Ralph Hilliard, the proprietor of
The Polygraph Place, a website that provides advertising for polygraph examiners, has recently become a polygrapher himself after receiving training from the grandiloquently-named
American International Institute of Polygraph, located in the small town of
Morrow, Georgia.
In the latest edition of his electronic newsletter,
The Relevant Issue (until recently called
The Polygraph Chronicles), Mr. Hilliard avers in an editorial titled, "A few insights from my first polygraph exam," that he has recently had several "epiphanies." It is to the third and last of these revelations that I shall respond here:
Quote:THREE. Anti-Polygraph people are not crusaders for the innocent, they are just self-centered.
While in school, I was surrounded by cops for two months. This was my first glimpse into the life of those in law enforcement. One of the vibes I picked up on was that cops are under appreciated for laying down their lives to 'protect and serve'. To continually put your life in danger only to watch guilty people go unpunished because of technicalities in the law must be a bitter pill to swallow. There are people who are continually working to undermine justice and protect the guilty by manipulating law.
Polygraph will be no different. As an examiner, I will be working as an ambassador of the truth. I'm beginning to understand the anger examiners display against those who are trying to undermine polygraph under the flimsy guise of 'protecting the innocent'. If successful, the only accomplishment of Anti-Polygraph Crusaders will be to put more dangerous people on the streets to hurt more innocent people. I can't think of any real motive for being Anti-Polygraph that doesn't stem from just being plain-old self-centered.
What an epiphany! Those who oppose polygraphy do so simply because they are self-centered! The unspoken corrollary of ambassador-of-the-truth Hilliard's epiphany seems to be that the arguments of those who oppose polygraphy need not be seriously considered, since they derive from base motivations.
Those who have not had the good fortune of receiving divine revelation regarding the motives of polygraph opponents, and who instead would form their opinions through the admittedly more laborious route of considering the available evidence, might ask themselves the following questions:
Did the National Academy of Sciences' Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph conclude that polygraph screening is completely invalid because its members were self-centered?
Did the great majority of Society for Psychophysiological Research and American Psychological Association Division One members surveyed not agree with the statement that CQT polygraphy is based on scientifically sound psychological principles or theory because they were self-centered?
Did Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, M.D. and other senior scientists at Sandia National Laboratories who conducted a review of the scientific literature on polygraphy reach the negative conclusions they did because they were all self-centered?
Did Dr. Drew C. Richardson, who researched polygraphy for the FBI Laboratory Division, testify before the U.S. Senate that "[polygraph screening] is completely without any theoretical foundation and has absolutely no validity..." and that "the diagnostic value of this type of testing is no more than that of astrology or tea-leaf reading" simply because he was self-centered?
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A Response to Ralph Hilliard (Read 2612 times)
