By Kelly Hearn, AlterNet. Posted August 19, 2005
A non-lethal -- but potentially harmful -- crowd control weapon that heats human skin is bound for Iraq, and possibly to a police department near you.
A tough-talking Texan named Edward Hammond has to be a key element of any accurate study of the spooky history of what the military calls the "Active Denial System."
The head of The Sunshine Project, a Texas-based group opposing biological weapons, Hammond shows his disdain for military excesses through swear words and federal disclosure suits that seek to lift a window on military science projects. Two times now, he says, Marine Corp staff handling his Freedom of Information Act claims have mailed him the wrong envelope, mistakenly sending him materials meant for another military office, envelopes that contained classified information.
One of those times, he says, was in May when he received 112 pages of files on the Active Denial System, or ADS, a crowd control weapon built by Raytheon Corporation and slated for military deployment in Iraq in 2006. The documents included descriptions of tests conducted on volunteer subjects at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Hammond, who had requested the documents, noticed something odd. "I saw some of the documents that were marked classified should have been redacted," he said in a telephone interview.
snip
Davison, for one, says not likely. 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 Air Force's Garcia said he knows of no independent research. A Marine Corp spokesman said the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, the military organization in charge of ADS, is "unaware of any release of classified documents or information relating to Active Denial System."
http://www.alternet.org/story/24044/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
