By Chris Whitworth
The world will not quickly forget the day Osama bin Laden died.
But just like the folklore, myth and half-truths surrounding bin Laden’s life, the exact accounts of his death have become muddled.
Initial facts released by officials, such as marines engaging in a prolonged firefight with several armed guards at the complex and an armed bin Laden using one of his wives as a human shield, have since been scaled down or outright changed.
A White House official described varying accounts as the “fog of war”, where misinformation spreads through the chaos and ambiguity of war-time combat.
Others have accused the US government and military of lying and sculpting the truth about what really happened in last week’s early morning raid.
But could it be the marines’ actual memory of the event that is to blame?
A leading doctor of psychology at Victoria University, who advises the New Zealand Police, says he is not at all surprised that differing accounts of the mission have emerged.
“What we know about the way in which memory works is that memory is very fragile, and we know that memory is very easily distorted and easily changed,” says Dr Matthew Gerrie.
Mr Gerrie specialises in the effects of stress on memory, and is often called upon by the police to educate officers and detectives on the science of memory.
Can memories lie?
He says even police and soldiers trained specifically to cope with high stress situations are not immune to memory errors.
“I’m not at all surprised that even highly trained marines would come out with a differing account of what they experienced.”
Mr Gerrie says a further problem is that people who experience a high stress event often feel a false sense of confidence in what they remember, which makes them feel certain of details.
“In actual fact those events undergo the same kind of forgetting as every other kind of memory,” he says.
“…Because the event was traumatic or it was emotional what it tends to do is make us feel definite about the event, so it makes us feel as if our memory is better even though in fact it may not be better.”
A study carried out on soldiers a few years ago – called the Morgan’s Study – looked at soldiers’ memory under varying degrees of interrogation, and found there to be a direct link between stress levels and memory recall.
Mr Gerrie says stress has the ability to alter even major details of a person’s recall as it narrows their focus, in a phenomenon know as “change blindness”.
The phenomenon is easily shown in this video memory test.
Your memory or mine?
Another effect stress can have on memory is what is called “multiple memory reports”, where a person’s memory of an event becomes mixed up with other peoples’ recollections.
Crime scene detectives are often faced with multiple memory reports from eye witnesses who hear other peoples’ accounts of a crime and then take on the memory as their own.
Mr Gerrie says even the act of discussing the mission with other marines could have greatly distorted the individual’s memory.
“It’s highly likely that these soldiers were exposed to all sorts of different sources of information which could have manipulated their memory or changed their memory,” he says.
Multiple memory reports were considered such a pertinent problem with the New Zealand Police that in 2006-2007 they completely revised their crime scene and witness interview practises.
Senior Sergeant Nina Westera, who helped implement the changes, says the new protocol sees all police who are involved in high stress, potentially deadly situations, interviewed as witnesses themselves shortly after the event.
“We treat their memory as a crime scene and are aware that that too can change with time and under different circumstances, so we try and preserve it as best we can,” she says.
“We’re not superhumans, we’re just humans at the end of the day, so we have limited abilities and cognitive levels of memory - we’re exactly the same like everyone else.”
Ms Westera says there are many reported incidents of officers discharging a weapon with no real memory of the incident.
Weren’t the SEALs wearing helmet cams?
In life and death missions with high political stakes, soldiers cannot afford to be wrong.
Like police, marines are also not superhuman and the army knows this.
An interesting detail in the bin Laden mission is that many of the SEALs were wearing helmet cameras to document the mission.
It was reported time and time again that US President Barack Obama watched live video and audio from the mission – although how much of the actual raid he saw has been disputed, after revelations of a 25 minute blackout while the unit was inside the compound.
Regardless, the US military will have full access to the video.
So does this debunk any theories of soldier memory loss or multiple memory reports?
New Zealand war correspondent Jon Stephenson says the helmet cams are a key point.
“The reliance on memory isn’t a sufficient excuse to show the discrepancies between what people are saying and what actually happens because you’ve got that documented perspective [the cameras] to fall back on,” he says.
A US version of the raid
Where Mr Gerrie suggests multiple memory reports are to blame, Mr Stephenson suggests an intentional shaping of the narrative.
“They would have sat down and worked out how do we run this, how do we put this out to the world, how do we make this look good to the people in America,” he says.
In his experience, he says a country’s military will often make an initial statement on what occurred and then “clarify” the story further along the track.
“They’ll fudge it in the knowledge that most of the attention gets focused on an incident at the time,” he says.
“But people have a short memory span, the news cycle moves on and the important thing is to get out there and get the initial impression in people’s minds and then back away from it.”
He says in the initial account it was important to paint the operation as precisely executed.
“The narrative is going to be one from the perspective of the US military and government which is one of courageous soldiers doing a high risk operation to take out the world’s number one terrorist - you can absolutely put money on that this will be a movie.”
The bin Laden raid is not the first time the US military has sensationalised facts in high stake missions. In 2003, female army supply clerk Jessica Lynch was captured in Iraq and then rescued in a daring mission by the military.
The story of Ms Lynch’s heroic resistance to her captors was widely reported after an official release from the military. However, such fabulous accounts were later proved false when Ms Lynch herself spoke out against the military’s version of events.
Mr Stephenson says, in his experiences reporting on war, military operations are never straight forward and often carry an equal measure of both heroics and cowardice.
But does the presence of a camera remove all ambiguity?
Mr Gerrie says the video footage can clarify some details, but can only go so far.
“We can have some kind of objective truth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we know what the marines themselves experienced because we don’t know where their attention was pointed and we don’t know how large their window of attention was,” he says.
At present, the account of the bin Laden raid is the US government and military’s official version. In the coming months more details may be uncovered with Pakistan’s Prime Minister this week ordering an official inquiry into the raid, and conservative right wing groups in the US pressuring the Obama administration to release photos of bin Laden’s body, and eventually the raid videos.
Release of such documentary evidence may be essential for an accurate history of this event, especially as our memories cannot be trusted.
But even with such evidence – history has already been shaped by the slippery recollections of Obama’s Navy SEALs.
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