Congressional Quarterly National Security editor Jeff Stein writes, among other things, on the use of polygraphs in the New York subway terror investigation in his SpyTalk column dated 17 October 2005: Quote:
http://www.cq.com/public/20051017_homeland.html
New York Alert: Lost in Translation?
By Jeff Stein, National Security Editor, CQ Staff
Far away from the chatter about who knew what, when and how about the recent terror scare in New York City, some polygraph experts are shaking their heads at the so-called lie detector tests the Iraqi source at the heart of the matter “passed.”
The source, who was said to have provided reliable information to U.S. forces in the past, reportedly showed no deception in his answers to about half the questions posed to him about his claim that New York’s subway system was about to be hit by suicide bombers, according to news accounts.
“Insane,” responded Drew Richardson, one of the FBI’s top polygraph experts until he retired a few years ago, in an e-mail to SpyTalk. “I would say placing any significance on an examinee passing some portion or all portions on eight out of 15 CQT polygraph exams with all exams having covered the same subject(s) is, in a word, insane.”
CQT stands for “control question test,” a widely used technique, even with FBI job applicants, in which the polygraph examiner supposedly gets a baseline reading of the subject’s truthfulness by asking questions such as “Is your name [whatever it is]” and others where a subject is expected to lie.
Richardson famously boasted in the mid-1990s that it took him about 20 minutes to teach his 12-year-old son how to beat the test.
Details on what polygraph techniques U.S. intelligence is using in Iraq are highly classified.
“I have not seen any reports regarding the technique used,” George W. Maschke, an Arabic-speaking former Army intelligence interrogator, said in an e-mail from The Hague, where he works as an interpreter on the US/Iran Tribunal, charged with settling claims from the 1980 Tehran hostage crisis. But “it seems almost certain that a CQT was used, as presumably there weren’t any previously known or alleged facts about the plot on which he could have been tested.”
Other, somewhat more reliable tests are used, but Maschke said, “I think it’s more likely that a CQT was used. The CQT is easier to construct and administer, and polygraphers tend to believe in it.”
Maschke has had a lot of experience with polygraphs — the most recent one entirely negative. Despite holding a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance while working on highly classified operations with the Army during the first Gulf War and with the FBI on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation — for which he received commendations — he “failed” a polygraph test when he later applied for a job with the bureau. The FBI examiner told Maschke his answers showed he was covering up secret contacts with a foreign intelligence agency.
Incredulous, Maschke protested that he should be arrested if he was suspected of being a spy.
The FBI declined. He was never investigated, to his knowledge, much less arrested and prosecuted, but he also never got a job with the FBI, whose polygraph result short-circuited his advancement in the U.S. Army Reserves.
“I am not a spy. I have not betrayed the trust that my government placed in me,” Maschke said, denouncing “the junk science of polygraph screening.” Over the past decade, dozens of people who previously held Top Secret clearances have gone public with complaints about the FBI polygraphs. On the other hand, all the Soviet “moles” who infiltrated the FBI and the CIA passed their polygraph exams.
“The theory and methods of polygraphic lie detection are not rocket science,” says David Lykken, emeritus professor of behavioral genetics at the University of Minnesota and author of “A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector.” “Indeed, they are not science at all.”
Pass/Fail
U.S. intelligence officials sometimes agree. Last February an FBI informant “flunked” a lie detector test when reporting an imminent “dirty bomb” attack on the U.S., but a Code Orange alert was run up the flagpole anyway. Conversely, in 2003, an informant who “passed” a polygraph while saying Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction emboldened Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to campaign for the invasion of Iraq.
According to some news accounts, operatives of Saddam’s regime were trained to “beat” the polygraph, enabling them to feed bogus information to U.S. intelligence — a deception made all the easier because of the scarcity of fluent Arabic speakers among U.S. interrogators.
Maschke, who has interrogated Iraqis himself, agrees the lack of language capabilities adds confusion to an already specious technique.
“Very few polygraphers speak Arabic. So apart from the normal ambiguities associated with polygraphy,” he said, “something could get lost in translation, too.”
Missing the Bigger Picture
A senior Defense Department special warfare official said focusing on the vicissitudes of the polygraph misses the bigger picture of how U.S. operatives took special care to test their sources’ information by other means. Special Forces personnel carried out raids that they believed confirmed the original leads and bolstered their faith in the polygraph results.
“What is credible is what was discovered both during an interrogation and a hit on a safe house pointing towards suicide bombings and particular targets in NYC,” the official, a counterterror operative for more than three decades, said.
Evaluating intelligence is an art, he said, not a science. It “begets the question of when do we hold back information and the question of what constitutes the appropriate response on the part of any government jurisdiction.”
The alert kerfuffle is getting a second look, first by the feds, who are looking into e-mails that Homeland Security officials allegedly sent to relatives in Manhattan warning them to stay away from the subway — even as department spokesman Russ Knocke was dismissing the intelligence the alert was based on. The House Homeland Security Committee’s top Democrat, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, also said he is going to hold hearings on the affair.
It would be interesting to see how officials would react if they were told they would have to be wired up to a polygraph machine for their testimony.
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NYC Subway Terror Threat Assessed by Polygraph (Read 2583 times)
