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This is a story that pissed me off quite a bit when I first heard about it. Basically what happened is the Iraq Military had been buying and outfitting their soldiers (who were manning checkpoints and searching for bombs passing through the checkpoints) with bomb detectors that were essentially dousing rods! Phil Plait, the then president of the JREF, wrote an article about it back in November of last year. Now,the main reason that this upset me so much is the fact that arming the soldiers with bomb detectors that don't detect anything will probably lead to the deaths of many innocent people.
Well, long story short, James McCormic is the guy running the company who sold $85,000,000 worth of these useless devices to the Iraqi Military, and probably others. Now it is being reported by the BBC and others that McCormick has been arrested and charged with fraud. Furthermore, I hope that they throw the book at him, because his useless devices have probably already let many bombs through checkpoints that have killed and injured innocent people, many of which would have probably been stopped with real bomb detectors, bomb sniffing dogs, etc. Well, I just read about McCormick's arrest on the JREF website (linked to above) and James Randi (who is awesome by the way) had a few of his own words to say on the matter...and I couldn't agree more.......
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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Great blog you have here. Let's hope McCormick gets prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, along with his collaborators. Lately at the JREF, there has been some talk about the Sanswire scam. It is similar to McCormick's scam, except that this involves airships instead of bomb-detection rods. Luckily, unlike McCormick's scam, Sanswire hasn't sold anything, but they are working hard to sell their unproven technology to the government. It's very scary to think what would happen if this scam company sold their airships to the military and it was used in a war zone!
ReplyDeleteRecently, they did manage to fool Scientific American into thinking they are a legitimate technology company, unfortunately.
Wow....I hadn't heard much about them. I will try to remember to look into it when I have time. Thanks for the info :-)
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