Wednesday, October 16, 2002

The truth is polygraphs lie Steve Chapman      In May 1978, four men were arrested by Chicago police for murdering a suburban man and raping and murdering his fiancee. All the suspects claimed they were innocent, but there was no real doubt about their guilt: Three of them, after all, had failed a polygraph exam.      Eventually, the Ford Heights Four, as they became known, were convicted for these brutal slayings, and two of the defendants were sentenced to death. But in 1996, DNA evidence exonerated all four. They had spent 18 years behind bars, partly because the lie detector lied.      A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the federal government stop using polygraphs to screen for security risks. Why? Because, in the words of the study, these devices are "intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results." That's academese for "I wouldn't trust one as far as I could throw it."      The Energy Department adopted polygraph screening of employees in response to the case of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist accused of spying for China but convicted of only a minor security violation. DOE now tests about 2,000 people a year. But George Mason University systems engineering professor Kathryn Laskey, a member of the NAS committee, noted, "No spy has ever been caught using the polygraph."      There are particular dangers in subjecting lots of people to polygraphs in the effort to find a few wrongdoers, because false positives will greatly outnumber "true" positives. Some employees who have done nothing wrong will nonetheless have physiological reactions that look suspicious. Some accomplished liars will be able to fool the machine.      To nab 8 out of every 10 real spies, the NAS report found, the device would probably have to erroneously implicate nearly 1,600 people. If it were set to minimize false positives, 80 percent of the real spies would slip past. But even then, 20 innocent people would be flagged for every guilty one.      The same fallibility that renders these machines unusable for employee monitoring makes them dangerous for criminal investigations as well. Police and prosecutors regard polygraph results as the closest thing to a dead-bang certainty. But that faith lacks any foundation. "Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy," concluded the panel.      And there is no reason to think better technology will help. People simply don't respond in a clear and predictable way to questions about what they may have done wrong. The "inherent ambiguity of the physiological measures used in the polygraph suggest that further investments in improving polygraph technique and interpretation will bring only modest improvements in accuracy," said the report. Polygraphs are a crude instrument that can't be refined.      The consequences of a misleading polygraph exam are bad enough in the employment arena, where someone can lose a job or not be hired. But they're much worse for criminal suspects, who can be locked away or even put to death because their pulse rate rose too much in a stressful situation.      A polygraph result generally can't be used as evidence in court. But some states allow the information if both the prosecution and the defense concur. So prosecutors may offer suspects the opportunity to clear themselves. Innocent suspects sometimes feel they have nothing to lose and much to gain from going along — only to fail the test.      A couple of weeks ago, one Jimmy Williams was officially cleared by an Ohio court after spending 10 years in prison for the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl. In fact, the rape never happened, but the Akron man nonetheless managed to fail a polygraph exam. Because his lawyer had agreed in advance to admit the results, the jury was told the lie detector had implicated him.      Other defendants have been victimized not only by the polygraph itself but by its aura of infallibility. Gary Gauger was sentenced to death for the murder of his parents on their McHenry County, Ill., farm but was eventually exonerated. He took a polygraph during his interrogation, and the results were inconclusive. But the police told him he had failed it.      He was so rattled by the news that the cops were able to get him to speculate aloud how he might have killed his parents. Those statements were then used to convict him of a crime he never committed.      Our medieval forebears had their own lie detector test: Suspected witches were dunked in water, on the theory that the guilty would float and the innocent would sink. Polygraphs aren't quite as preposterous, but they're bad enough. 6:29:59 PM       A Definition at Last, but What Does It All Mean?. Starting Monday, all foods labeled "organic" must comply with rigorous national standards that the movement has sought for years. By Marian Burros. 6:27:11 PM       Tobias Wolff. "We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are." 6:25:46 PM       Demosthenes. "Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master." 6:25:14 PM       Jackie Mason. "I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something." 6:23:37 PM       Testosterone fluctuation tied to women's sex drive 6:21:45 PM       Saddam 'wins 100% of vote' BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --Saddam Hussein won another seven-year term as Iraq's president in a referendum in which he was the sole candidate, taking 100 percent of the vote, the Iraqi leader's right-hand man announced Wednesday. All 11,445,638 of the eligible voters cast ballots, said Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council that is Iraq's key decision-making body. "This is a unique manifestation of democracy which is superior to all other forms of democracies even in these countries which are besieging Iraq and trying to suffocate it," Ibrahim said at a news conference in Baghdad, apparently referring to the United States. The White House had dismissed the one-man race in advance, and the results seemed to bear out the criticism. To get a vote total at all -- let alone a 100 percent "yes" vote -- Iraqi officials would have had to gather and count millions of paper ballots, some from remote areas far from Baghdad. "Obviously, it's not a very serious day, not a very serious vote and nobody places any credibility on it," press secretary Ari Fleischer said in Washington on Tuesday as ballots were being cast in Iraq. Parliament members were expected to go to Saddam sometime Wednesday to administer the oath of office for the new term. Iraqis in Baghdad could be heard firing in the air in celebration after Ibrahim's announcement of the results in Parliament. The government already had declared the day a national holiday, even before the results. Clusters of men took to the streets, dancing, at the news. Nabir Khaled Yusef, a van driver, and one of them: "My feeling is of happiness. This referendum and the 100 percent shows that all Iraqis are ready to defend their country and leader." Mahmoud Amin, a retired civil servant, echoed the idea. "This is a great day to celebrate," he said. "We are not surprised with the 100 percent vote for the president, because all Iraqis are steadfast to their president, who has been known to them for 30 years." On Tuesday, it was apparent that the vote was different from what most people know in democratic societies. Some voters stuffed bunches of ballots into boxes, saying they represented the votes of their entire families. Ibrahim defended the 100 percent figure when asked by reporters whether such a percentage wasn't absurd. "Someone who does not know the Iraqi people, he will not believe this percentage, but it is real. Whether it looks that way to someone or not," he said. "We don't have opposition in Iraq. They are situated in northern Iraq. Inside Iraq, there is no opposition. A poll among Kurds in northern Iraq -- who are not under Saddam's control -- bore out Ibrahim's statement on the opposition. The poll conducted by the Iraqi Institute for Democracy showed 94.5 percent of Iraqi Kurds questioned said they would not vote for Saddam. The institute, which is based in the northern Kurdish enclave and calls itself a nonprofit group promoting democracy, said said about 3,000 Kurds were questioned Tuesday as Iraqis went to the polls in the referendum. The poll was published Wednesday by the London-based Al Hayat daily, which reported only 64 Kurds said they would vote for Saddam while 129 said they were undecided. In the last referendum in 1995, Saddam got 99.96 percent of the vote -- according to the official Iraqi results -- and officials had said they expected him to top that figure. "This is a day of pride, honor and dignity as Iraqis express their free will to say "yes" to the pinnacle of their glory and loftiness," Ibrahim said, referring to Saddam. The vote was widely advertised not only as backing for Saddam but as a rebuke to the United States, which has been pressing in the United Nations Security Council for a resolution that would allow a war to topple Saddam. Ibrahim referred to the United States as the "forces of injustice and illusion," and called Iraq the land of "civilization and creativity." Saddam, 65, became president in 1979 in a well-orchestrated transfer of power within his Baath Party. Iraq has been under U.N. Security Council sanctions since invading Kuwait in 1990. U.N. resolutions require the country to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction, but it is widely believed to retain chemical and biological weapons, and the United States has accused it of trying to develop nuclear weapons. The United States wants a new Security Council resolution that would give U.N. weapons inspectors wide powers to uncover Iraq's arms and to trigger a war on Iraq if it resists full inspections. France has led a campaign in the Security Council to drop from the resolution the idea of an automatic trigger for war. 6:18:07 PM       "Every time I go out with the guys and come home late, I'm so careful not to make a sound.  I tip toe up the stairs and quietly get into bed.  She immediately springs to life and starts yelling about my irresponsible behavior, etc." "I've solved this problem.  On the rare occassion I find my self later then what was expected, I have a new approach.  I loudly enter the house, slam the door and say on the top of my lungs 'Who's in the Need of some lov'n?'  I don't hear a sound all night." 5:44:02 PM       "He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper." -Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) 10:59:18 AM       Q: What is the name of King Arthur's knight that created the round table? A: Sir Cumference. 10:53:24 AM

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