only circumstantial evidence suggests that the terrorists probably were victims of mind control. "We’d be able to tie the whole thing up if we knew what happened to people on a daily basis in the camps," he says.
He doesn’t rule out the possibility that grievances were fanned into an intense hatred for the West. He reckons there is a crying need for those qualified in exit counselling to sit down with captured al-Qaeda suspects and talk to them. "Ironically, the greatest number of such counsellors are in the US, but do the authorities ever talk to people in our field? Not very often."
The involvement of such specialists, he argues, might have avoided the deaths of 82 members of the Branch Davidian sect, including its deluded leader and would-be-messiah, David Koresh, in the conflagration at Waco, Texas, in 1993, after FBI agents opened fire. "It’s easy to talk in hindsight, but they do have some of the best brains in our field in America, but they don’t listen. Now, with suspects sitting in cages in Cuba, I would have thought that some of these specialists could find out some very interesting information.
"And if it is proved that at least some of the al-Qaeda members have been victims of mind control, by talking to them and reversing the process, one could gain tremendous insight into what was done and why, and what is likely to be done elsewhere in the world."