Kudos to Retired CIA Polygrapher John F. Sullivan

[George W. Maschke]

Retired CIA polygrapher John F. Sullivan, author of Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers Vietnam (University of Kansas Press, 2002), has come out unequivocally against torture. In a letter to TomPaine.com (some links supplied), Sullivan writes:

Re: McCain's Defining Moment by Ray McGovern

I just read Mr. McGovern's letter re: torture and wish that I had been one of the signers.  For 31 years (1968 - 1999), I was a polygraph examiner with the CIA; four of those years were spent in Vietnam. I, and many of my former colleagues, are outraged and disgusted by the recent stories re: CIA involvement in torture.

Jane Mayer's article in the 14 November New Yorker, and the subsequent ABC story on CIA Harsh Interrogations got my attention.  In my 31 years with the agency, I underwent the agency's interrogation course, conducted a lot of interrogations, in a lot of countries, and never encountered anything like what was described in those articles.

What was described in those articles represents a fundamental change in the way the agency does business and vitiates any claim we have to the moral high road.  Those articles also symbolize the failure of our Iraq policy.

John Sullivan
Author, Of Spies and Lies

As a former U.S. Army interrogator and Arabic linguist, I fully endorse these sentiments.

[furedy]

And as someone who has attacked polygraphy as a "psychological rubber hose" (see:
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~furedy/Papers/ld/Cconfess.doc),
I have to agree that the recent CIA policy is beyond the totalitarian pale inasumuch as it employs a physical rubber hose (or worse).

I recall that in the mid eighties countries behind the iron curtain evinced little interest in the polygraph, as their totalitarian system had the physical rubber hose (or worse) at its disposal.  

In what is still a relatively free society, Americans who support the polygraph and those who oppose it have to unite against the apparent use of torture by a CIA that has crossed the line that separates totalitarian from free societies.

All the best, John (now moved to Sydney Australia, but still on the UofT email.