It appears that Scooter Libby's research team has done its homework.
Libby's team has recently contacted Daniel L. Schacter, Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the nation's leading authority on the phenomenon of false memory.
There are two basic types of false memory: a memory of an event that did not occur, and a distortion of an event that did occur. Many factors contribute to false memories (chief among them stress at the time of encoding the memory), but false memories also "just happen."
It should be clear by now why Libby's legal team has enlisted the services of a renowned expert on false memory. Libby's team will claim that Libby was under tremendous stress in 2003 and 2004 due to his involvement in various national security matters that he either forgot the details of his conversations with investigators of the Plame leak case or he unconsciously created false memories of the conversations.
Libby's team has already suggested that they will pursue the "faulty memory" route, and Schacter's involvement adds another piece to the puzzle of Libby's defense strategy. According to the Association for Psychological Science journal Observer (April 2006),
Schacter's work could be used to support what reportedly is one of the central themes of Libby's defense, which, according to documents filed by his lawyers, is that "any misstatements he made during his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony were not intentional, but rather the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory." Libby's lawyers also contend that "Given the urgent national security issues that commanded Libby's attention, it is understandable that he may have forgotten or misremembered relatively less significant events [such as] alleged snippets of conversations about Valerie Plame Wilson's employment status."
False memory is often a key topic in criminal trials, especially those involving so-called "recovered memories" or eye-witness testimony. Leading memory researchers have harshly criticized the reliability of both recovered memories and eye-witness testimony by showing that memories are not incontrovertible evidence and that memories can be manipulated by suggestive questions in the course of examination and cross-examination.
The leading researcher in this particular area is Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Prof. Loftus is often called as an expert witness at trials in which memory plays a key role. (Click on the link for her faculty page, CV, and a list of selected publications.)
Other experts in this field are H.L. Roediger, Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, Kathleen McDermott, Professor of Psychology and Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, and Marcia Johnson, Professor of Psychology at Yale.
The Libby trial is scheduled to begin in January. Prepare to hear a lot about false memory during the course of the trial.