05/27/15 – George Maschke – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott here.
If you've got a band, a business, a cause, or campaign, and you need stickers to help promote, check out thebumpersticker.com at thebumpersticker.com.
They digitally print with solvent ink, so you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old style screen printing.
I'm sure glad I sold thebumpersticker.com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it, and there are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me too.
Let thebumpersticker.com help you get the word out.
That's thebumpersticker.com at thebumpersticker.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
On the line is George Machke.
He is the founder of the website antipolygraph.org, and he is covering the trial of Doug Williams, United States versus Doug Williams.
Oh, man, I'm only just seeing the update here day two.
I don't want to spoil it, but what a terrible headline.
Welcome back to the show.
George, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
You know, I read part one, and then I'm only now realizing that there's a part two here, and so go ahead and break the bad news.
Yes, on the second day of the trial, Doug Williams changed his plea to guilty.
And why?
Was he guilty?
He acknowledged that he was guilty before the judge.
In doing so, he didn't state the reasons for changing his plea.
In fact, he hasn't made any public statements since that day.
Now how much time is he facing?
Well, the maximum for the crimes to which he pled guilty is 20 years imprisonment for each of the five counts, a fine of I think it's $200,000 or $250,000 per count.
So it's more than a million dollars in fines and up to 100 years in prison is the maximum.
However, under federal sentencing guidelines, any maximum punishment should be considerably less than that.
Now, his crime, if I understand it right, was just that they successfully entrapped him into teaching some undercover federal agents how to beat a polygraph.
Is that right?
That's right.
The only crimes with which Williams was charged were the ones that were planned by undercover agents.
And now, so is there some kind of line there between explaining to someone this is how to make yourself not appear to be lying on a lie detector in a way that's a matter-free speech versus a way that really is criminally conspiring to break a law?
Yes.
From the testimony that was delivered in the trial, it became clear what one would have to do to avoid such an entrapment in the future.
For example, if anyone wanted to provide this as a service, a training in how to pass polygraphs, the key would be not to train anyone who tells you that their purpose in getting the training is to lie to any government official, whether it be in a job application or a criminal investigation.
Is that the law, or that's just where the judges have drawn the line, or how does that work?
Well, no line was drawn by the judge here in that there was a guilty plea.
Well, I guess I mean like in earlier cases, or I guess really just the first part of the question, is that the law according to Congress or according to state legislatures?
Well, I think in all fairness, if you read the indictment, one could conceive of how the actions with which Williams was charged could be construed as violating the mail fraud laws and the witness tampering statute, because they're very broadly written.
So I can see a case could be made that this was a violation of the law.
But I'm not aware of any analogous cases to the case of Doug Williams or Chad Dixon, who's the other person who was targeted in this criminal investigation.
He was a man in Indiana who taught people how to pass the polygraph as well.
Right.
Well, we can get to that in a second.
And let me get to mail fraud, back to mail fraud in a second.
But as far as the witness tampering, I mean, I can see that there's some kind of qualitative difference between someone saying, I'm afraid that I will be falsely indicated as dishonest.
And so I want to protect myself from that versus someone coming and saying, I'm going to lie and I want to get away with lying.
However, I'm not so sure I see the legal difference there as far as the responsibility of the person doing the teaching.
How in the hell is that witness tampering?
I mean, witness tampering.
We know what witness tampering is and it's an entirely different thing.
Right.
Well, yeah.
Normally when we think of witness tampering as as laypersons, we think of something like intimidating a witness not to testify at a trial or trying to bribe them or influence them somehow.
Yeah.
Peel the religious faith.
Something.
Right.
And I guess the government's argument was that he attempted to and it's in the language of the statute to corruptly influence a potential witness, not even necessarily someone who who had testified or was necessarily going to.
So it's a quite broadly written statute.
Yeah.
Sounds like.
And I guess it sounds like his lawyer told him, give it up, man, throw yourself on the mercy of the court here because they're going to nail you anyway.
That's quite possible.
I don't know, again, for sure.
But one plausible rationale that was a knowledgeable person who observed the trial was that if conviction seem if it seems likely that one is going to be convicted, one might change one's plea to guilty in hope of receiving a lesser sentence under the federal sentencing guidelines.
Well, so what's the mail fraud part of this?
That has to do with having received payment through the U.S. Postal Service.
That's all.
Yeah.
See, that's the one where they can just nail anybody with anything.
Right.
Right.
You would think that mail fraud is offering a service or something for sale through the mail and then taking the money but not delivering it.
But it's much more broad than that.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, fraud, again, just like witness tampering.
We know what fraud is.
It's not receiving a check unless it has that component to it that it was deceit that tricked the person into sending the check, right, and that they were complaining.
We don't have that situation here at all, do we?
Well, the argument, again, by the prosecutors is that Williams' training was a fraudulent service and he received payment for it through the U.S. Postal Service.
So that violates the mail fraud statute, which again is fraudulent itself.
Well, in what way?
In that it was not that it didn't work.
In fact, the government's key witness in the case all but acknowledged that the training does work, training someone, for example, to get away with lying during an examination.
And in one case, a point they – okay, one point that was repeated, instructed the person was receiving the training to deny having received it to investigators.
And – Man, we got real bandwidth problems.
We have real bandwidth problems here, George.
So I don't know if you're on Wi-Fi and pacing around the house or exactly what, but we're going to have to figure that out during the break here and get it straight.
Okay.
But hey, it's a good time to take a break.
So hold it right there, and we'll be right back, everybody, with George Matschke from antipolygraph.com with the sad news Doug Williams has pleaded guilty in his federal trial for teaching some trappers how to beat a polygraph.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or a peacenik, live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world, Iran, central banking, political realignment, and, well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out scotthorton.org slash speeches for some examples, and email me, scott at scotthorton.org for more information.
See you there.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with George Matschke.
We got the plain old television, telephone service happening now.
So that should be good.
That way he can hear me and I can hear him, and you guys can hear us both.
All right.
So now, yeah, I think where we were, George, we were talking about the bogus mail fraud charge, and I guess I've heard this before as referred to as the thing that they can make stick to anyone.
If the feds want to put someone in prison, if you basically checked your mailbox, they can somehow make that a federal offense for receiving junk mail or whatever it is they want to frame you up on.
And it sounds like that's what they did here.
You're telling me they're not saying that he was, you know, selling some bogus potion or whatever, some kind of snake oil that did not work, that that was not the fraud.
But so what was the fraud?
So the fraud was assisting people who intended to lie in the course of a federal investigation.
So a conspiracy to commit fraud by way of the mail somehow?
Well, none of the charges are actual conspiracy, but actual witness.
There are three counts of witness tampering and two counts of mail fraud in the indictment.
And then in the cases of the mail fraud, it's the feds sending him his check?
Yes, payment sent through the U.S. mail.
Okay.
And but by the ones who entrapped him, not just, you know, somebody else.
That's right.
An interesting and I think important point in understanding this case is that the feds really wanted Doug Williams business records, which they got for it, at least something on the for nearly 5000 of his customers, not necessarily people who had received in person training, but people who just bought his manual online, either through his website, now it's available for sale on amazon.com.
So they got a list of close to 5000 customers and actually went and interviewed many of them, seeking any evidence that Williams had committed any crime.
And yet, none of the crimes for which he was charged involved any actual customers.
And now, I'm sorry, go ahead.
As Marissa Taylor of McClatchy DC has reported, based on this list, the government created a watch list and circulated it to some 17 government agencies that have polygraph programs.
So now, when anyone goes for a federal polygraph, they can check their name against the list of Doug Williams customers.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
I was just going to ask you about the McClatchy stories.
I had forgotten about that detail, but then that's part of kind of a series that they did on the whole new clampdown inside the executive branch, and not just in the national security departments, right, but all across the foreign branch government.
Right.
The lead agency for what was called Operation Lie Busters that targeted people who provided training in how to pass a polygraph, that was the United States Customs and Border Protection.
That was the lead agency.
And they're even making it where, well, for the national security employees, they cannot discuss with journalists anything, even if it's not classified at all.
And then for everybody else who's not even in national security, where it's not even a matter of classification, they're all being ordered that no one may speak to the media.
Everything must go through the official channels and official spokesmen under penalty of I don't know what besides firing.
Is it as far as prosecution, this whole new regime?
And they're trying to get everybody to tattletale on the guy in the cubicle next to him and all this stuff, right?
Yes.
Yes.
People are being discouraged from talking to the press without authorization, even about unclassified matters.
And one of the areas about which people who are subject to polygraph screening may be questioned is any contact that they've had with the media.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like from what I was reading, it was like a whole new order inside the departments about who's allowed to speak to who and when and why and all of that, you know, real change.
And people were kind of befuddled by it.
Right.
Well, I know in the intelligence community, I'm a former Army Reserve intelligence officer and interrogator.
We were always discouraged from talking with the media at all.
And it was something, you know, we'd never do.
It certainly wasn't authorized.
And we knew it was something you could, you know, lose a security clearance for.
So I'm not sure how much change there really is in that respect.
The thing about talking about unclassified matters seems new for it to be codified in writing in a directive from the Director of National Intelligence, as it has been.
But you know, back to the conviction of Doug Williams and Chad Dixon for teaching people how to pass polygraph test, I think an important thing to note here is that the government by prosecuting them, by criminally investigating them, has all but acknowledged that polygraph tests can be beaten.
And I think the for purposes of national security and public safety, perhaps rather than, you know, prosecuting people who are telling the truth about lie detectors, that they don't work, that they can be beaten, and they're easy to beat, here's how to do it.
Our government should reassess its reliance on polygraphs.
We have a recommendation from the National Research Council that polygraph screening not be used, that it's, you know, it's not sufficiently reliable to be used for national security purposes.
Yeah, you know what it is?
It's like the Iraqis standing around with a got the little pretended gizmo on a stick.
It doesn't even have a battery in it, it doesn't do anything.
But they just go, it's a bomb detector and they rely on it.
It's the fake bomb detector that I think was sold for $60,000 or pounds a pop.
It's quite outrageous.
And actually, the lie detector works on very much the same principle in that it can't really detect lies.
But it does have some usefulness if the person who's being tested believes that it can detect deception, maybe they'll make admissions.
But it's often wrong.
And so numerous spies have beaten the polygraph using simple countermeasures, such as Doug Williams was teaching, such as you can still find on the internet, you know, putting Doug Williams in prison isn't going to destroy the knowledge of how to pass the polygraph.
If anything, to the extent that it's brought public attention to it, more people have learned that the polygraph is unreliable and it's easy to beat.
Yeah, well he said on this show, I'm sure you heard the interview, where Williams said, hey listen, I was a con artist for years, not teaching people how to beat it, but being a polygraph so-called expert himself.
He said all he was was a hustler.
His job wasn't detecting lies.
His job was scaring you and tricking you into believing that he could detect your lies.
That was it.
So his prop in his little scam, like he was a barker at a carnival, had nothing to do with anything scientific.
It's not even expertise any more than it's expertise running a, you know, carnival scam.
Well, the expertise is expertise in reading people.
It's rather like cold reading, like a psychic or fortune teller might use it, in reading another person and exploiting their fears as a leg up in an interrogation.
And sometimes it works, for example, in criminal investigations where, you know, a dumb criminal can be convinced to confess.
And hopefully it's a valid confession and corroborating evidence can be found.
But sometimes even false confessions have been coerced from people because the police believe that they've gotten a liar and they just won't accept any innocent explanation.
And of course, for screening purposes for employees, I think it's just wrong on several accounts.
Again, first, from a national security standpoint, because it's unreliable and easily beaten and numerous spies, including Ana Belen Montes, who was the Defense Intelligence Agency's top analyst for Cuban affairs.
She beat the polygraph going into it.
She was a Cuban agent before she even applied for work with the DIA.
They taught her how to pass it, and it worked brilliantly for her.
And again, recent documents that were leaked to antipolygraph.org that we've published from DIA, from Customs and Border Protection, show that the only people they're catching trying to beat the polygraph are those who use the most crude, uneducated techniques that anyone who knew what they were doing wouldn't do.
People who are sophisticated, who have, for example, read Doug Williams' manual, who have read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, which is our book available for free on antipolygraph.org, they would know how to use techniques that the government cannot detect and that are proven effective.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you one thing real quick, and we're over time here, but I want to ask you real quick.
Has anybody ever taken some polygraph readouts, the paperwork, and given them to a bunch of different polygraph experts and see if you could even get them to agree on what they all say?
Yeah, that would be like a test of inter-rater reliability, and it's, I think, close to like 70 to 80% of agreement between polygraph examiners on sets of charts.
That sounds like a fail to me, 70, that's a D minus.
Well, that would provide an upper limit for validity if it had any, which it doesn't.
And then there's other things like test-retest reliability, which the federal government doesn't want to look into that because they know the results wouldn't be good for them.
So yeah, it's unscientific nonsense, and it's not surprising that the techniques used by the federal government and state and local governments for polygraph screening and testing were not developed by scientists, but by interrogators who perhaps were well-meaning, but who lacked an understanding of the scientific method, didn't do double-blind studies, didn't have an understanding of proper control procedures for a scientific test.
So what we have is a pseudoscience that has, in a sense, become the official pseudoscience of the United States government.
The Iraqis had the AD-651 fake bomb detector, well, we have a fake lie detector that we're using for the most sensitive things that, you know, Cy Hersh's reporting recently that Walken who came to, I think it was the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, what was the first thing they did?
They sent someone to Pakistan to give them a polygraph test, which is just absurd that the decision whether to have confidence in such an informant would be made.
Throw him in the river to see if he's a witch, you know?
If he sinks and drowns, that means he was a good Christian and died a good Christian death and went to heaven anyway, so it's all right.
But if he floats and gets away, well, then that means he's guilty.
So I think it's deeply disturbing that important questions affecting national security are allowed to be influenced on such junk science.
And it's really well past time that we abandoned our misplaced reliance on junk science.
And like other countries, like the UK, like Germany, realize that there is no magic lie detector and we're better off not kidding ourselves.
We're better off taking a realistic approach to deception, knowing that this lie test doesn't work.
It might be useful for admissions from time to time, but there's adverse consequences that come from relying on something that doesn't work.
And it also requires the government to misinform the public about it, to create a false public belief in the lie detector to keep the whole musical chair games going.
Right.
All right, y'all, that is George Maschke.
He's at antipolygraph.org and the book is The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
The whole thing is there free.
And I'm pretty sure, at least it used to be, that people could find the Penn and Teller episode on the lie detector that features George on YouTube, at least parts of it anyway.
So you should be able to find that.
And you definitely find it on the Pirate Bay if you want to go sifting around, figuring out which episode it is.
But anyway, so thanks for coming back on the show, George, and covering this sad news for us about Doug Williams' guilty plea.
And I'll be looking forward to your sad update about just what they're going to do to him.
I'll keep you posted.
For his honest work, exposing their dishonesty.
So thanks again for your time, George.
Appreciate it.
OK.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.