Is the military blowing up key evidence?

[unhappycamper]

Is the military blowing up key evidence?
By Blake Morrison and Peter Eisler - USA Today
Posted : Wednesday Nov 7, 2007 8:10:56 EST

During their last six months in Baghdad last year, Navy Lt. Sarah Wilson and her team of explosives ordnance disposal technicians said goodbye to each other more than 70 times.

Each time they were called to dismantle a roadside bomb, they’d bump fists. Then, Wilson says, “we’d all say we love each other because if we never got to say anything else” — if the bomb ended up exploding — “we wanted to be able to say goodbye.”

After they arrived at the scene, they would often begin a perilous, painstaking task: taking apart the bombs, bagging the components and sending the parts back to a unit that analyzes them, much as investigators do on the television show “CSI.”

They were willing to take such risks, Wilson said, because “it’s the best shot our guys on the ground have of catching the bad guys.”

If forensic teams can lift a fingerprint or identify materials used in a series of bombs, “we can now connect him,” said Wilson, 27. “We know he’s a bomb maker.”

~snip~

A classified order, issued May 30 and reviewed by USA Today, gives commanders the authority to forgo calling in explosives technicians like Wilson to glean intelligence from improvised explosive devices. Instead, commanders may use engineers traveling with their regular units to simply detonate the bombs without gathering evidence from them. Engineers receive about 10 percent of the explosives training of technicians, and they’re not allowed to dismantle bombs.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/gns_iraqexplosives_071107/