Pain Compliance. Coming Soon to an Antiwar Demo Near You?

Last September, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne indicated the military would use “nonlethal weapons” against “fellow citizens” before they use them in “a wartime situation.” In other words, the American people are considered little more than guinea pigs, especially dissenting Americans in need of “crowd control.”

Before zapping antiwar demonstrators with an ADS beam—that’s short for “Active Denial System”—the military or police may request they remove glasses, contact lenses, and take coins and keys out of their pockets. “Precautions used to test U.S. military’s microwave weapon ADS for crowd control have raised questions about its safety, says a report,” explains United Press International. “These precautions raise concerns about the ADS in real crowd-control situations, the New Scientist reported… The ADS fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam, which is supposed to heat skin and to cause pain but no physical damage, the report said. Until now little information about its effects had been released.”

In fact, it took a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a group that campaigns against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons to discover how dangerous the ADS weapon is. It was learned that military “experimenters” conducting tests at the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque “banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent eye damage to the subjects and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin.”

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