Quote:
Originally Posted by AdrienXII
A body can be checked for gunpowder or explosive residue. It seems like a good way to distinguish bystanders from combatants. Unless they've been blown up, of course.
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I guess it could be done, but it doesn't seem to me like it could ever be 100% effective and it's probably cost and time prohibitive.
Do you think it would be reasonable to administer such tests to every Iraqi corpse?
Honest question, I don't know enough about the daily goings on in Iraq to give a worth-while opinion.
How much do these tests cost?
Who would pay for them?
How long do they take to administer?
Who would administer them?
Do the people who would be in the best position to administer the tests have enough time on their hands to do the testing (especially if they were medical professionals trying to clean up after a bloddy battle and still get the corpses back to the families intime for a traditional Islamic burial)?
Then we'd have to look into all of the situations where a guy could pop hot on a GSR test but it wouldn't necessarially be because he had been engaging in insurgent attacks. Maybe he had fired his rifle defending his home against robbers or militia the night before and was only an innocent victim of an American shooting. If GSR were the metric by which insurgent ties were established would a positive test on an innocent man void his family's claim on any compensation to which it would otherwise be entitled?
Maybe this kind of thing would work in a well established and generally safe area where insurgent violence and American shootings are very much the exception. But in the places where it would be the most used it would also probably be very difficult to keep up with and could have a propensity for unreliability.