Last night, I watched a superb HBO movie called The Pentagon Wars (Richard Benjamin, 1998), a dark comedy that satirizes waste, fraud, and abuse in the Department of Defense. The movie is based on James G. Burton's non-fiction book, The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard (United States Naval Institute, 1993).

The movie, which deals with the U.S. Army's research and development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, documents how Pentagon officials lie, cheat, steal, and viciously retaliate against whistleblowers.

The institutional corruption portrayed in this movie is not unlike that found in the U.S. Government's polygraph program(s). At the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI), research that fails to support policy objectives is covered up. For example, DoDPI never published Dr. Sheila Reed's third study of the "Test for Espionage and Sabotage" and apparently destroyed her research data. DoDPI suppressed Dr. Gordon H. Barland's racial bias study wherein innocent blacks were about twice as likely as innocent whites to wrongly "fail" a polygraph "test." Professor Charles R. Honts, a former DoDPI researcher, has testified before the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that he was told that his job at DoDPI was not to test the validity of the polygraph techniques used at DoDPI, but to show that those techniques were valid. In addition, DoDPI apparently misled the National Academy of Sciences regarding the existence of polygraph countermeasure studies. In The Pentagon Wars, corrupt officials deliberately avoided live-fire tests of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that would have shown that its armor was easily penetrated by even light anti-armor weapons, and that any soldiers inside would have been killed. In the same fashion, it appears that DoDPI is deliberately avoiding any meaningful research into polygraphy's most glaring weakness: it's ready susceptibility to countermeasures.

The retaliation that the whistleblower in The Pentagon Wars (Burton) experienced is also reminiscent of that suffered by Dr. Drew C. Richardson, the FBI Supervisory Special Agent and polygraph researcher who in 1997 blew the whistle on polygraph screening before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts. In retaliation for his candor, Dr. Richardson was precluded from conducting any further polygraph research. (Later, the FBI suddenly and without warning dismantled its polygraph research laboratory while its sole remaining polygraph researcher was temporarily away.) The FBI prohibited Dr. Richardson from testifying in court on polygraph matters, even though he was eminently qualified to do so, prevented him from publishing under his own name an article critical of polygraphy in a peer-reviewed journal, and prohibited him from testifying in other fora.