Op-Ed Contributor: The Fog of War

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Op-Ed Contributor: The Fog of War

April 5, 2004
 By DANIEL L. SCHACTER





CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - With Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser, set to testify before the 9/11 commission
on Thursday, much attention is being focused on the
expected discrepancies between her recollections of the
Bush administration's response to terrorism issues and
those of Richard Clarke. One of the two, popular thinking
goes, will ultimately be caught in a lie. Already,
differences have come to light between how Mr. Clarke, the
former counterterrorism director for President Bush, and
another White House colleague remember the specific events
of 9/11.

In Mr. Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," he recounts
the responses of senior administration officials on that
day. Many of Mr. Clarke's recollections conflict with those
of Franklin C. Miller, a national security official who
worked closely with him. For example, Mr. Clarke writes
that Mr. Miller advised the secretary of defense, Donald
Rumsfeld, to leave the Pentagon by helicopter; Mr. Miller
said in an interview last week that he never spoke to Mr.
Rumsfeld that day. The two men also have contrasting
recollections of the details of important decisions, like
providing fighter escorts for Air Force One when it took
off from Florida. According to Mr. Miller, Mr. Clarke's
memories contain dramatic embellishments that would "make a
great movie" but do not reflect the reality of what
happened.

These accounts may seem perplexing given the momentous
nature of the unfolding events. One might even wonder
whether one of the parties has engaged in willful
distortion. But these conflicts need not involve bad faith
on the part of either person.

Indeed, conflicting recollections are neither unfamiliar
(recall the testimonies of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
in 1991) nor surprising. The way the brain stores and
retrieves information, research shows, can sometimes lead
people to hold different memories of the same event.

Memory errors can be classified into seven categories
(sometimes called sins). Three are especially relevant to
conflicting recollections: transience, misattribution and
bias. Transience is the term for the well-known fact that
memories tend to fade over time (unless we rehash and
discuss them frequently). Experiments show that specific
details of an experience are lost more quickly than general
information about it.

In one such study, 12 people were asked to summarize their
activities during a "typical day" at work; they also were
asked to recount exactly what they did the day before and a
week before. The study confirmed what some researchers
suspected: the day-old memory was a nearly verbatim record
of what actually happened, but a week later memory was
closer to a generic description of what usually happens.
With the passage of time, memory shifts from a reproduction
of the past to a reconstruction that is heavily influenced
by general knowledge and beliefs.

Similar considerations almost certainly apply to what Mr.
Clarke and Mr. Miller remember. Of course, 9/11 was not an
ordinary day at the office. Shocking experiences like the
terrorist attacks or the explosion of the space shuttle
tend to be better remembered than mundane occurrences. But
studies show that with the passage of time, people can
forget and distort details of even these experiences.

Such errors are sometimes associated with the memory sin of
misattribution, where we remember aspects of an experience
correctly but attribute them to the wrong source. For
instance, a college student recalled that she first learned
of the Challenger explosion in 1986 from television, when
the actual source was a group of friends. Misattribution
errors can occur for traumatic experiences, as in the case
of a rape victim who accused a psychologist of assault
based on her vivid memory of his face. In reality, she had
seen the psychologist on television just before she was
raped.

Because parts of misattributed memories are accurate,
people can maintain high confidence in such mistaken
recollections. Both Mr. Clarke's and Mr. Miller's accounts
are probably correct in some respects, but either one may
have fallen victim to misattribution, leading to different
claims about who said what to whom.

Bias, a third memory sin, occurs when current knowledge,
beliefs or feelings distort the past. For example, studies
have shown that we often inaccurately recall political
attitudes we held in the past. Our recollection ends up
reflecting our current attitudes instead. Research also
reveals an egocentric bias, meaning we remember the past in
ways that reflect positively our current self - a bias from
which government officials are not likely to be immune.

Transience, misattribution and bias occur even when we do
our best to recollect the past accurately. Without external
corroboration, we cannot know for certain which aspects of
Mr. Clarke's or Mr. Miller's account are off the mark - but
we do know enough about memory's sins to implicate the
likely culprits. It's something the commission, and the
country, should keep in mind when Ms. Rice testifies as
well.

Daniel L. Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard,
is the author of "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind
Forgets and Remembers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/opinion/05SCHA.html?ex=1082148399&ei=1&en=1cfd8a2520e4c06d

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