Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Britain responsible for Taliban-led atrocities

This is what brown liberals (aka coconuts) have been saying for some time and who knows, there may be some truth in it after all. It is well documented that South Asians are unable to govern themselves responsibly, we do not have the tools to finish the job. The British as our colonial masters should have educated us on the specifics of managing a liberal democracy (as opposed to the divide and rule policies and the free trade for me but not for thee policies and the food for british soldiers alongside mass starvation for native civilians policies and the... you get the idea).


Presently in our discussion of tools and British responsibility we have something a bit more specific in mind and which concerns a massive fraud that has been effected in the present. We frequently see such bomb detectors in operation and we are unhappy (but unsurprised) to know that they do not work (we are under the impression that sniffer dogs work very well but that may not be an appropriate suggestion for Pakistan).  

Thus the fact that more of us are not dead from terrorist attacks is not because the security is so efficient, rather the terrorists are simply exhausted by the demands of the job. Now that is a comforting thought.
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It is is one of the world's most obvious terrorist targets. So how did a group of 10 militants armed with guns, bomb vests, rocket-launchers and grenades get into Karachi's Jinnah airport? Part of the answer, incredibly, may lie in the fact that Pakistani security personnel still guard the outer perimeter using versions of the phoney bomb detector sold by the convicted British conman Jim McCormick.

McCormick's device, which he called the ADE 651, was itself a variation of a common design. Essentially, a telescopic radio aerial is attached by a hinge to a plastic handgrip. When used by a "properly trained" operator, who must first sensitise it to the "molecular frequency" of explosives, it was supposed to point out bombs by swinging towards them.

In fact, all this was nonsense. The aerial swings because of unconscious movements by the operator, known as the ideomotor effect – the same thing that gives rise to the common belief in dowsing. Nevertheless, McCormick and other fraudsters, such as Gary Bolton, exported thousands to clients around the world, including in Iraq and Pakistan. Less ambitious criminals used to sell them as golf ball detectors in the 1990s.

Like dowsers, though, many security personnel continued to keep the faith. In 2010, even after McCormick had been charged with fraud, Pakistan's Airport Security Force admitted to the Dawn newspaper that they were continuing to use a device of their own design that operates on the same principle.

Iraq, which had been McCormick's largest market, still uses them too, despite repeated warnings. In 2009, the New York Times confronted bomb squad commander Major General Jehad al-Jabiri with evidence of the ADE 651's fraudulence, yet he insisted that it was effective, saying: "Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs." In 2011, al-Jabiri was charged and later jailed for – of all things – taking bribes from McCormick. And still the ADE 651s were being used, as recently October 2013.

At the same time it was apparently common to find Beirut security guards still scanning cars for explosives with an ADE 651, or something similar. And there are reports of other devices being used in the south of Thailand. Indeed, according to Detective Sergeant Steve Mapp, who led the investigation into McCormick, some people's belief in the ADE 651 is almost unshakeable. As he told Business Week, "In Kenya they said, 'No, we know about Mr McCormick's conviction, but we're really glad we've got them – and they do work.'"
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Link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/jun/09/fake-bomb-detectors-british-conman-pakistan-karachi-airport
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regards

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