The Associated Press reports. Excerpt:
LAS VEGAS (AP) – The FBI said Friday that a southern Nevada man’s claim that his cellular phone picked up people talking in Arabic about a planned terrorist attack was “not credible.”
“The results of the investigation to date do not substantiate these allegations,” said Ellen Knowlton, special agent in charge of the Las Vegas FBI office.
Michael Hamdan, 54, told The Associated Press that he failed a polygraph test during a 4-hour interview at the FBI office in Las Vegas. He blamed lack of sleep and mental fatigue after many media interviews in the past 48 hours. He said it was his first polygraph test.
“It was not 100 percent,” Hamdan said by cellular telephone as his wife drove him to their home in suburban Henderson. “They told me everything was OK, but there was some uncertainty about a few things.”
FBI Special Agent Daron Borst, spokesman for the FBI Las Vegas office, called the investigation “substantially complete.” He declined to discuss the results of the lie-detector test or any information agents gathered from Hamdan’s cellular telephone records.
Borst said a southern Nevada Joint Terrorism Task Force involving the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Las Vegas police and the U.S. Air Force would wrap up the case in the next several days.
“They’ll follow up the remaining leads, but that’s it,” Borst said.
Hamdan, who was born in Lebanon and speaks Arabic, stuck by his story during a later interview with the AP.
He had said that last Saturday his cell phone intercepted a call in which a group of Arabic-speaking men said to another man, “We are in the city of corruption, the city of prostitution, the city of gambling, the city of unbelievers.”
Hamdan said he believed the men were referring to Las Vegas and that one saying, “we are going to hit them on the day of freedom” meant a terrorist attack was planned for July Fourth.
He said he authorized the FBI to get his phone records and that agents asked him eight questions during his polygraph interview – including whether he was telling the truth, whether he was a United States citizen and if he hoped to gain anything by telling his story.
“I’m sticking with my story 100 percent because I heard it and it’s true,” said Hamdan, who expressed disappointment with the FBI decision.
“I came to them with something that I heard on my cell that could not be ignored,” he said. “I cannot tell them what to do.”
The outcome of pseudoscientific polygraph “tests” should never be made a factor in determining whether such citizen’s reports are credible. Polygraph “tests” have no scientific basis, have an inherent bias against the truthful, and yet are easily defeated by the deceptive.