So says Modesto Bee staff writer John Gorenfeld in an article thus titled. Clearly, Gorenfeld has not yet discovered “the lie behind the lie detector” (and the polygraphers with whom he spoke didn’t clue him in). Excerpt:
Just how much does Rep. Gary Condit know about the disappearance of Chandra Levy, the Modesto woman last seen April 30?
Levy’s family, as well as Washington, D.C., police, urged the congressman from Ceres to take a lie detector test.
Thursday, Condit did just that. His attorney arranged the exam, which was administered by private consultant Barry Colvert, formerly the FBI’s chief polygraph examiner.
The polygraph machine monitors blood pressure, breathing and perspiration.
“It records things you have no control over,” said Rick Beeman, whose Stockton-based company Interstate Polygraph is sometimes hired by the state Department of Justice to conduct tests in the valley.
Books and Internet sites suggest ways to outwit lie detector tests through breath control, or by faking stress at key moments.
But Beeman, who has been in the lie-detection business since 1982, said resistance is futile. “The more you know, the worse it is for you,” he said. “You’re better to go in clean and honest.”
“The more you know, the worse it is for you” says polygrapher Rick Beeman. Actually, the more you know about the fraudulent nature of polygraphy (exposed at length in Chapter 3 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector), the worse it is for polygraphers, whose continued livelihoods depend on an ignorant public.