Despu\u00e9s de una investigaci\u00f3n realizada por periodistas brit\u00e1nicos en 2010, el Reino Unido prohibi\u00f3 la exportaci\u00f3n de unos supuestos detectores de explosivos (comercializados bajo el nombre A.D.E.651 por la firma ATSC) a Irak y Afganist\u00e1n. James McCormick, el hombre de negocios brit\u00e1nico que vendi\u00f3 por millones de d\u00f3lares estos aparatos al gobierno iraqu\u00ed, ha estado en la c\u00e1rcel por fraude desde 2013, cuando un juez declar\u00f3 los detectores in\u00fatiles, y el beneficio indignante y a McCormick la fuerza impulsora y \u00fanico director detr\u00e1s de el fraude. El producto proporciona, en palabras del juez, una falsa sensaci\u00f3n de seguridad que probablemente ha costado vidas.<\/p>\n
Following Sunday\u2019s bombing in Baghdad\u2014which the Iraqi government now says killed 250 people, making it ISIS\u2019s deadliest-ever bombing against civilians\u2014The Washington Post reported that the website of Iraq\u2019s Ministry of Interior had been hacked. \u201cA picture of a bloodied baby was posted along with a bomb detector bearing the Islamic State\u2019s markings,\u201d wrote Mustafa Salim and Loveday Morris. \u201c\u2018I don\u2019t know how you sleep at night,\u2019 the hacked site read. \u2018Your conscience is dead.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
It was an anguished protest, as Salim and Morris detailed, against a security service that failed to protect Iraqis against the ISIS attack on Sunday and countless others like it. Emblematic of that failure is the fact that bomb detectors still in widespread use in Iraq are fake\u2014and were shown to be fake by a BBC investigation six years ago.
\nRelated Story<\/p>\n
After that investigation, the U.K. banned the devices\u2019 export to Iraq and Afghanistan. James McCormick, the British businessman who sold millions of dollars worth of the bomb detectors to the Iraqi government, has been in jail for fraud since 2013, when a judge declared the detectors \u201cuseless, the profit outrageous\u201d and McCormick himself \u201cthe driving force and sole director behind\u201d the fraud. The product provided, in the judge\u2019s words, a \u201cfalse sense of security\u201d that likely cost lives.<\/p>\n
But as of Monday morning, New York Times reporters saw police using them \u201cat checkpoints across Baghdad\u201d\u2014even though, in the wake of the bombing, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had said that the police should stop doing so. An officer using one told The Washington Post simply: \u201cWe haven\u2019t received an order yet. … We know it doesn\u2019t work, everybody knows it doesn\u2019t work, and the man who made it is in prison now. But I don\u2019t have any other choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cbomb detectors,\u201d as many people have reported over the years, are actually repurposed (also fake) golf ball detectors. As my friend and Atlantic contributor Jeffrey Stern detailed in Vanity Fair last year, a typical model<\/p>\n
consists of a cheap plastic handle with a free-swinging antenna, and the way it works is simple: When you tilt the device to the right, the antenna swings right. When you tilt it to the left, the antenna swings left. If you\u2019ve been primed by the right sales pitch, you believe that the antenna has moved as a result of something called nuclear quadrupole resonance, or electrostatic attraction, or low-frequency radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere\u2014each force supposedly drawing the antenna toward the substance you\u2019re scanning for, such as, in the beginning, \u201cthe elements used in all golf balls.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later versions, marketed as the A.D.E. 651, among other names, came with cards that a user could supposedly insert to detect different kinds of substances, from drugs to explosives to ivory. (Versions of the device have been sold in Mexico, Thailand, Niger, and numerous other countries.) In 2010, the BBC took some of those cards to a laboratory at Cambridge University to be analyzed by the computer scientist Markus Kuhn, who found, in the BBC\u2019s words, that a card purporting to be able to detect TNT \u201ccontained nothing but a type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.\u201d Kuhn remarked that \u201cThese are the cheapest bit of electronics that you can get that look vaguely electronic and are sufficiently flat to fit inside a card.\u201d That same year, an investigation by the inspector general of Iraq\u2019s Interior Ministry also concluded that \u201cmany lives had been lost due to the wands\u2019 utter ineffectiveness.\u201d As Ernesto Londo\u00f1o of The Washington Post reported at the time:<\/p>\n
When faced with the inspector general\u2019s findings, Interior Ministry officials did not pull the devices from hundreds of checkpoints that snarl traffic around Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Instead, they shelved the report and quietly granted immunity to the official who signed the no-bid contracts, worth at least $85 million.<\/p>\n
One possible reason for the government\u2019s decision: That Interior Ministry report concluded that 75 percent of the contract\u2019s value was paid in kickbacks to Iraqi officials.<\/p>\n
An inert hunk of plastic, marketed falsely as a safeguard for up to $40,000 a unit, wielded by disillusioned security forces who know full well it\u2019s useless but have no other choice\u2014the device is, as the Post pointed out, an apt symbol of the Iraqi government\u2019s corruption and failure to protect its citizens. It\u2019s also a hugely discouraging, if not unusual, sign of just how difficult a task Iraqi security forces face as one of the frontline forces in the fight against ISIS, despite recent successes. The Baghdad attack came mere weeks after Abadi declared that the Iraqi military had liberated the western city of Fallujah, which was the first to fall to ISIS two years ago; other battlefield losses for ISIS have similarly been followed with an uptick in attacks in Baghdad. The Islamic State may exist in part to hold territory, but fighters deprived of territory can find ways to keep fighting.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, having disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003, the United States has spent billions trying to rebuild it; but here, too, expense and effectiveness are two different things. The Financial Times has pointed to \u201cthousands of non-existent soldiers on [the army\u2019s] payroll [and] struggles with basic logistics and graft.\u201d There have been numerous reports of Iraqi soldiers running out of food, water, or ammunition. By contrast, Mitchell Prothero wrote for Politico last year, \u201cIslamic State fighters always have ammunition, they have backpacks of food and water, they maneuver to contact, seemingly aware of the maxim that the best way to stop someone from shooting at you is to shoot at them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter proclaimed that Iraqi soldiers who had abandoned the city of Ramadi to Islamic State fighters had shown \u201cno will to fight.\u201d (Iraqi forces took the city back early this year.) Following Carter\u2019s remarks, an anonymous Iraqi serviceman told Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty that he had wanted to take the town back immediately. \u201cBut desire without wherewithal,\u201d he said, \u201cis not enough.\u201d The same could just as well apply to the broader fight against ISIS\u2014and, more fundamentally, to the horrifyingly inadequate efforts to protect the innocents in its path.<\/p>\n