As noted earlier on the blog, Larry Sinclair, who claims (thus far without evidence) to have used cocaine with, and performed fellatio on, Barack Obama in 1999 has accepted a $100,000 polygraph challenge from one-time Internet pornographer Dan Parisi, who runs the website WhiteHouse.com. Sinclair is to be polygraphed on Tuesday, 26 February 2008 by an as-yet-unnamed polygrapher in or near New York City. Political blog BigHeadDC reports that Sinclair, who stands to make $100,000 if he passes the polygraph,  "is expected to hold a press conference in the coming days."

Parisi avers that the polygrapher performing the services is "a renowned expert who has been involved in quite a few high-profile cases," and that the results will be "verified by a second renowned expert."

Update: I have posted to YouTube the following commentary on why -- pass or fail -- Mr. Sinclair's polygraph results will be evidence of nothing:

https://www.youtube.com/v/R1uMEXiv1ng

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Note (2023-09-09): The video that Larry Sinclair uploaded to YouTube making these allegations was long ago deleted. A copy is now attached to this post.

Sackett,

I'm not suggesting for a minute, as you suggest, that whatever the result of Mr. Sinclair's polygraph examination, it will be wrong. My point (well-known to longtime readers of AntiPolygraph.org) is that because polygraph testing has no scientific basis, because it's inherently biased against the truthful, and because outcomes can be easily manipulated through the use of simple countermeasures, the results of Mr. Sinclair's polygraph test will provide no reliable evidence regarding his veracity.

sackett wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2008 at 11:25pm:


Precisely. The point I'm trying to make is that no inferences regarding his truthfulness can be safely drawn from his polygraph results, however they may turn out.

My concern is that if Mr. Sinclair passes (the outcome that would also provide the greatest publicity boost for Dan Parisi and WhiteHouse.com), Barack Obama's detractors will seize on it to bolster the credibility of Sinclair's claims.

Conversely, if Mr. Sinclair fails, Mr. Obama's supporters might predictably welcome this result as confirmation that Larry Sinclair is a liar.

But because of the unreliability of polygraphy, neither conclusion is warranted.

Quote:


For documentation of my assertions regarding the scientific status of polygraphy, see Chapter 1 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.

Well all,

apparently the polygraph folks couldn't wait and they conducted Sinclair's testing today. Information to be posted on whitehouse.com on Monday or Tuesday.

The fall-out will sure be interesting, regardless...


Sackett

I posted a comment to Larry Sinclair's YouTube video OBAMA'S LIMO SEX & DRUG PARTY calling attention to my video commentary, and received a prompt reply from Mr. Sinclair (larrysinclair0926):



It seems from other of Mr. Sinclair's YouTube posts that his polygraph was actually conducted not in New York City, but in Los Angeles. While I  can't tell who conducted the polygraph (though it sounds like something up Ed Gelb's alley), Mr. Sinclair indicated that the results were going to be reviewed by an expert on polygraph countermeasures in Salt Lake City whose name he states is "Gordon (something)." The obvious inference is that he's referring to Gordon H. Barland (a registered user and occasional poster on these boards):

A photograph posted to WhiteHouse.com reveals that the polygraph operator who conducted the lie detector "testing" of Larry Sinclair is indeed "Dr." Ed Gelb of Los Angeles, whom AntiPolygraph.org has exposed as a phony Ph.D. Gelb, a past-president of the American Polygraph Association, obtained his "doctoral degree" from an unaccredited, mail-order diploma mill.




It's interesting that WhiteHouse.com chose a man of such questionable credibility to assess the credibility of Larry Sinclair.

WhiteHouse.com has posted Ed Gelb's reports on the two polygraph "tests" that he gave Larry Sinclair on Friday, 22 February regarding his sex and drugs allegations. They may be downloaded, respectively, directly here:

http://www.whitehouse.com/files/intercept1_2.pdf

http://www.whitehouse.com/files/intercept3_4.pdf

WhiteHouse.com also confirms that "quality control" is to be performed by Dr. Gordon Barland (who, unlike "Dr." Gelb, actually has a doctoral degree):

Quote:


It would appear that WhiteHouse.com is going back on its earlier promise to post video of Sinclair's polygraph examination:

Quote:


In other news, Mr. Sinclair has started a blog since learning that he did not pass his polygraph and has posted, among other things, his e-mail correspondence with Dan Parisi, the owner of WhiteHouse.com. Among other things, Mr. Sinclair is upset that "Dr." Ed Gelb, whom Mr. Parisi selected to conduct the test, is not, after all, a "Dr." as Parisi (no doubt relying on Gelb's own misrepresentations) had represented him to be in his correspondence with Sinclair. Note that Parisi, who by now should be aware of Gelb's academic fakery, continues to refer to him as "Dr. Gelb" on WhiteHouse.com.

To date, Mr. Sinclair has offered no evidence to support his accusations against Barack Obama.

Regular readers of AntiPolygraph.org may recall that last year, Ed Gelb performed a polygraph test on Wendy Ellis, a former prostitute who claimed that U.S. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) had been a customer. That polygraph examination was also paid for by a pornographer: Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine.

Comparing the polygraph report that Gelb prepared on Ellis with those he prepared on Sinclair, one notes a glaring difference: for the Ellis polygraph report, he scored the charts both manually and with a computerized scoring algorithm:

Quote:


But Gelb only mentions the results of his hand-scoring of the charts in his two reports for Sinclair (concerning his sex and drug allegations, respectively). Why did Gelb fail to include computerized scoring results for Sinclair's polygraph examinations? Gelb's omission raises the question of whether there was a discrepancy between his hand scoring and the decision rendered by the computer.

In addition, note that while Ellis was advised of the test results at the conclusion, it appears that Gelb failed to advise Sinclair that he had failed during the post-test interview.