Congressional Quarterly national security editor Jeff Stein, who first brought the DOJ report to my attention, has filed the following report: Quote:http://www.cq.com/public/20060919_homeland.html
Justice Report: Standards Lacking on ‘Lie Detector’ Tests
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
The FBI and three other Justice Department components are conducting over 16,000 polygraph tests a year, even though they have no uniform standards for administering them, the department’s inspector general reported Monday.
The FBI requires job applicants and employees in sensitive positions to pass polygraphs as a condition of employment, even though their scientific basis and reliability have been sharply challenged in the past decade.
The FBI’s polygraph program failed to meet federal standards during 2003-2005, the inspector general (IG) said.
More than 49,000 polygraph examinations were conducted by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the office of the Inspector General (OIG) itself during that period, the report said.
The lion’s share of those — 77 percent, or 38,017 tests — were conducted by the FBI during 2003-2005.
Thousands more polygraph examinations —by the CIA, the military services, Pentagon agencies or other Justice Department components that do not have their own programs, such as the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service—are conducted annually on subjects as varied as job applicants, employees, contractors, confidential sources and even participants in the Witness Protection Program.
“However, our review found no [Justice] Department-wide policy concerning the conduct and use of polygraph examinations,” the OIG said. “Rather, each Department component has developed its own policies, procedures, and practices to govern polygraph examinations.”
In 2004, the Justice Department’s Management Division concluded that without a uniform standard, agencies under its jurisdiction should not be able to “compel Department employees to take a polygraph in a misconduct investigation.”
Two years later, only the FBI among its components has codified its policies and procedures for making an employee submit to a polygraph, the report said.
Critics were quick to point out that the polygraph examinations can give the FBI a false sense of security.
Such infamous turncoats as the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, both of whom spied for the Russians for years, passed routine polygraph examinations, where they were asked about their loyalty to the United States.
More recently, in May, an FBI intelligence analyst with a top secret clearance pled guilty in May to spying for Philippines officials.
Leandro Aragoncillo, who joined the FBI in 2004 after 21 years in the Marines, which included a stint in the office of the vice president, would have been asked about any unauthorized use of classified documents in a standard polygraph test.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of pre-Iraq war intelligence also reported that three key Iraqi exiles who supplied false or misleading intelligence to the Pentagon all passed polygraphs.
None of these cases was part of the OIG’s study, which focused on the administration of polygraph programs, not the validity of the tests themselves.
The report did, say, however, that Justice Department examiners were certified by the Department of Defense’s Polygraph Institute.
The DoDPI not only trains polygraphers for military services and civilian agencies, it administers the government’s Quality Assurance Program that judges how well the programs are working.
Bad Grades
Critics say the system has built-in conflicts of interest, but the OIG’s report revealed that the DoDPI inspectors could hand out bad grades, too, especially to the FBI.
“The programs of the DEA, ATF, and OIG were consistently certified as being in compliance with federal standards,” the OIG’s report said.
“However, the FBI’s program was not certified as complying with federal standard after the three inspections DoDPI conducted in fiscal 2003 through 2005, because of repeated instances of noncompliance with federal polygraph standards during polygraph examinations.
“The noncompliance included instances of improperly constructed questions, opinions on results . . . that were not supported by standard test scoring techniques, and the routine destruction of the score sheets that examiners and supervisors prepared when examining polygraph test results,” the report said.
FBI polygraphers turned around their program last year, the OIG said.
“Although not all issues were finally resolved, the issues were sufficiently addressed so that in January 2006 DoDPI certified the FBI polygraph program for the first time.”
Worthless?
George W. Maschke, an Arabic language translator who also worked with the FBI on terrorism cases in the 1990s, said the IG report had significant holes.
“The most noteworthy thing about this report is that which it fails to address,” said Maschke, who also runs the AntiPolygraph.org Web site.
One important omission, he said, was any reference to the National Academy of Sciences’ 2002 finding 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.”
Maschke said, “The OIG report fails to address why DOJ (in particular, the FBI) has substantially increased its reliance on polygraph screening since fiscal 2002 despite [this report]. In fact, the OIG report makes no mention of this critical finding.”
Retired FBI scientist Drew Richardson, another prominent polygraph critic, said “Anything that doesn’t deal with the substance of the polygraph as a diagnostic tool is basically worthless. It’s really just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
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DOJ Report on Use of Polygraph Examinations (Read 9558 times)
