From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun Aug 03 2003 - 16:40:59 MDT
The truth about polygraphs
A National Academy of Sciences study validates long-held doubts about
the reliability of polygraphs. So why does the government still rely on
them to screen applicants for jobs?
By Charles P. Pierce, Globe Staff, 8/3/2003
< http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0803/coverstory_entire.htm >
WAS HE SWEATING?
Of course he was sweating.
But he didn't want to be sweating, and he didn't want his heart to race
this way, because he knew what that did to his blood pressure, and he
knew that he was in a situation here in the Boston office of the Drug
Enforcement Administration.
Everybody there knew him from the days when he'd been the
law-enforcement equivalent of a phenom pitcher straight out of the
minors. So they knew why he was standing there, and he knew why he was
standing there, and they knew that he knew. He was standing there
because there was a man behind a closed door with a machine that
claimed to know the truth of him better than he did. And he wasn't sure
what the machine knew about him that he didn't know. He knew this
situation well. He'd been trained to put suspects in this kind of a box.
Once, when he was 16 and at a party, he'd smoked a little weed. The
joint came by -- maybe once, maybe twice -- and he'd taken a puff.
Maybe two. It was a long time ago and hard to remember, but it was long
before he'd become interested in law enforcement and long before he'd
become so good at it. It was long before he'd graduated from
Northeastern University summa cum laude with his degree in criminal
justice and long before the co-op job with the DEA. He'd planned on
entering the DEA upon graduation but was tripped up by the budget
shutdown of the mid-'90s.
It was long before he'd gone to work for that antidrug task force down
on Cape Cod, long before he'd grown his hair long and his beard out to
go undercover to chase the speed labs and the dope-running boats, and
it was long before someone had waved the gun at him in the crack house
in New Bedford. It was long before he'd gotten a pilot's license
because he'd heard the DEA had an air wing, and he thought he might
like to be part of that, too. It was long before the awards and the
citations, and it was long before he'd applied for the full-time job at
DEA when the government reopened for business.
...< %>< >...Full article at URL above.
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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