Iraq is finally taking a hard look at the expensive hand-held bomb-detecting devices that explosives experts around the world believe are useless. The device is shaped like a gun with a metal sensor on the nose. If a bomb (or perfume, soap and detergent) is detected, the sensor moves toward the suspicious substance.

 In Baghdad, I've heard journalists and Iraqis deride it as a "toy" or "the Ouija board approach."

Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al Bolani told The Associated Press this week that Iraq would study "another alternative" if experts find flaws in the hand-held units bought from a British-based firm. British officials have banned the export of the device to Iraq and Afghanistan after a BBC report challenged its ability to detect explosives.

It's about time. Frustration over the device, whose official name is ADE-651, has seeped out of the interior ministry and into the streets, where Iraqis openly mock officers who use them at checkpoints. Arabic-language newspapers and TV stations have reported that the devices are useless; nobody's fooled anymore.

Earlier this week, a day after the hotel bombings that wiped out the offices of many of my colleagues in the Western press corps, another bomb went off at a forensics lab in central Baghdad. One of my Iraqi colleagues, Sahar Issa, went to the scene and met some outraged residents, including a man named Basim Mohammed Ismail, a 43-year-old husband and father of three.

Here's what Ismail said:
We were having breakfast when a terrific blast tore through our apartment. It was just one second, but it has caused so much destruction and pain. My 8-year-old daughter is in the hospital. Her beautiful face is full of glass and splinters. Her eyes - she might lose her eyesight. Her mother is there with her, and I am going back as soon as I take the rest of the family to their uncle's house.

How can such explosives move about the city? They can because the detectors we're using are useless. The government knows they are useless, and the officials in the ministry of interior know that, too....We know these detectors. We know they are useless and that they were rejected before by Japan -- 15 years ago! So, they sell them to the Iraqi government, to officials who make money from buying them.

What do they care about us? One week -- maybe two at most -- they'll still be repeating "We will compensate, we will deal out justice" and then they will forget.

If they ever do get rid of the magic wands, the Iraqis still have another controversial deterrant in their arsenal: a "fake" car bomb packed with real explosives - sans detonator - that officers drive around Baghdad to gauge whether Iraqi security forces at checkpoints can detect them. My colleague Warren Strobel wrote about the faux car bomb on his last visit; read it here.