The Albuquerque Tribune comments on the Energy Department’s decision to ignore the conclusions of the National Academy of Sciences regarding polygraph screening. Excerpt:
It’s like the sequel to a goofy movie: “DOE – Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest.”
Sometimes – even giving it the vast benefit of the doubt – the U.S. Department of Energy is infuriating and needs the equivalent of a national security slap upside its bungling, bureaucratic head. If the White House refuses to do it, Congress should deliver the blow without delay.
In the most recent example, DOE announced in the Federal Register this week that it will maintain the internal use of polygraphs to try to combat espionage at the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories. Not smart. Worse, it’s a really big lie.
Science clearly shows polygraphs – or lie-detector tests, as some call them – are valueless in such applications. But DOE’s stubborn addiction to using the tests on its scientists and engineers also is likely to compromise U.S. national security. DOE will end up wasting its time investigating false positives, while leaving real spies in peace. If the best scientists don’t quit their jobs in anger, or stay and succumb to declining morale, they will communicate less freely with fellow-scientists, and their work will suffer as a result.
Based on the best available science that shows polygraphs are hardly better than crystal balls:
DOE’s own scientists – led by Al Zelicoff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque – have advised strongly against their use as a threat to national security.
Various independent scientists across the country say that using them routinely to screen DOE employees is a bad idea, because the tests are not reliable.
An independent science review, by no less than the highly regarded National Academy of Sciences, officially debunked the tests in such cases.
DOE’s decision is not surprising, coming as it does during the second half of the Bush administration. The current White House and its Cabinet appointees routinely ignore science in making tough decisions for the nation – particularly in the realms of environmental protection, energy policy and natural resource management.
But for an agency that relies as heavily on hard science as DOE does to maintain national security, this decision completely boggles the mind. It illogical and counterproductive to the mission. And it would fail any fair and reasonable court test. DOE is saying, essentially, “We are DOE; we say so; therefore, it is.”
This is not the way this agency expects its nuclear weapons scientists and engineers – reportedly the nation’s best and brightest – to perform, and it is not the way Americans should expect the overseer of their civilian nuclear weapons laboratories and nuclear bomb stockpiles to act.