‘This statement is untrue’. The good old liar’s paradox has tortured philosophers for hundreds of years. Sorting deception from honesty is a complex business, vastly accelerated by our relatively recent access to a relentless, often unverifiable deluge of information designed to influence, inflame and sometimes mobilise our darkest thoughts.
Terrorists are ardent consumers of deception. Their violent extremism may have been animated by formative lies used by those trying to radicalise them to explain then legitimise then weaponise their own inadequacies. Planning and preparation for attacks requires subterfuge. The assailant must be adept at concealing their true motives both to the security services who want to thwart them and citizens who they sometimes must exploit to further their deadly aims. They will in many cases have had to fashion and live an alternative identity so convincing they deceive even close family members.
We are generally inclined to trust people at face value as a default – particularly those in our own groups or those who want to acquire expertise. This goes some way to explain for example why, despite the jarring ambiguity of their specific interests, the 9/11 attackers were still able to obtain the training in flight schools to turn passenger planes into weapons.
Those extremists who don’t kill themselves, get killed or escape enter our criminal justice system carrying with them this huge freight of deception. We still don’t know enough about the relationship between time behind bars and desistance to say whether or how the toxic ideology that put them there is amenable to authentic and enduring change. But we know it is vitally important to do everything possible to identify who the unrepentant terrorists are and mitigate the dangers they will pose when released from prison back into the community as the vast majority will be. This requires better systems, processes and skills to identify deception.
Terrorists in prison are not currently subject to assertive challenge or individualised treatment, whatever you might read in the press releases. The priority is to keep potentially highly dangerous prisoners compliant, to do their time, which they can by merely keeping their heads down. The current regime is containment-focused, with intervention only when there is intelligence to show risky behaviour. To a large extent this model has evolved from the experience of dealing with Irish republican terrorists in custody in Great Britain during the Troubles. No attempt was made to challenge the ideology that drove their terrorism, the emphasis – imperfect as it was given the number of escapes that took place – was on secure confinement and a pair of crossed fingers.
Things are changing, largely as a result of the jihadist attacks either side of last Christmas, where automatically released terrorist prisoners went on appalling rampages resulting in two murders and both attackers being shot dead. Emergency legislation will mean that terrorist offenders spend longer in custody but this will be meaningless – dangerous even – if their hateful ideologies merely curdle and intensify.
One of the innovations being introduced to manage ongoing risk is the use of the polygraph or lie detector for terrorist offenders released on licence. Last November, Usman Khan killed two young people with cynical brutality at an event that was supposed to showcase his rehabilitation. Khan released almost a year before was in some ways a model prisoner who completed a primitive prison deradicalisation programme and appeared to have given up his violent past. He also appeared to be co-operating with a disengagement programme after release which judged him safe enough to attend the ‘Learning Together’ charity event unaccompanied. There, dressed in a fake suicide belt, he stabbed two young people to death. Khan was judged to have been a success by the charity to the extent that his ‘case study’ was on their promotional literature.
How did Khan conceal his murderous intent and deceive so many people including professionals whose job it was to monitor and quantify risky behaviour? In the absence of any enquiry, we don’t know whether he simply ‘gamed’ a very inadequate monitoring system or that he had genuinely changed but events during his release on licence reverted him back to active extremism. Either way, it’s clear that sophisticated and unfortunately successful deception played a central role.
The Government has decided to enlist lie detector tests to assist professionals who must make profoundly difficult and sensitive decisions about people who believe they have divine permission to kill, and for whom deception is not just a habit but a duty. In my evidence to the scrutiny committee for the bill that will introduce them I said, rather flippantly, that polygraphs were a little better than tossing a coin and that they were an excellent way of detecting the physiological signs of nervousness, which is almost a given when you consider the necessary and sometimes useful ‘theatre’ of wiring someone up to a machine that has been accorded mythical status by Hollywood.
The truth is rather less glamorous and certainly more contested. Polygraphs conducted in clinical settings by highly trained operators do seem to provide a better outcome in distinguishing the truth from lies when compared with the old gut feeling of seasoned interrogators. But it’s no silver bullet, which makes me somewhat suspicious of why it has gained so much prominence in the blizzard of other measures to be rolled out in the forthcoming Counter Terrorism Act.
Standard Polygraphs measure blood pressure, respiration, heart rate and sweating. After establishing a baseline the operator then asks a series of structured questions requiring a yes/no answer and, interspersed with control questions, can examine the answers for signs of agitation associated with lying.
There are a number of key drawbacks to the technology. First, there are well known and researched mental and physical counter measures the subject can take which are regarded as effective. I’m not going to tell you, look them up. Second, a whole range of prescribed medications, as well as known and undetected medical conditions, can cause inconsistencies in measurement. There’s only one state in the US that allows evidence from polygraphs to be admitted in court without the subject’s consent. That should tell us something about the veracity of what is still an experimental approach.
Nonetheless, polygraphs are a potentially helpful addition to the new armoury of skills and techniques that we must equip ourselves with to detect unchanged and dangerous offenders in custody and after release. Recent advances in polygraph technology, replacing technicians with AI, are delivering promising results through processes that are harder to prepare for and resist. They will have a role, but rather less so than the breathless tabloid headlines have suggested.
What they cannot and will not solve is a fundamental problem in our risk management of the ‘spectacular few’ offenders who have the capacity to do harm out of all proportion to their numbers. Sadly an opportunity to answer this need this was missed in the publication of a review last week into our creaky Heath Robinson risk management system, built on dodgy diagnostics and plodding bureaucracy.
We need terrorist offenders actively and assertively challenged from the first day of their sentence in custody to the last day of their supervision in the community. We need this driven by a dedicated and elite stand alone terrorist risk management unit, probably freed from the dead hand-wringing of the corporate Prison Service and instead composed of hard nosed interrogators, theologians, security specialists, psychiatrists and frontline case workers who spend years understanding their charges and supporting them to change.
There is no shiny tech substitute for patient years of observation by experienced and well led staff who are dedicated to developing relationships with terrorist offenders and getting a foot in the door to enable cognitive change. These are the people most likely to see authentic repentance as well as spot someone who is merely simulating it. In the absence of these bold and radical changes, if we look only to initiatives that make the headlines, I fear we will see more unreconstructed, deceitful terrorists slipping through the net however longer they remain incarcerated. Lies, damned lies make human statistics.
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