Chris,

Your analogy between corked bats in baseball and countermeasures in polygraphy raises some interesting questions, but also has severe limitations. Baseball and polygraphy, as well as corked bats and countermeasures, differ in several fundamental ways:

1) Baseball is a game. Polygraphy, on the other hand, is a pseudoscience that its practitioners falsely represent to be a diagnostic test for the detection of deception.

2) Baseball offers a level playing field. Polygraphy has an inherent bias against the truthful.

3) In baseball, umpires are presumably evaluated on their ability to objectively make correct calls. In contrast, many polygraphers are rated on their success in obtaining confessions/admissions. Thus, the latter have a stake in the outcome.

4) Corked bats can be detected by techniques such as X-ray inspection. By contrast, no polygrapher has ever demonstrated any ability to detect countermeasures.

The polygraph community certainly does prefer to sweep the issue of countermeasures, and its inability to detect them, under the rug. We saw this with the National Academy of Sciences' polygraph review, where panel members were at first told that there were countermeasure studies classified at the secret level that were relevant to their work. When panel members obtained the appropriate security clearances and sought access to these studies, DoDPI and the CIA told them that no such completed studies existed at the secret level.

Is such head-in-the-sand game playing in the national interest? Hell no. But it is in the interest of those government officials who have foolishly staked their professional reputations on the pseudoscience of polygraphy.