Reported by: Wijdan CRWE Newswire Middle East correspondent.

Governments all over the world are using all possible means to avoid acts of terrorism in their country, different forms of research have been carried out, X ray scanners have been introduced and installed which can even scan inside a drinking water bottle and tell the difference between water and liquid explosives.

The United States, just like any other advanced country is currently spending billions of dollars, over the past six years, the US has made a serious attempt to work out a strategy to minimize terrorism across the globe. For this purpose drones, advanced metal detectors, chemical sniffers and super spy cam were used. However, after spending 19 billion dollars and six years of extensive research on all the above mentioned techniques, the pentagon finally concluded that there is nothing in the US arsenal, against bomb detection, which is more powerful than a dog’s nose.

Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the commander of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), informed in a press conference that with the use of modern devices in Iraq and Afghanistan only 50 percent of the explosives can be traced, however this number increases to 80 percent when US and Afghan patrols are accompanied by a trained dog. Bomb attacks are on a continuous rise in Afghanistan and in the first eight months of 2010, 1062 successful bomb attacks were carried out in comparison to 820 in the entire year of 2009. The bombs are fabricated from fertilizers and chemicals which makes detection even more difficult, since such bombs can not be easily detected by a metal detector.

JIEDDO proposes the use of traditional techniques as well as modern concepts to counter this improvised explosive devise threat. The modern gadgets include drones who search for teams of bomb planting terrorists; forensic teams match fingers and thumb prints of the criminals which are in their data base, and radio jammers to interfere with the frequencies used to detonate the bombs.

Congress has shown a considerable lack of confidence in the efforts of JIEDDO and questioned their use of 18.77 billion dollars, their budget, over the last six years, and last year the senate appropriation committee cut 442 million dollars from the Pentagon’s requested budget for JIEDDO.

A good point, since General Michael Oates called trained dogs, their best weapon against IEDs, congress should rethink where to spend this budget allocation, perhaps it might be a worthwhile idea to train more bomb sniffing canines and buying body armor for the dogs.

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