...these contractors will work side-by-side with military interrogators conducting question-and-answer sessions using 17 officially sanctioned techniques, ranging from "love of comrades" to "fear up harsh." Their subjects will be the tens of thousands of men thrown into United States-run military jails on suspicion of links to terrorism.(*)
...Lockheed is supplying the U.S. war in Iraq with a vast range of both personnel and materiel. In addition providing interrogators, it is currently seeking retired Army majors or lieutenant colonels to develop short- and long-range planning at the biggest U.S. base in Iraq: Camp Anaconda, in Balad, northern Iraq.
On the material side, Lockheed's Keyhole and Lacrosse satellites beam images from the war back to the military; its U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, F-16, F/A-22 jet fighters, and F-117 stealth attack fighters were used to "shock and awe" the Iraqis at the start of the US invasion; and ground troops employed its Hellfire air-to-ground missiles and the Javelin portable missiles in the invasion of Fallujah last year.
The company's reach and influence go far beyond the military. A New York Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with the sentence: "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it."
Spy Cameras Meet Lie Detectors
Peter Rosenfeld designs technology that allow computers to interpret what a cameras "sees." Now, robotics expert for Advanced Technology Labs, a division of Lockheed Martin in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is turning this expertise to the imprecise science of interrogation.
His latest assignment is a three year project with Professor Dimitris Metaxas of Rutgers University to use cameras and a special computer program to track subjects' eyes, lips, shoulders, and hands movements to determine if they are lying.
Metaxas and Rosenfeld's work is paid for by a $3.5 million grant made in August by the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the U.S. immigration and border security system among a myriad other tasks. Lockheed Martin's Rosenfeld is supplying three-dimensional sensor technology for the project, while Rutgers is supplying student volunteers.
The government has used polygraphs for more than 50 years to track blood pressure and heart rate, but most experts believe that these "lie detectors" are inaccurate at least 50 percent of the time and that a trained liar can easily fool the machine.
The next steps in lie detection draw heavily from the work of psychologists including Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of California medical school in San Francisco, who has spent more than 40 years tracking the facial and body signals that people make when they answer questions. Early studies indicated, for example, that people looked to their left when recalling the past but to the right when making up a story about prior events.
Today Ekman and Metaxas are getting millions of dollars from the multiple military agencies to study the fleeting facial expressions and casual gestures that many observers do not notice, but that the scientists hope can help them develop more sophisticated lie detectors. "Micro-expressions and micro-gestures are a lot harder to mask and they do not vary among cultures and races," Metaxas told the Daily Targus, the Rutgers campus newspaper. "This gives interrogators tools to do their job confidently.
article By Pratap Chatterjee | Corp Watch & Jihad Unspun
*(as heard on Harry Shearer's "LeShow")
Posted by Cieciel at November 21, 2005 12:26 PM