The Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, has released a 151-page report titled, "Use of Polygraph Examinations in the Department of Justice" (1 mb PDF):

http://antipolygraph.org/documents/doj-use-of-polygraph-2006.pdf

The report provides a description of how polygraph examinations are used by various component agencies of the Justice Department, including the pre-employment screening programs of the FBI, ATF, and DEA.

Notably absent from the report is any mention of the National Academy of Sciences' key finding in its 2002 research review report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection, that "[polygraph testing's] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies." Despite this, the report shows that the FBI's reliance on polygraphy has steadily grown since the NAS published its findings. In fact, the FBI is considering "a plan to expand the requirement for periodic and random counterintelligence-scope polygraph examinations to all of the FBI’s approximately 35,000 employees, contractors, task force members, and a number of non-FBI personnel with special access."

Also absent from the DOJ report is any mention of how convicted spy Leandro Aragoncillo passed his FBI pre-employment polygraph examination, which includes a relevant question about unauthorized disclosure of classified information, when he had done precisely that while working in the Executive Office of the Vice President. Aragoncillo continued his espionage against the United States after obtaining employment as an FBI analyst. But the OIG report doesn't address this critical failure of the polygraph to detect or deter espionage.

The DOJ report fails to mention other colossal failures of the polygraph. For example, in 1938, in what may have been its first use of the lie detector in an espionage investigation, the FBI allowed Nazi spy suspect Theodor Ignatz Griebl to escape to Germany when it relaxed surveillance of him because he had passed the polygraph.

More recently, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City might have been averted had not the FBI terminated a key intelligence source, Emad Salem, who had penetrated the group that carried out the bombing, in part because of his failure to pass a polygraph examination. After the bombing, the FBI re-hired Salem, whose information helped to thwart a second planned attack.

Also of interest is that the FBI's polygraph program failed to pass the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute's "quality control" inspections until January 2006. Multiple and repeated deficiencies were noted. These are addressed at pp. 59-63.