President Bush today announced the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, under whose tenure the Department of Defense has
willfully ignored the National Academy of Sciences' 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." In addition, Mr. Rumsfeld never responded to a
letter I sent him regarding waste, fraud, and abuse in the DoD counterintelligence-scope polygraph program.
The President has nominated former CIA director
Dr. Robert M. Gates to replace Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Gates, a career CIA employee who rose to become the Agency's director and who served under both Republican president George H.W. Bush and Democratic president Bill Clinton, seems to be a shoo-in for confirmation.
So what is his track record when it comes to polygraph policy? A
profile on the CIA website provides some ground for optimism, indicating that he has taken a pragmatic stance in the past:
Quote:Gates wanted more officers from various intelligence agencies to join his community staff and other staffs or centers that had community roles, and he changed CIA’s security policy to allow non-CIA officers to be stationed at CIA headquarters for up to two years without having to undergo the full lifestyle polygraph examination previously required of them. He acknowledged to CIA’s security chief that this change treated detailees differently from permanent CIA staff employees, but he justified it on the grounds that their access to CIA secrets was constrained by their limited periods of assignment and by internal security compartmentation practices. This action showed both Gates’s knowledge of the nuts and bolts of organizational change and his seriousness about fostering contact and integration across the community.
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SECDEF Nominee Robert M. Gates and the Polygraph (Read 1688 times)
