For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Today we're going to go ahead and get started with our first interview here.
George Machke from Antipolygraph.com.
Welcome to the show, George, how are you doing?
Very good, Scott, thank you.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
Just a quick correction, it's Antipolygraph.org.
Oh, you're right.
You're in front of me, too.
I'm sorry about that.
Yeah, Antipolygraph.org.
And now, yeah, it's been a few years.
We've talked back in 2005 or 2006 or something like that.
Wow, there's so many different things I want to ask you about today on the show.
But I guess first of all, beyond any of the polygraph stuff, well, it is a truth or falsehood question.
You sent me an email regarding Gareth Porter's article, wherein Philip Giraldi is quoted, and we talked with Phil yesterday on the show, about how the CIA does not believe in these documents that were published in the London Times on December 14th, secret document exposes Iran's nuclear trigger, is the Times article.
And Gareth Porter's article at Antiwar.com slash Porter right now is, Giraldi says U.S. intelligence ain't buying it, something along those lines.
And then you sent me an email saying, hey, I found reasons to not believe in these documents that were published in the London Times beyond those reported by Gareth Porter in his article.
So I was wondering if you could start us off with what it was that you found in those documents that made you suspect their credibility, George.
Yeah, sure.
What I did was I went to the Times website because when I saw Gareth Porter's article yesterday, that was, you know, I had just seen the headline but had been busy when that came out and didn't look into the story.
So I found it fascinating and I thought, wow, I'd like to see those original documents because I'm a Persian linguist.
I work as a translator.
So I found the documents in question and I was really a bit taken aback at how they could have been represented as being sensitive government documents because I think, as was mentioned in the article, and as I can confirm, there are no classification markings or any sensitive handling or special instructions on the documents.
There's two different documents that they have on the website.
The one about the supposed nuclear trigger, they allege that it's from early 2007, but the document itself is undated and there's nothing in it that would suggest that it was written in early 2007.
If anything, the other irregularity, which is not by any means a smoking gun but which struck me as odd, is that it was a document composed with a word processor on a computer, but the input method used, the keyboard setting, was Arabic, not Persian.
Let me clarify here real quick, George.
Pardon me for interrupting you, especially since you're on the phone from Europe there and we have that little delay.
But I wanted to make sure that we get this straight.
You are, by profession, a translator of Farsi?
Is that what you said?
Yes.
I'm working as a legal translator here in The Hague.
So in The Hague in terms of not just the city but for the international court system?
Well, for a particular tribunal, the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, in whose behalf I am not speaking with you now.
I'm representing strictly my own views.
I understand.
But the important part is that the American-Iranian which kind of tribunal?
It's called the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal.
And they apparently decided that you were qualified to handle translating back and forth between these two languages.
That's the point I'm getting at here.
Yes.
I in particular translate documents.
Okay.
I see.
And so I think Gareth mentions and you say you're verifying basically that the document that they say is from 2007.
It says, oh look, the Iranians are making weapons after the CIA said they quit or whatever.
There's actually no date on that document, as I was saying?
Right.
It's an undated document.
There's also no indication of who wrote it.
We know what organization, let alone what person.
Right.
And what about the secrecy stamps?
Is there anything that says the Persian version of top secret?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing, he says.
Okay.
And now in the part where I interrupted you there, you're talking about the type set.
You're talking about either the kind of keyboard or the software that the keyboard would use.
I'm not certain.
I mean, let me go ahead and give you an opportunity to elaborate however you like here.
But I'll start with this.
I don't know Arabic from Persian.
I couldn't pronounce a single letter of it.
I wouldn't know how to tell the difference between Farsi written down and Arabic written down at all.
So to me this is a very technical issue, but please explain.
Yeah.
Well, some letters are written a bit differently in Persian and Arabic.
And a particular one is the analog of the English letter Y.
When that appears as the last letter in a word in Arabic, it typically has two dots underneath it.
But in Persian this is not the case.
However, you know, years ago it was common for Persian to be written with an Arabic input method.
So you'd see Persian documents with the Arabic style two dots under the final Y in a word.
But you don't see that very much nowadays.
And especially, you know, if you have a modern computer with, say, Windows XP in it, it comes with the proper Persian input method.
Ah, well, you know, maybe that's the problem.
Maybe they got Windows 7 and it's a piece of junk and it's, you know, reverted their font faces there.
I don't think so.
Sorry.
That was a lame attempt at humor there because I hate Windows 7.
Sorry.
Well, what I think, Scott, is that, you know, it's possible that this was done on an old computer or one that didn't have the Persian resources in it or was misconfigured.
I just find it a little bit odd that coming from a center that's supposed to be high tech that, you know, in early 2007 they'd be typing Persian that way.
It's possible, but it really strikes me as odd.
And it's just one other factor that, you know, leads me to conclude that these documents should not be taken at face value.
Okay.
So let me make sure I got this straight here.
George Matschke, professional translator of Farsi and English for the American-Iranian, what is it again, the claims tribunal?
The official name is the Iran-United States claims tribunal.
Iran-United States claims tribunal.
I better, you know, jot that down here.
Who I'm not speaking for.
Right.
Which you're not speaking for, but you are a credentialed and professional translator.
Okay.
And now you verify what Gareth Porter says, that there are no dates on the document that supposedly comes from 2007.
But what about the other one?
You say there's two different documents, right?
Is one of them with dates on it?
Right.
Well, no.
Yeah, one does.
The first document is described as a memo signed by a Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
And that document is really not a memo.
It's a distribution list.
It has a duty position and signature on it.
It has a list of recipients and there's a list of 12 organizations and that's it.
There's no, that is dated.
I think the date corresponds as the Times states to 29 December 2005.
But this document has no connection at all to the other one as far as is apparent from the text of both documents.
They're unrelated.
What the Times seems to be saying is that based on this, what they call a memo, this recipient's list, this cover sheet for some other document, that this shows that those 12 organizations could only be a nuclear weapons research program.
And I've looked at those sub-organizations and none of them are specifically, from the names of them, appear to be specifically concerned with nuclear weapons.
Well, in fact, they're written very vaguely too, right?
Isn't that what, in the Gareth Porter piece here at Antiwar.com, it's called Giraldi, U.S. Intel found Iran nuke document was forged.
And in here I think he says that the references to these different agencies are written in a way where it's like the Institute, and the Center, and the Committee, and these things where...
In the two-page document that purports to be about the nuclear trigger work, yeah, that doesn't give specific references to, it doesn't give the full names of agencies.
Although I guess we don't have too many different documents to compare it to for what it would say for internal nuclear memos, right?
Well, I certainly don't.
This is not a story that I've been following closely.
I just read Gareth's article, looked at the documents myself, and just found them very suspect because they didn't seem to bear the hallmarks of anything that was a sensitive government document.
Right.
Okay, so there's two documents here.
The first one has a date but doesn't really say anything that implicates anybody doing anything criminal, or making nuclear bombs out of anything, or whatever.
The one that supposedly is incriminating, never mind the science of it, I spoke with Dr. Prather about why the whole story of the nuclear trigger and the uranium deuteride doesn't even make sense from a how-to-blow-a-bombs point of view.
Other than that, just in terms of the documents, the one that supposedly is incriminating has no date, has no secrecy stamps on it, and in fact looks like it was typed up in Arabic, not in Farsi.
Right.
And that last point is, I think, maybe the least significant one.
But one that really sort of stood out to me as strange.
I wouldn't diminish the importance of that.
I mean, come on, how could it be that the Iranian secret intelligence services and agencies, and people who would be in charge of something like this, don't have the ability to type in their own language?
Well, for comparison purposes, I did look at some Iranian military documents that have been posted on the Federation of American Sciences website.
And these date from about 2004 or so.
And some of them had the same sort of Arabic-style input, and some didn't.
So even as late as then, certainly there were some people working on scientific-type things.
This was about a super-speed underwater torpedo that had some of this Arabic-style lettering in it as well.
So it's not unprecedented, it's not a smoking gun, but it really struck me as odd.
And then looking through the rest of the document, again, no date, no classification markings, as I think Gareth Porter did mention in the article.
All right.
Well, let me ask you this, George Mashke of antipolygraph.org.
Have you ever driven drunk?
Nope.
All right.
So now, that can be my baseline.
That must be a lie.
And so whenever the squiggly line says the same thing as it said just now when you said that, I know that you're also lying, right?
That's the assumption that some polygraph operators do make, including some who work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
All right.
Well, I was trying to be funny, although the problem is I'm just really not very funny.
But the point is that that actually kept you from getting a job.
That was the assumption made by the polygraph guy at the FBI, right?
It might be.
You know, I really don't know 100% for sure, because when I requested my FBI file under the Privacy Act, I got it.
But somehow the polygraph charts were missing from the report.
They said they couldn't find them.
So I don't know for sure, but I do know that when I answered the question, did you ever drive?
Well, under the influence of alcohol, I felt very comfortable and confident in my truthful answer that, no, I never did.
Right.
So then are you a secret agent of the Russians or of Osama bin Laden or whatever else?
When you say, no, of course not, they go, aha, he's lying, just like when he denied driving drunk.
Everybody drives drunk.
Right.
If you truthfully answer the so-called control questions, the ones they secretly expect your answers to will be deceptive or less than truthful, then you have a very good chance of wrongly failing the polygraph.
And it happens a lot, Scott.
The FBI has a polygraph failure rate on the order of 50%.
And keep in mind, these are people who have already been screened through the initial paper and pencil test and through an oral interview by a panel.
So these aren't people just in and off the street.
They've already been through prescreening.
And yet they're saying like half of them are supposedly lying about drugs or national security matters, usually about drugs.
But it boggles the mind that so many people have used illegal drugs in excess of the FBI's tolerances.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's the thing, too, is whatever the statistics are for who's ever used drugs or whatever drugs are permissible in your background from the point of view of FBI hiring or something like that.
I mean, it doesn't make sense that people who would be disqualified based on their rules would put themselves through all of that mess just to get caught on some.
I mean, well, I mean, I don't know what the procedures are.
If you tell if you're trying to be an FBI agent and you say, yeah, I did coke twice in college or or, yeah, I had a lot of fun with it for three years there, you know, back in the day or whatever, does that mean that automatically you can't get the job?
What is the line there?
Is it ever doing it at all?
Well, the FBI has recently reportedly in the press I've seen relaxed its standards on drug use.
It used to be, I know in particular with marijuana, which I've never used, but they would allow up to 15 uses of marijuana in one's past.
And it had to be X number of years in the past, you know, between the time you last did it and your application.
And now they've dropped that arbitrary limit of 15 and have more more options for discretion.
So they're still concerned about past drug use.
And then there is a limit, but I'm not sure exactly where they draw the line nowadays.
The point is, the point is what you're getting at is that innocent people end up failing the polygraph thing based on a question about drug use, when it's at least improbable to think that so many people who are trying to be federal cops are the same people who smoke a lot of weed.
I mean, from my point of view, it seemed like anybody smoked a lot of weed would see right through the theory that there ought to be an FBI at all and would never take part in such a criminal organization.
But I mean, I don't know, you know, it's just not a perspective.
Well, sure.
It's you know, I'm sure there are people who have used a lot of drugs in their past and maybe who don't anymore and who seek employment in law enforcement.
You know, but people like that don't need to fear the polygraph because it doesn't work.
They just need to learn about the trickery behind it, say they didn't use drugs or make very minor admissions and then lie about the real use.
And there are simple countermeasures that can be used to pass the polygraph.
And while polygraph operators claim they can detect them, there's absolutely no evidence that they can.
And, you know, it's the number of spies, for example, who have fooled the polygraph suggests that they're not really good at catching liars who try to deceive them.
Well, you know, this is actually kind of fun for me, this topic, in the sense, I mean, I'm sorry that you've obviously had personal experiences here, you know, professionally where this has been a real problem.
And obviously it's been a real problem for a lot of people.
But what's fun about it to me is this is where we get to grapple with the very definition of what truth is and things like that.
And we get to see how the definitions of basic things, the most basic things like, you know, what does it mean for something to be true or not?
Or what does it mean for a machine to know something or not?
Or all these kinds of things are all getting redefined based on the gadgetry.
And, you know, when you call it a polygraph, I guess most people are used to that by now, but at least for quite a while there, I think there would have been a time, George, where people didn't know what you meant.
It's called a lie detector, as though the machine itself is connected to God and knows what all the truth is and catches you if you tell a lie somehow.
And it's not that anybody ever really taught us that that's how it works or anything, but that's become sort of the premise of the deal, that this machine knows what the truth is.
When really, what does it do?
Measure your heart rate or something?
Yeah, Scott, the lie detector measures your heart rate, your blood pressure, how much you're sweating.
That's the plate they attach to your fingers.
It tracks changes in conductance.
And the other one is the two tubes around your chest so they can track your breathing.
And the lie detector can do these things fairly well, but what it's not good at is telling whether or not you're telling the truth, because there is no lie response that people produce when they lie.
It's not like your nose grows longer or there's some certain pattern they look for.
The test is based on trickery, and the key part of the trick is that the American public does not understand that the whole thing is a sham.
Right.
Yeah, well, you know, I saw a thing one time where the fingerprint experts, when kind of really put to it, said, well, you know, mostly it's an art more than a science, really.
And I guess there you could even maybe believe that a computer would be better at fingerprints because it would have to mathematically match up enough different points on a fingerprint or something to really be able to tell, maybe better than a human.
But how many people have gone to prison based on testimony about fingerprints by people who probably during those trials didn't say, you know, well, it's an art.
And I kind of, you know, use my best hunch to tell you people whether to convict or not.
Yeah, well, it's when bogus science, which I think there's some of in fingerprints, you know, I'm not an expert on fingerprints.
My understanding is that complete fingerprint matching is pretty accurate, whereas partial print matching is where you really get into problems.
But, you know, the polygraph, it is like the lie detector is complete out of whole cloth pseudoscience.
Well, let me ask you this.
So when you have real science, like, say, double blind studies and all these kinds of things to examine how polygraphs work, has it been demonstrated that your sweaty fingertip, your increased heart rate, your dilation of your blood vessels or whatever the responses that the machine is measuring, that those could all be, you know, all those seemingly involuntary responses could be provoked out of people under all different circumstances besides having them tell a lie?
You know, I mean, it seems like a test somebody would have done, right?
Like, what if the lie detector has not been rigor, rigorously studied?
There are lots of studies in journals, especially polygraph trade journals, but they, for the most part, don't pass scientific muster.
The number of scientifically rigorous studies is much lower.
Those were reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, who produced a report in 2003 called the Polygraph and Lie Detection.
And, well, their basic conclusion was that polygraph testing's accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies.
But, you know, upon receiving this news from the National Academy of Sciences, the federal government's reaction was to double down on its use of polygraphs.
They actually expanded their use of the lie detector.
You know, you make it sound like it's almost a stroke of luck, just some wrinkle in time where, what, some three-judge panel somewhere said we're never going to let people be convicted based on these things.
I mean, that's the way it's been my whole lifetime, right, is that these things are not allowed in a criminal trial.
They're not to be introduced as evidence by the prosecution.
You can't force somebody to take them in criminal matters.
And we're kind of just lucky, right?
Like, you could have got another judge who says, oh, yeah, I believe in it.
And this would be part of our entire criminal justice system, right?
Instead, it's limited to just not hiring people in those terms, right?
It's into our criminal justice system maybe a bit more than you realize, because in some states, polygraph results can be admitted.
In fact, that Fry precedent is the one you're referring to for scientific evidence.
That was replaced by the Daubert standard, and now it's at the judge's discretion.
Really?
I did not know that.
So much for the stroke of luck, right?
But it's very hard to convince a federal judge to allow polygraph results as evidence in a criminal trial.
But there's been more success in cases with getting it admitted into civil cases.
And even in criminal cases, judges, I'm horrified to say, are in some cases considering lie detector results for purposes of sentencing after someone has been convicted.
Geez.
Well, now I'm sorry because we're way out of time here, but let me ask you to really quick.
Can you discuss the the use of lie detectors in the occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, et cetera?
Yeah.
One key thing I think since we last spoke, I discovered an Arabic language document in an Iraqi insurgent publication which explained how to beat the lie detector.
And I translated it to English, put it online, and apparently the knowledge that the enemy knows how to beat the lie detector hasn't stopped the U.S. government from not only continuing to use lie detectors itself in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from foisting the polygraph on the Iraqis to get them to use polygraphs to screen their own personnel, which is a really, really stupid policy.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing I saw on your website where people on the forum there are accusing you of treason for putting this information out there.
But the fact of the matter is, if our soldiers are going around like, you know, Keystone cops, putting people through lie detectors on the spot and then maybe killing them or, you know, taking them off to prison, you know, like the president is now finally being allowed in American courts, then, you know, that's not right.
Foreigners are people, too.
You can't go around rounding people up based on lie detector results.
It ain't right.
And so, you know, if it's treason to tell the truth to the world, then I don't know why they ever put the First Amendment in there in the first place, you know?
Yeah, well, I agree.
I think, you know, people who make their living giving lie detector tests get very upset when people point out that the emperor is naked.
All right, everybody, that's George Mashke.
The website is antipolygraph.org.
And I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It was a pleasure, Scott.
