By Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Newspapers –
WASHINGTON — The nation’s spy satellite agency has been extracting polygraph confessions to crimes such as child molestation, but local law enforcement agencies aren’t always told so that they can investigate.
For instance, a former California substitute teacher who agreed to a polygraph test so he could get a national security clearance with the National Reconnaissance Office admitted in 2010 to molesting a girl who was his student at the time. The federal contractor said that if he were asked, “ ‘Have you ever molested a nine-year-old?’ I’d have to say yes,” an internal document says.
McClatchy Newspapers checked with the police department and school district in Escondido, Calif., where the man once worked and discovered that neither had been notified of the 2005 incident involving a third-grader.
In a polygraph session with the spy agency in 2010, a man who was then an Air Force lieutenant colonel confessed to downloading child pornography on his Pentagon computer and to touching a child in a sexual way, records obtained by McClatchy show.
“He worried that because of his feelings toward children, he could be accused of being like ‘Michael Jackson,’ ” a document says. “He did make it clear that viewing nude children between the ages of three and fourteen was sexually appealing to him.”
The lieutenant colonel said he’d sexually touched the child in Stafford, Va., where the county sheriff’s department has jurisdiction. The department wasn’t notified, spokesman Bill Kennedy said.
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which could have investigated the downloading of child pornography, also wasn’t informed. “I have nothing on it,” Air Force OSI spokeswoman Linda Card said about the lieutenant colonel, who retired last August. It’s unclear whether the Justice Department was notified. When McClatchy asked about it, spokeswoman Alisa Finelli said the department was “reviewing its records.”
The federal government’s failure to notify local law enforcement in these two cases comes after revelations that Penn State officials may have withheld suspicions that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was molesting children. Sandusky was convicted last month of sexually abusing 10 boys.
The National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees spy satellites, conducts an aggressive and controversial polygraph program aimed at screening employees and job applicants from across the country for security clearances. The agency refused to answer McClatchy’s questions about its polygraph program, saying in a statement that “the NRO polygraph program is in compliance with the law” and the confessions were “forwarded to the appropriate authorities,” but officials declined to say whom they notified.
As soon as Escondido school district officials heard from McClatchy about their former substitute’s confession, they reported it to the police. In Virginia and California, where the two cases of molestation were said to have occurred, a wide range of state and local government officials who have contact with children are required to report child abuse. The National Reconnaissance Office is in Fairfax County, Va.
Polygraphers who worked in other government agencies said someone who confessed to a serious crime during a polygraph session generally would be arrested or investigated so that any criminal evidence could be secured. In a child pornography case, for example, investigators would want to seize computer evidence. After an admission of child abuse, police and child protective services would want to investigate as soon as possible to ensure that children weren’t in immediate danger.
The documents don’t indicate and the agency wouldn’t say whether the men received security clearances.
McClatchy isn’t revealing the two men’s names because the confessions weren’t criminally investigated and the polygraphs weren’t conducted by law enforcement officials.
When National Reconnaissance Office polygraphers asked supervisors in a meeting last summer why people weren’t being arrested on the spot after confessing to molestation, they were told that the allegations were referred to the appropriate authorities when warranted, several former polygraphers who attended the meeting said. Two of the polygraphers, Mark Phillips and Chuck Hinshaw, said several polygraphers at the agency have questioned whether it was handling confessions to crime appropriately. Both men have since left the agency and now think that they were retaliated against for objecting to the practices.
To prosecute a polygraph confession, criminal investigators often must collect more evidence or get an admission to a crime during a separate interrogation. Agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office inform people who are polygraphed voluntarily during employment screenings that any such admission might be referred to law enforcement authorities. However, polygraphers generally don’t inform them of their constitutional rights, as criminal investigators often are required to do. In the lieutenant colonel’s case, the polygrapher was supposed to inform him of his rights under military law but did not, the records show.
Many courts don’t allow polygraph evidence because it isn’t scientifically reliable, and prosecutors might determine that charges can’t be filed even if there’s a confession. But several National Reconnaissance Office polygraphers who spoke to McClatchy, including Phillips and Hinshaw, questioned whether the agency was routinely withholding that it was obtaining such confessions to protect itself from outside scrutiny. A criminal prosecution would mean that the suspect’s defense attorney would have access to taped interviews and notes of the polygraph sessions, and might question the agency’s techniques at a time when some of its polygraphers already were accusing it internally of improper practices.
The Pentagon has told the National Reconnaissance Office that it doesn’t have the authority to ask directly about crimes during its polygraph screenings. It’s supposed to directly ask only about national security issues such as spying and terrorism.
Yet the agency compelled a job applicant in January to confess to stealing a lipstick and smoking pot once when she was a teenager, documents show. Adding to questions about the agency’s practices, the 35-year-old woman already had gone through a polygraph in 2010 aimed at the national security issues the agency is permitted to ask about.
The National Security Agency, which along with the CIA is allowed to directly ask questions about criminal conduct in polygraph tests, is known for being aggressive about referring molestation and child pornography cases to local and state officials.
