Cruising through Alternet’s latest, I spied this article by Kelly Hearn telling us of the latest weapon in the war on terra, and likely, on dissent in this country.
The Active Denial System is a Pentagon-funded, $51 million crowd control device that rides atop a Humvee, looks like a TV dish, and shoots energy waves 1/64 of an inch deep into human skin. It dispenses brief but intolerable bursts of pain, sending bad guys fleeing but supposedly leaving no lasting damage. (During a Pentagon press briefing in 2001, this reporter felt a zap from an ADS prototype on his fingertip and can attest to the brief but fleeting sensation that a hot light bulb was pressing against the skin). ADS works outside the range of small arms fire.(emphasis mine)
Hmmm…sounds like it could be useful, huh? How about this:
As key scientific questions go unanswered, a version of the Active Denial System is being developed by the Justice Department for use by U.S. police departments. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, has issued a half-million dollar grant to Raytheon Corporation for a “Solid-State Active Denial System Demonstration Program,” according to the NIJ website. Alan Fischer, a Raytheon spokesperson, said the company is “working on a number of active denial projects, with various ranges. ADS may some day be miniaturized down to a hand-held device that could be carried in a purse or pocket and used for personal protection instead of something like Mace. The potential for this technology is huge.”
Of couse, this has been tested and proven not to cause lasting damage, right? I mean, we all know depleted uranium is safe for use around our troops, so they must have evaluated the ADS system properly, right?
In July, New Scientist magazine reported on the files, citing red flags that troubled some scientists. Though the ADS, for example, will be facing chaotic, unruly situations, the reports said volunteers were banned from wearing glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage. In other tests, volunteers were told to remove metallic objects such as keys to avoid “hot spots” that might burn skin.
Neil Davison, an expert in non-lethal weapons at Bradford University in England, reviewed the files and questions how ADS would perform in live conditions. In email interviews with AlterNet, Davison, a social researcher with biology training, pointed out that one section on medical risk analysis states that “exposure levels [of energy waves] may exceed permissible exposure limits specified by the relevant safety standard by as much as 20-fold.”(emphases mine)
There is also reason to believe that the use of ADS could have serious long-term effects, such as causing cancer or blindness; one researcher has shown an effect on white blood cells. However, it seems unlikely that anyone will examine the possibility of long-term harm further. From the article:
That’s because the majority if not all literature detailing research on the bioeffects of the weapons’ specific wavelength (95 gigahertz) appears to have been conducted by researchers linked to the Pentagon’s weapon development program. In an ADS fact sheet, the Air Force says a panel of non-governmental scientists and medical experts reviewed bio-effects tests on humans. When asked for the names of those experts, a press official at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Human Effectiveness Directorate at Brooks City Base, Texas, said experts were not immediately available to answer.
The researchers seem to be government employees with no outside oversight, and the military isn’t disclosing this. Can you say conflict of interest?
