The national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated.

No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

To the extent that I considered the personal burden of harming the people who had trusted me, plus the Agency, or the United States, I wasn't processing that.