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You wrote in part:


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Essentially its your characterization that people who received no more than 30 minutes training were able to beat the polygraph.  Those studies used graduate students, who received just enough training to operate the laboratory polygraph posing as examiners.  The question is not whether or not the polygraph can be beat, but how easy is it to do so.  How easy is it to beat an unqualified student posing as an examiner, as opposed to beating an experienced, certified examiner.

If you go back and read the Honts countermeasures studies, you'll see that the polygraph examinations were not administered by graduate students. While the countermeasures instruction was provided by assistants, in the 1985 study (Honts, C.R., R.L. Hodes, and D.C. Raskin, "Effects of Physical Countermeasures on the Physiological Detection of Deception, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 70 [1985], No. 1, 177-187) Honts himself performed all of the polygraph examinations:


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The first author conducted all of the polygraph examinations in this experiment. He was trained at the Backster School of Lie Detection, had 5 yr of field polygraph experience, and was a licensed detection of deception examiner in the Commonwealth of Virginia. (p. 179)

In the 1994 study (Honts, C.R., D.C. Raskin, and J.C. Kircher, "Mental and Physical Countermeasures Reduce the Accuracy of Polygraph Tests," Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 79 [1994], No. 2, 252-259), while countermeasures training was again provided by assistants, all polygraph examinations were conducted by experienced polygraphers:


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Approximately 1 week after their initial appointments, all subjects were administered a CQT polygraph examination by an experienced polygraph examiner who was unaware of the subject's guilt, innocence, or countermeasure training. (p. 254)

I agree with you that readers of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector should check our sources. We scrupulously annotated it for this very purpose, and in the case of the Honts studies in question, we cited the full abstracts in the annotated bibliography for the benefit of those for whom a visit to a research library might be inconvenient.

With regard to the last Honts study to which you refer (Honts, C.R., Amato, S.L., and Gordon, A.K., "Effects of Spontaneous Countermeasures Used Against the Comparison Question Test"), it was published in the American Polygraph Association quarterly Polygraph, Vol. 30 (2001), No. 1, 1-9. Note that the Office of Naval Research grant which supported this research is #N00014-98-0725.

With regard to the examiners in this study, Honts et al. write:


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An experienced (22 years in practice) polygraph examiner used reference materials provided by the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI) to train three women, none of whom was a practicing polygraph examiner, to conduct polygraph examinations. Two of the examiners held the Ph.D. degree in Psychology, the third was an undergraduate research assistant. The goal of the training was that the examinations should follow field procedures as closely as possible. As a quality control procedure, all polygraph examinations were videotaped. Throughout the experiment, sample examinations were randomly reviewed by the supervising examiner to make sure that the examinations were being conducted properly.... (p. 3) ... The physiological data from the examinations were printed on paper charts and were evaluated independently by three Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI) instructors using the numerical scoring system taught at DoDPI (Swinford, 1999; Weaver, 1980). Those instructors also made an assessment on a 7-point scale (1=not likely at all) regarding the likelihood of countermeasure use. (p. 6)

"Spontaneous countermeasures," the subject of this report, are untrained countermeasures: those things done by subjects who are ignorant of polygraph procedure in an attempt to increase the likelihood of their passing the "test." Spontaneous countermeasures are fundamentally different from those that were the subject of the earlier two Honts studies (and those discussed in Chapter 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.) It is hardly surprising that the use of spontaneous countermeasures by innocent subjects did not help them to pass the "test." It is noteworthy, however, that in this study, highly trained examiners were unable to detect even such unsophisticated countermeasures attempts:


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The present study also examined the ability of highly trained polygraph examiners to detect the use of countermeasures. The results of this study indicate that they cannot detect the use of spontaneous countermeasures. Their ratings of the likelihood of countermeasure use were generally unreliable and were not associated with actual countermeasure use at better than chance levels. Field polygraph examiners generally appear to operate under the notion that a detection of countermeasure attempts is synonymous with attempted deception to the relevant questions of the examination (Jayne, 1981). Clearly, that notion is incorrect. The results of this study show that an examiner's decision of countermeasure use is unrelated to both countermeasure use, and to deception. Our analyses indicated that almost half of the subjects judged to be using countermeasures were in fact Innocent subjects. These results strongly suggest that the field practice of equating countermeasure attempts with deception to the relevant issues of an examination should be abandoned. (pp. 7-8)