What struck me most about this New York Times article about information deleted from the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report was the following sentence:
The only information about the source known as Red River is an apparent reference to the failed polygraph test, which notes that the intelligence committee staff has asked a polygraph expert from the Department of Defense “about the possibility of a ‘false positive’ “ resulting from a polygraph examination.
The sentence quoted above illustrates for me in a poignant way what I consider to be one of the major flaws in the way our government is currently being run. If an informant on whose intelligence the decision to go to war may rest fails a lie detector test, I don’t think the appropriate reaction is to go looking for ways to justify ignoring the polygraph result. That is what a lawyer would do ("It’s not what’s true, it’s what you can prove"). Instead, I believe that our government officials have a duty to do everything they can to determine whether the informant is actually lying or not.