By: Bob McCarty
Bob McCarty Writes

James Chapman was as distraught as any patriotic American about seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan being killed in an explosion set off by a double-agent Dec. 31.

James Chapman

The 67-year-old Marine Corps veteran made it clear that he hated to see our nation’s security compromised the way it was Christmas Day when a 23-year-old Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to take down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with a bomb as it approached Detroit.

While many would find it difficult to recognize anything positive in those two recent security breakdowns that prompted a presidential news conference Thursday, Chapman sees opportunity. He made that clear during a 45-minute interview Friday.

“The science exists today that would protect our troops,” he said. “The science exists today that would protect our flying public.

“The science exists today that can benefit all law enforcement — not just intelligence agencies, but the officers who are fighting the war on crime in our country — and it can be used to protect children, adults and the elderly.”

The science to which he refers is known as Computer Voice Stress Analysis®, and Chapman is the world’s leading expert on its use as a tool for a multitude of intelligence, law enforcement and security applications.

A board member of the National Association of Computer Voice Stress Analysts, Chapman has used voice stress analysis from the time it was first developed in 1971 by Army Col. Alan D. Bell Jr. and through the transition period in 1989 when the people at the National Institute for Truth Verification computerized the technology.

Unlike polygraph, which is only capable of displaying relative stress, Chapman said VSA is capable of displaying absolute stress levels and is not subject to a plethora of factors (i.e., hypnosis, drugs, muscle tensing) that disqualify nine out of ten people from being good polygraph subjects in the first place.

NITV’s CVSA®, in particular, is a portable, computer-based system that its backers contend offers a more-accurate and more-versatile solution for assessing potential human threats than the 60-plus-year-old polygraph technology. Using it, Chapman is able to boast a 94.6 percent confession rate in 2,100 cases over 19 years.

Based on his extensive and successful first-hand knowledge of the CVSA testing platform, Chapman believes it should be used widely in both the war on terrorism and the war on crime.

Asked how the deadly attack on the CIA operatives might have been prevented, Chapman didn’t mince words.

“Obviously, they did not vet this guy,” he explained. “Had they tested him on CVSA, there’s no doubt in my mind that they would have found out that he was an enemy double-agent.

“They could have sat that person down and asked him a series of questions, and they would have known,” Chapman continued. “I believe with all my heart that, had this occurred, they could have saved these people’s lives.”

Chapman, the former director of the Criminal Justice Program and the Forensic Crime Laboratory at the State University of New York in Corning, shared similar thoughts about passenger screening in the case of the man news media outlets have dubbed the “Underwear Bomber.”

“If they had (CVSA) overseas, they could have asked a series of questions — what we call uncontrolled narrative testing,” he explained, “and if you would have asked him a series of questions — Is your name so and so? Do you have any intentions of harming anyone on this flight? Do you have any intentions of harming anyone in America? Do you have any intentions of engaging in any kind of terrorist activity? — the system and the science would have picked up on that and the operator could have said to these people, ‘Wait a minute, you better take this guy off to the side and really interview him.’”

The science is there.

“We’re talking about putting full-body scanners where you can see almost everything there is to see in a human being. If you had, when you walk through an airport, a kiosk or something where, as you walk through, you answer five or six questions which wouldn’t take any time at all, the science and technology could identify your current stress.”

A person with hard stress, he explained, would warrant further questions.

One case that warranted further questioning — and stands out among the 2,100 cases in which Chapman has been involved — took place in Madison County, N.Y.

“An Irish girl, a co-ed from Long Island, was missing in Upstate New York,” he explained. “(The suspect) had been polygraphed once and had been cleared, and a second time by another agency that called it ‘inconclusive.’”

After a thorough interview and CVSA examination, the suspect confessed to the murder. Not only did Chapman obtain a confession that proved two polygraphs to be incorrect, but he also obtained additional evidence — including the identification of other individuals involved — based on the results of the CVSA which will prove crucial in convicting the suspects of the girl’s 1981 murder.

The case is one of thousands that serve as prime examples of the key difference between traditional polygraph exams and CVSA, Chapman said.

“An ‘inconclusive’ simply indicates someone who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing,” he explained. “We don’t have ‘inconclusives’ with CVSA. You either clear them or you can’t clear them” as ‘deceptive’ or ‘not deceptive.’”

One might wonder why, when more than 1,800 law enforcement agencies across the United States are realizing great success with CVSA, more federal agencies — including, but not limited to, the Department of Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense — aren’t using CVSA technology in the fight to protect the United States and U.S. interests against crime, terrorism and enemy combatants.

Likewise, one might wonder why the technology that proved so successful when used to interrogate detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq was officially and abruptly put “off limits” by the “powers that be.”

Chapman explained the dilemma.

“You have a small, select group of people who have the power to put up a wall, because they’re protecting their little turf and putting our troops and the American people in harm’s way,” he said. “To me, that’s a crime.”

Asked who constitutes that “small group,” he said, “It’s the polygraph community and those who control it.

“When you put (people) in harm’s way and we have scientific instrumentation that can facilitate their safety and the safety of the people of the United States and we have a small group of bureaucrats who can get someone’s ear to block that,” he continued, “it’s absolutely asinine and, to me, it borders on treason, because you’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

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