Another Reminder

If any these assets are killed, she should face the death penalty.

Goes to show, yet, again, the insider threat is one of THE national security threats in the US.

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And another…

Don’t know if was a clearance holder but a lesson in vigilance nonetheless.

There goes a notion of a polygraph value.

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The poly is a useful tool to be used during interrogation for a person who has fallen under suspicion. Beyond that, it’s far too subjective to be of any use.

Of course, the usefulness of the polygraph as an aid to interrogation depends on the subject not understanding that it’s completely bogus.

It seems likely that Mariam Thompson would have been polygraphed, though at this time, nothing seems to have been reported about that.

I don’t see anything that indicates that she was subjected to a polygraph in order to get her clearance. She accessed files that she was not supposed to have access to so we don’t know that she was cleared at the TS level unless there is someone here who can tell us that ALL linguists have to have TS access in order to work overseas.

But, she may very well have fallen victim to the “honey pot” which would indicate that she would have likely had no intention to commit this act when she was going through her clearance process.

It’s ridiculous to suggest that this failure indicates that the process is worthless. There is no process that is going to protect from every breech. It simply doesn’t work that way. The process makes the best judgement that it can when it is called upon. The only option would be to clear no one which would make it very difficult to get any work done.

Not that this makes things any better.

If Thompson was a DIA contractor, then pre-employment polygraph screening would have been mandatory. But there is no news yet as far as I can tell regarding what component she was assigned to. A check of the PACER database indicates that the case remains sealed, and the publicly available affidavit says little about Thompson’s background, training, and job.

Not all linguists have TS clearance, but then I assume she would not have had an opportunity to access anything TS related. So she probably did have clearance. I don’t understand how Department of Justice doesn’t have simple roles/privileges assigned to people that would enable them to have or not to have access to files they are not supposed to see. It’s said in the article the files she accessed were not part of her daily responsibilities.

But then I dealt with DOJ, so I am not surprised.

The case of U.S. v. Thompson has been unsealed, and AntiPolygraph.org has purchased the available court filings from PACER and shared them via the RECAP archive. An affidavit in support of an arrest warrant indicates that Thompson was a contract linguist with Worldwide Language Resources assigned to a Special Operations Task Force in Erbil, Iraq. She had held a top secret clearance since 2012, and a secret clearance for three years prior to that. The docket and case files are available here:

Dr. Charles Lieber was charged with lying to DoD investigators.

According to Harvard Magazine:

“Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, and a university professor, a designation bestowed on only the most eminent scholars, has been arrested, charged with misleading investigators from the Department of Defense about his work for a Chinese government-sponsored program…”

There’s a curious connection with this arrest and the recent Coronavirus outbreak which they say started in Wuhan, China. What does a chemist have to do with viruses? Well, Lieber moonlighted doing work for DoD Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as well as Wuhan University of Technology working on nanomaterials and nanoelectronics that detect viruses and pathogens released during biological weapons attacks.

From the Harvard Gazette:

“We want to find a single virus before it finds you,” says Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University… “Viruses are among the most important causes of human disease and are of increasing concern as agents for bioterrorism,” Lieber says.

I don’t know, it seems highly coincidental that Lieber was arrested at this time for lying to DoD investigators about the degree of his involvement with, and remuneration from, this public university in Wuhan, China. Seems like there’s a lot more to this story.