Slashdot Mirror
The Little Bomb-Detecting Device That Couldn't
theodp writes "Widely deployed in Iraq and promoted by military leaders, BusinessWeek reports the ADE 651 bomb-detecting device had one little problem: it wouldn't detect explosives (earlier Slashdot story). 'The ADE 651,' reports Adam Higginbotham, 'was modeled on a novelty trinket conceived decades before by a former used-car salesman from South Carolina, which was purported to detect golf balls. It wasn't even good at that.' One thing the ADE 651 did excel at, however, was making money — estimates suggest that the authorities in Baghdad bought more than 6,000 useless bomb detectors, at a cost of at least $38 million. Even though ADE 651 manufacturer James McCormick was found guilty of three counts of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison in May, the ADE 651 is still being used at thousands of checkpoints across Baghdad. Elsewhere, authorities have never stopped believing in the detectors. Why? According to Sandia Labs' Dale Murray, the ideomotor effect is so persuasive that for anyone who wants or needs to believe in it, even conclusive scientific evidence undermining the technology it exploits has little power."
James randi too was amazed at how basically all dowsers keep believing they have their special powers even after they've been thoroughly debunked.
This bomb detector thing was a mixture of greed, negligence, incompetence and corruption. I can't even begin to imagine the mindset that enables somebody to make money by directly endangering lives. Every aspect of this war stinks.
20 minutes into the future
The real reason they continue to use these isn't because they somehow have convinced themselves that it works. It's probably not even directly a scam insofar as they're shoving money to some business cohort through the military industrial complex. I would suspect that what this is really about is that it's far cheaper to stick a device in a young man's hand and convince him that it's there to protect him, so that he'll actually continue to actively do his job, and have him wind up being blown up -- than it is to spend money on any sort of real device. The man is disposable. The worthless device is the placebo to motivate him to feel safe in doing his job. And when he dies, it was a far cheaper investment than the amount that any sort of real device would cost to produce, purchase, train on, and deploy.
I don't know what you are talking about. There is loads of scientific evidence on the oil reserves in Iraq.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.