Rock,
To be sure, my congratulations to the winners of the Bureau's polygraph lottery were intended in the way of black humor, not schadenfreude, and I in no way see their plight as a source of merriment.
There's something of the Orwellian in the reasoning behind the following line from the Associated Press article:
Quote:Officials said that some workers whose polygraphs raise initial concerns about deception may eventually be cleared because things like medical conditions can cause anomalies on the tests.
In the minds of FBI counterintelligence officials, those who "fail" a polygraph seance seem to be presumed guilty until proven innocent -- and the possibility that the polygraph was simply wrong seems to be excluded.
The FBI officials who told the Associated Press that those who fail "may eventually be cleared because things like medical conditions can cause anomalies on the tests" are deluded. As Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, M.D. of the Center for National Security and Arms Control observed in his 14 June 2001
letter to DOE counterintelligence chief Michael H. Waguespack:
Quote:As the technical staff at the Labs pointed out repeatedly during the October 1999 DOE Polygraph Hearings and subsequently to Dr. Andrew Ryan [chief of research at DoDPI] and Mr. David Renzelman [DOE polygraph program chief], there are no scientific studies that identify medical conditions of relevance to the polygraph.... Also, there are no guidelines, textbook chapters, or review articles in any medical, psychology or psychiatry journal that describe medical contra-indications to the polygraph.
As I noted in a
list of questions presented to panel members of the National Academy of Sciences Study to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph:
Quote:7) At January's meeting, Mr. Renzelman also said that the polygraph is not a lie detector. He explained that the polygraph is used to determine if a question "bothers" the examinee, noting, "Polygraph is only a means of...of...of looking at emotion that is taking place at the time a person listens to, thinks about, answers a question that the examiner and the person taking the test has agreed upon originally. And if the answer to that question bothers the person taking the test, then it tends to bother us. And then it's our job to find out, 'Why did that bother you?'"
Does a reaction to a relevant question necessarily indicate that it is the answer to the question that "bothers" a person (and not, for example, the mere fact of being asked the question in the first place)?
What scientific methodology do DOE (and presumably, other) polygraphers use to find out why a question "bothered" a person? What scientific research supports the validity of that procedure?
The FBI (and other agencies) seem to be unable to grasp the concept that a truthful person can indeed "fail" in the absence of some special circumstance that might explain the "failure."
It's high time that this superstitious "polygraph lottery" were ended.