Why aren't potential presidential candidates polygraphed and cleared to handle sensitive material

a reply to: onequestion

I'm vacillating between "blackmail and control" versus "one has to be involved in nefarious acts to even get to the office in the first place". I don't suppose they are mutually exclusive either, however, and I like the answers given by other posters as well.

Why? They are only potential leaders. You can't give the key to everyone. They don't get the secrets until they get the job.

a reply to: onequestion

Well let's start with the polygraph test.

What kinds of questions do you propose? I'm pretty sure that most politicians that get to the point where they are vying for a presidential position have fine tuned the art of consummate lying and could probably pass a polygraph.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the president doesn't have that high of a clearance level.

Well with certain exceptions I would hold everything a politician said to the standards that you would in a court of law.
Lying would be considered perjury.

Also end of every term I would make all politicians face a jury in a civil court to decide on if in there office they did there job of representing there constituents. Failure of this would have seen striped of there pension and barred from public office.

a reply to: onequestion

I am guessing the cost of the machines are pretty high. Maybe each time they have tried to hook up a candidate to a polygraph, the machine just overloaded and blew up. So they decided to skip that part.


iTruthSeeker

a reply to: onequestion

Erm, no, Polygraphing has been proven to be worthless in pretty much every sensible nation and state. It's entirely unreliable and has never once been proven to be a worthwhile means to confirm truth.

Everyone in positions of government go through security clearance, I don't believe politicians are exempt from this. You can guarantee that the CIA have a file on every serving politician of note in the US, and this would include all those running for the highest levels of office.

Just because you don't see the clearance doesn't mean they are not checked, monitored, investigated and cleared.

Do you really think your government doesn't monitor politicians for security against infiltration from unfriendly nations, for example? They do this for corporations all the time, what makes you think they don't check on politicians in the same way?

And a politician running for the highest office in the country doesn't just appear from nowhere, they would have been on the radar of the security services for years prior to that.

a reply to: onequestion

?Why don't we require more rigorous qualifications for our elected officials. They handle see and overseas sensitive material everyday it would only make sense to put them through the same process everyone they are working with goes through

People that run things are very carefully screened. They have to be really good liars, really good pretenders, and really good at diverting attention towards or away prefab stories for mass consumption. Oratory skills a plus, but mostly dedicated, stone cold liars.

The complicit media will pick up any slack they leave behind.

a reply to: onequestion

I thought it was generally understood that hooking a polygraph machine to a career politician will not only break the machine, but it creates a hazard to the public from the potential explosion.

a reply to: Tiamat384

IT is very difficult to polygraph some people, particularly psychopaths. It is also possible to learn to fool a polygraph reader with the correct training.

Given that psychopaths and trained puppets are the ones that you would want to most carefully remove from the running, a polygraph would be the least effective tool in the box.

a reply to: onequestion

Basically because the constitutional requirements for running for president are basic, they are spelled out pretty openly, and because we also have the 4th Amendment.

Now, if the parties wanted to do that to their candidates on their own--being private organizations--and then made the results public, that'd be fine, but I think making something like a polygraph (something that is easy enough to fool that they are not admissible as evidence in court) a mandatory step at the federal level in running for president is ridiculous.

But I get why you would like to see something like that happen--hell, it'd probably knock out 99% of all professional politicians and we'd get some real people in office.

Wouldn't that be something?

a reply to: Rocker2013

No, everybody in positions of government do not go through the clearance process.

Members of congress swear an oath that takes the place of the clearance process.

The president can, theoretically, ask for and be given information that he/she would not be able to obtain were he/she not the president and unable to receive a clearance for whatever reason.

Are they monitored and does somebody have files on them? Sure, to some degree anyway. But they do not go through the same process other people do.

a reply to: onequestion

I came across an FBI interview a long time ago in regards to why they do not do background checks on them .

According to them the FBI stance was that its up to the American people to decide who they want to be their president. They didn't want the power to overturn or muddy those waters by having that authority.

Sounds great but full of BS too me .

The real reason is likely more in line with the fact that all presidential candidates are selected by the Oligarch which streamlines the the DNC and GOP candidate pool.

In other words the presidential candidates is one of their own and the rules don't apply to them nor do they like to be questioned or investigated.

Why aren't potential presidential candidates polygraphed and cleared to handle sensitive material

Who needs a polygraph ?

Easy to tell when a politician is lying.

Their lips are moving.

originally posted by: onequestion

originally posted by: Tiamat384
Polygraph tests fail?

Then why do they use them for SCI clearances?

They don't. Had an SCI and was PRP qualified for a large part of my adult life and never saw a polygraph. And the vetting done on Candidates by their own party, the opposition party, the media and dozens of watchdog groups is more thorough than any background check that would be done. And as we have only had 43 people in history hold the office it has never been an issue.

a reply to: MrSpad

That's Mrspad never thought about it that way.

Then why is it that they are so hard to hold accountable to corruption?