The US State Department’s inspector general said on Friday that bomb-sniffing dogs in Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t being tested properly and may not be able to effectively detect explosives.
The inspector general’s review found that the companies hired to supply and train the animals weren’t testing them for all of the scents of the most commonly encountered explosives, increasing the chance of a dog missing a bomb in a vehicle or luggage. That puts US diplomats at risk, the inspector general said.
The companies — US Training Center in Moyock, North Carolina, a business unit of the firm formerly known as Blackwater, and RONCO Consulting Corp in Washington — also used expired or potentially contaminated materials for the scent tests, the report said.
Susan Pitcher, a spokeswoman for Wackenhut Services, RONCO’s parent company, called the inspector general’s review “inaccurate.” She said a canine expert engaged by the State Department to verify the detection capabilities of the dogs concluded they complied with the required standards.
Pitcher, however, said that the company had not been provided of the expert’s report, receiving instead what she described as “on-site briefings” of the results.
The inspector general’s office said it had not been given the results of the expert’s inspection when it released its report.
The US Training Center did not respond to a request for comment.
The inspector general’s review was limited to three canine programs handled by US Training Center and RONCO. The report does not say how many dogs each contractor provides.
Overall, the State Department uses nearly 200 bomb-sniffing dogs. The report only offers a glimpse of the costs, saying canine services at the US embassy in Baghdad alone costs US$24 million a year.
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