In an article titled, “You can bet Mohammed will talk,” New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafets suggests that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will be subjected to polygraphic interrogation. Excerpt:
Polygraphs…are not only admissible but indispensable. “They won’t let him say a single word without being hooked up to a lie detector,” says X. “It may not be a perfect scientific device, but it’s close enough. And it will make him feel vulnerable, transparent.”
It is to be hoped that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s interrogators are not under the illusion that the lie detector is anything remotely close to being a “perfect scientific device.” Al Qaeda knows it isn’t: see the extract on instrumental lie detection from Al-Qaeda’s Encyclopedia of Jihad. U.S. intelligence officials’ misplaced faith in pseudoscientific lie detector “testing” is a danger to national security.