Obama, Dohrn, Ayers and Ward Churchill: What’s changed since 1995?
On April 16, 2008, George Stephanopolous pointedly asked Barack Obama to explain his relationship with William Ayers. Obama’s response (see video below) is more revealing than he intended. Most commentators missed this story because they have no training in the science of deception detection.*
A related video (further below - watch out for the f-word!) taken at University of Colorado, shows how little William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (Obama friends and supporters) have changed since their Weather Underground days. They went to Colorado to defend Ward Churchill, then on the verge of being fired from the Uni. The videographer asks whether Ayers and Dohrn remember Churchill teaching them bomb making. You’d think it would be relatively easy to recall such an event, but they both say in essence, “I don’t recall”.
Anyway, the folks at Business Intelligence Advisors have developed a highly reliable detection method called “Tactical Behavior Assessment,” based on research and their experience at CIA and FBI. Two years ago, I attended an introductory BIA seminar where I learned the TBA basics. Applying this system to Obama’s response produced new insights. Let me say that nearly all political candidates would fail this kind of analysis. But deception about a continuing affinity for and relationship with radical Marxists who continue to cry “down with capitalism” is a very serious failing in a presidential candidate.
First, watch the video yourself to learn what you can on your own. Pay careful attention to non-verbal and verbal signals like odd qualifiers and grammatical errors. Below the video, I offer my own TBA analysis. The more times you watch, the more you’ll see. It’s a bit like peeling an onion.
Principles
The BIA approach focuses on clustered verbal and non-verbal deceptive behavioral incidents. Verbal incidents include things like failure to answer the question; failure to deny; scope or honesty qualifiers like “basically,” “officially,” “generally,” “frankly,” or “honestly”; attacking the accuser; detour statements like “see this is what I’ve been talking about” or “as I’ve said before;” overly specific answers; non-answer statement; complaints about the question; protests of good character or innocence; or . . .
Non-verbal incidents include movement of body “anchor points” (like shifting weight from one foot or arm to another); grooming gestures, cleaning surroundings or moving objects; pauses or delays in response (these are signals the subject is mentally searching his mind for prior inconsistent statements); tension-release mechanisms like lip licking or biting; verbal/non-verbal disconnect (like Scott Peterson smiling while discussing the disappearance of his pregnant wife); or . . . .
Look for the first incident during, or within 5 seconds of, the stimulus (Stephanopolous’ question). Two or more incidents in a cluster (occurring either simultaneously or in quick succession) are a flag — though not conclusive proof — of deception. The more incidents in the cluster, the higher the likelihood that the subject is lying somehow.
Quicky Diagnosis of Obama’s response
0:17 anchor shift
0:21-0:24 extended eye closure followed by moving microphone
0:33 licks lips as Steph finishes question
0:34-0:37 detour statement “George, but this is an example of what I’m been talking about,” with faint smile at 0:36 in response to a very serious allegation that should not elicit a smile
0:37-43 begins overly specific non-answer “a professor of English, in Chicago”
0:43 begins odd pause to reflect on exactly what to say about Ayers
0:44-0:46 takes a long, long time to say “who I . . . [pregnant pause] . . . know,” referring to Ayers
0:46-50 more pausing interspersed with “uhs” — obviously laboring to come up with an explanation that won’t later be used against him
0:50 shifts weight (anchor shift) with qualified response “who I have not received some official endorsement from”
0:54 another anchor shift
0:52-54 grammatically awkward, qualified statement, “he’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from [sic] on a regular basis
0:54-1:13 Here, Obama launches into non-answer statement and protest, responding to a question that Steph never asked.
Remember, the question was, “Can you explain this relationship for the voters?” But Obama leaps right by that question, with significant indignation: “And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.”
But George never asked anything about Obama or his values. He just asked Obama to explain the relationship. And Obama never did.
I count 17 deceptive incidents, in a single unbroken cluster lasting an entire minute of the debate. This is a pretty strong indicator that Obama was lying about something.
The implications of Obama’s response are
1. Ayers has probably un-officially endorsed Obama for President;
2. While Obama doesn’t “exchange ideas from” Ayers “on a regular basis,” he does it irregularly; and
3. Obama wants us to believe that Ayers used to be a bad guy (when Obama was little and didn’t know any better) but now is a good guy and, therefore, it’s OK for Obama and his campaign to maintain a “friendly” relationship with Ayers and, by extension, Dohrn.
Next Question
But Ayers and Dohrn are ideologically the same people today as they were in 1969 — die-hard Marxists. If you don’t believe it, watch the video below and read my post from yesterday. This leads to a question Steph didn’t ask: Why would two unrepentant Marxists host an Obama fundraiser at their home, in 1995, contribute, in 2001, to Obama’s state senate campaign, and un-officially endorse Obama for President in 2008?
Here’s the Dohrn-Ayers video from University of Colorado, December 2006:
As Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum report in the June 2008 Foundation Watch, the evidence is mounting that Barack Obama has over a period of decades deliberately and systematically associated himself with violent radical and Marxist ideologues just like Ayers and Dohrn.
Yesterday, Margot Schulzke referenced a small piece of the Crim-Vadum report documenting how Barack Obama, far from being a mere close friend or parishioner of Jeremiah Wright, was a key player in Wright’s Chicago agitation machine. In this connection I found informative this additional material from the Crim-Vadum report:
Mike Kruglik, formerly one of Obama’s fellow organizers, hailed Obama for his persuasive powers:
“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards… With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.” (New Republic, March 19, 2007).
Agitation is what Chicago-born Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), the father of community organizing, called “rubbing raw the sores of discontent.” In his classic book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky prescribed the tactics and defined the goals of community organizing.
Among his “rules”: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up” and “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” “I attended one of Saul Alinsky’s schools,” Kellman told Foundation Watch recently, “and most of his principles are still being used in those schools today.” . . .
Left-wing funders are drawn to the campaign. Philanthropist George Soros is praying for an Obama victory in November. “I think Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world…I think that he has shown himself to be a really unusual person,” Soros said. (New York Review of Books, May 15, 2008). . .
Ayers and Dohrn supported (and support) Obama because he is one of them. Put this together with all of the other data showing Obama marching in lock step with the far left and I can only conclude that George Soros, for once, is right. It takes real lefties to make Soros look right.
* If anyone can find a college journalism program that requires a course or module on deception detection, please let me know.
17 comments
Wow. By comparison, McCain looks like goody two-shoes.
I just checked out the Crim-Vadum report you linked. Obama’s long-time pal, slumlord Tony Rezko (whose tenants went without heat for five weeks of a bitter Chicago winter in 96-97), who is, surprise, a Chicago Democrat-machine bagman — could be a real liability. This is the same guy who came up with $300,000 plus to help the Obamas buy their mansion.
Rezko and Barack had a long-term, social, legal and financial relationship going back to the early 90s. It was a going-out-to-dinner friendship. There’s a lot of stuff on him.
Rezko fits the Obama pattern.
So on 9/12, Ward Churchill talked about 9/11 in terms of America’s “chickens coming home to roost,” as did Rev. Wright soon thereafter; made a pilgrimage in 1983 to Qadhafi in Libya, a la Rev. Wright (with his sidekick Louis Farakkhan); falsely accused the U. S. Army of spreading smallpox among the Missouri Indians in 1832 (hey, AIDs in 2008 as per Rev. Wright, or smallpox in 1832, what’s the dif?) as well as accusing the USA of other genocidal intentions — race-baiting on a grand scale — and since his ouster from his tenured position at UCBoulder, among a number of libs that have spoken up in his defense we find Obama buddy William Ayers and the hallowed inspiration of Sam whoever-he-is, Barack’s campaign blog-master, Noam Chomsky. Does this suggest some kind of pattern, even some kind of contact, between Obama’s 20-yr-mentor and the apparent King of Kooks, Ward Churchill? Are they rubbing off on each other? Not enough to prove anything, but enough to generate curiosity.
I’m curious if you, or anyone else, has applied this “science” to recent speeches by McBush, HRC, Rev. Hagee, Rev. Dobson, Ron Paul, Dick Cheney, George Bush, whoever is Sec. of State and whoever is Attorney General, and so forth. If so, what were the results?
I recall something by E. Hemingway, a statement of his about having a “built-in bull shit detector.” Some of us are born with it, some of us have to take instruction in it. For instance, a perceptive 16 year old could have told that Alberto Gonzales was lying to Congress. No need for fancy psuedo-scientific approaches to that. What is amazing is that so many Americans could not discern that in Bush, Powell, Cheney, Rice, etc., in 2003 and later.
I hope you will provide some more information about the BIA deal, as a wide appreciation of the possibilities of the TBA could have a significant impact on politics in America.
Doran —
I am not aware of anyone having applied TBA to the individuals you’ve identified above. But I am sure it would be entertaining. Politicians lie. This particular instance of lying by Barack Obama is more dangerous than most, however, because of what he is lying about. The fact that he is obviously lying about his continuing relationship with Ayers and Dohrn — two notorious Marxists — should cause thinking people to seriously question Obama’s loyalty to the United States.
I’d be more likely to vote for him if he had been forthright and just answered the question. But he lied not once but multiple times in the span of a single minute.
If you can find a link to a short McCain vid that you’d like me to analyze, I’d be more than happy. I’m an equal-opportunity analyst.
I would agree Bush has done some stupid things, but promoting revolution, class envy and race-baiting are not among them.
The honor of claiming the “chickens are coming home to roost”– applied to a national tragedy–belongs to Black Nationalist Malcolm X, who used the words to describe JFK’s asssassination. That these men share the same terminology and express the same attitudes should not come as a surprise.
Thanks for the offer, but my own BIBSD is functioning jes fine, thank you.
Really, isn’t this TBA process “science” in the same way the Standard Roadside Sobriety Tests are “science”? Which is, psuedo-science, or ersatz science, or — when arguing to a jury — junk science. If it is science, the results should be replicated under some blind testing protocol. I’ll bet they cannot be replicated with the frequency required to meet a scientific level, because there is just too much discretion on the part of the viewer. A give-away mouth motion, or eye shifit or whatever to you could be missed by someone else, or dismissed by someone else as meaningless.
This is not to say that such minute body language cannot be looked upon to tell the viewer something about the speaker’s state of mind. Poker playes rely upon such “tells” to guage the bona fides of another player’s bet or raise. But compare that to the moves by chess players, which I suggest have nothing at all to do with what squirming the players might be doing as they make their moves.
I remember reading of Thomas Jefferson that he was “shifty eyed.” He would not look in the eye the person to whom he was speaking. He probably had other “tells” which would give him away as a liar when promoting the Bill of Rights, I suppose.
Is that your photo on the most recent post about CPS/SCOT?
The pic is that of Charles Childress. And, no, TBA is not pseudo-science. It’s a widely used, reliable mechanism for rooting out fraud. And TBA research has specifically excluded “shifty eyes” or rapid eye blinking as reliable indicators of deception. I understand your skepticism, but in this case it’s misplaced.
I should also mention that TBA focuses on clusters of behavioral cues, not isolated cues. If the subject just shifts an anchor without another cue (like licking lips or qualified answer) within a 5-second interval then it shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign of deception.
But the bottom line here is that you really don’t need a sophisticated B.S. detector to know Obama is lying about his relationship to Ayers. He gives it away to an average observer by qualifying his response by saying he doesn’t “exchange ideas on a regular basis” and that Ayers has “officially” endorsed Obama. These qualified denials say three important things: 1. Obama has a motive to conceal the true nature of the relationship 2. Obama still does exchange ideas with Ayers and 3. Ayers has endorsed Obama at least “unofficially”.
While I’ve no opinion on the Ayers question, I do have strong opinions on the “science of deception detection,” which of course is complete and utter pseudoscience with Z-E-R-O actual scientific support for its methods. In fact, applying the scientific method to behavioral analysis based deception detection, researchers discovered that police officers who received such training “not only fail to discriminate accurately between true and false statements much of th time, but also that behavior analysis training actually lowers the ability of police interrogators to discriminate accurately between true and false denials.” In other words, it’s utter bunk and following it’s logic makes you LESS likely to accurately identify lies or believe the truth. To what extent that’s what’s happened with your Obama critique I cannot say.
More at: http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2008/07/deception-detection-is-weak-spot-in.html
Good points. Thanks.
I wouldn’t use the technique to prove truth or falsity of specific factual assertions, certainly not to determine guilt or innocence of a particular crime. TBA was never designed for that purpose.
The technique is useful — though not 100% reliable — for determining whether the subject is lying about something. If you believe they are lying about something, that belief then leads to a deeper examination to determine exactly what, if anything, the subject is lying about. Deeper examination doesn’t necessarily mean more interrogation. It could mean taking other investigative measures — interviewing relatives or co-workers or looking for other evidentiary materials.
However, as I’ve also pointed out above, there’s no need to rely on the technique to know that Obama was deliberately misleading Stephanopolous about the nature of his continuing interaction with Ayers. Just listen to the qualifiers — “on a regular basis” and “official endorsement” — and you see the real deal.
“certainly not to determine guilt or innocence of a particular crime. TBA was never designed for that purpose”
Well, Richard Leo, the author of ‘Police Interrogation and American Justice,’ would disagree with you about that. He demonstrates effectively how behavioral analysis and the “science” of deception detection was created by and within law enforcement specifically in reaction to the Senate’s Wickersham Commission in the early ’30s and the subsequent abolition over the following decade of third degree interrogation tactics. The most popular modern version of these tactics is taught be John Reid and Associates out of Chicago, which specifically teaches investigators to look for the cues you’ve described in this post.
If you’ve been swayed much by the “science of deception detection” foolishness, I’d encourage you to read Leo’s book (it came out this spring) which focuses extensively on the origins of that particular body of thought. Reliance on its tenets actually makes your judgments about truth and lies less reliable, and the tactics should be eschewed IMO by anyone seeking honest answers to serious questions.
Of course, no one needs fancy techniques to tell if a politician is lying. Just check to see if their lips are moving.
Moving lips are also a good indicator.
Perhaps what I should have said is that the TBA training that I received was delivered with the specific caveat that it is NOT useful in determining precisely what the subject is lying about. I don’t dispute your assertion that the idea is, was or may be presented by others as a tool for that purpose.
And I will be interested to read Leo’s book. I should mention, however, that his bio - http://acadserv.usfca.edu/preview/law/faculty/fulltime/RichardLeo.html - suggests more than the average level of bias against such a methodology. Too many Berkeleys too many times.
I don’t see why being liberal or conservative would make you more or less likely to support the behavioral analysis model of deception detection. Those issues don’t cut on a liberal-conservative axis.
I’d encourage you to ignore your own assumptions about Leo till you’ve read the research. I found it pretty compelling, and there’s now a pretty significant body of research backing up most of his points.
It’s not the politics. It’s the illectually one-sided reputation of the institution (and the City) where’s he’s spent most of his career. It’s a one-sided world. I should know. My Mom was born in SF and I grew up in Northern Cal. Bro got his PhD at Berkeley.
Just like an interrogator can torture a “lie” out of subject, a biased academic can torture lies out of statistics. But I will take your advice and keep an open mind. I’m on board with the idea that the methodology ain’t perfect, especially not for identifying a specific untruth.
But apart from the specific methodology, it’s a red flag any time a speaker inserts pointless modifiers like “on a regular basis” or “official”.
It’s not like Obama was being waterboarded or under some other kind of duress. If he really weren’t still “exchanging ideas” with Ayers, it would have been very simple to say something like, “He’s an acquaintance, not a friend or advisor. Never will be an advisor or idea source unless he changed dramatically. We haven’t had contact with each other for approximately — years or months. Ayers hasn’t endorsed me that I’m aware of and I hope he doesn’t because he’s a first-rate a–hole and I reject everything (or just about everything) the man says about politics.”
It’s not like Obama is inarticulate. He can say what he wants when he wants to.
But, in this instance, Obama hedged and hemmed and hawed for an entire minute during which he conveyed as little information as he possibly could. But even then he said enough to make it clear that he’s not ready yet to throw Ayers or his marxist philosophy over the side.
Gritsforbreakfast — I’ve ordered Leo’s book and will look forward to reading it.
Bingo!!! Maybe contraries will be proven.
The reason he has to hem and haw probably has nothing to do with Ayers per se. They served on the board of one of the most complete failures in educational reform: the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. In hindsight, it would have been better to institute the winner of the federally funded project Follow-Through: Direct Instruction. Obama didn’t want to admit he wasted the Chicago tax-payers’ money. The worst part is that Direct Instruction was well known as the winner of Follow-Through back in the 1970s. Fortunately educational reform research at the turn of the millenium finally admitted it.
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