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Pain Ray, Rejected by the Military, Ready to Blast L.A. Prisoners
Inmates of the Pitchess Detention Center, watch your step. If you get out of line, you may get blasted with an invisible heat ray.
An officer with the LA County Sheriff's Department operates the Raytheon-designed 'pain ray' gun. (Photo courtesy of the LASD) The jail’s energy weapon is a small-scale version of the Active Denial System, the experimental crowd control device that the U.S. military brought to Afghanistan — and then quickly shipped back home,
after questions mounted about the wisdom of blasting locals with a beam
that momentarily puts them in agony. The pain weapon seemed at odds
with the military’s efforts to appear more humane and measured in the
eyes of the Afghan populace.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department not only found those concerns overblown; they used the military’s long-standing reluctance to zap Afghans as fodder for the plan to zap Pitchess’ prisoners. “I already had contacts at [Active Denial maker] Raytheon who were reeling from the short-sided, self-serving cowardice of people who were more interested in saving face than saving lives, and leveraged it right into getting it into our jails,” former LASD Cmdr. Charles “Sid” Heal tells Danger Room.
The LASD has long been a hotbed of advocates for exotic weaponry — everything from sonic blasters to spy drones. But the Active Denial System has long been of particular interest. Heal calls it the “Holy Grail of crowd control.” He’s been trying for years to get the technology deployed in Los Angeles.
The LASD unveiled the 7½-foot-tall millimeter wave weapon late last week, partially as answer to the 257 inmate-on-inmate assaults at Pitchess so far this year, and the 19 additional assaults on deputies. Sheriff Lee Baca believes the modified pain ray can break up these incidents before they get out of hand. With a range of 80 to 100 feet, the heat beam can blast prisoners that a Taser couldn’t hit. “This device will allow us to quickly intervene without having to enter the area and without incapacitating or injuring either combatant,” Baca says in a statement.
The National Institute of Justice — the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department — is paying for the six-month trial at Pitchess, part of a larger effort to test technologies that might cut down on inmate violence. “If we try and fail we’ve sent a message that we care, because even the effort becomes noble!” Heal e-mails. ”If we try and succeed we’ve become heroes in that we accepted a risk the Department of Defense refused — even after they spent $40 million of the taxpayers money and even while they’re killing people, because [they] are unwilling to use it.”
- Posted in
33 Comments so far
Show AllHmmm - but isn't the beam, which presumably is fairly broad, also going to punish the victim of the prison-yard assault?
Oh, thats right, the're all brutes!
I invite you to visit Pelican Bay in California, or San Quenten. You can hand out candy.
Human animals at their worst are more dangerous than anything else, but liberial as we are we can't seem to put down our crazed dogs.
>^^<
It may be hard to get institutional permission to put down our crazed dogs when they run our prisons.
It may be hard to get institutional permission to put down our crazed dogs when they run our prisons.
There are lots of crazy people in prisons, sure. But most of the people on any given day are there for nonviolent offenses, even victimless crimes.
Worse, this is riot gear. The primary target is unlikely to be prisoners.
I thought Josef Mengele was experimenting in Hell now! Guess our government picked up the NAZI's option on him!
Z1..
Spot on comparison to the Nazi butcher Mengele...
Naw in the car I definatly want the Pain Ray! Right on the cell-phone hand ZAP!
Bawhhahahaha
>^^<
inverted fascism is becoming pure fascism.
Ahhh yaaas, the ubiquitous Pain Ray.
The mechanism of the ray is to almost instantly bring the subcutaneous moisture to a boil, causing instant, unendurable, pain. I watched a film clip of volunteers. None could stand a two second burst.
I imagine it would take a bit more time to boil the fluid in the eyeball, but I can't imagine that doing anyone's sight any good.
The theory is that when you hit a crowd with the pain ray, they will scatter and disperse. The crippled, the elderly, small children and animals may not be so lucky. But, what the Hell, as Mussolini said, what are a few lives compared to the glory of the Fascist State.
Having seen how much the cops like to multiple taze a victim, I imagine that the guard would probably get a kick out of using the ray a number of times. Give them an order to "freeze" while they are writhing in pain, then hit them again for moving.
When We the People have finally had enough, we shall be facing these horrors here in our streets and in the concentration camps. I hope we have the courage to fight even against these ghastly odds. If not, they win by default.
It seems to me that there are simple countermeasures.
Any kind of metalic mesh with mesh openings smaller than the wavelength, like microwage oven windows have, will block the microvave energy. Devise some long underwear and socks made of the stuff, plus glove liners and a hood that can be slipped on quickly. The mesh would also short-out the tazer darts too.
If they catch you at a protest with a pair of swim goggles in your kit, they can arrest you and try you and convict you for that. Swim goggles are part of an effective defense against pepper spray.
Openings smaller than the wavelength? You would look like a cyber punk version of a bank robber with a nylon stocking pulled over his head. They can arrest you and try you and convict you for covering your face, too.
Interesting point about the Tazer defense though. They don't usually tazer your face, so you might get away with something worn discreetely under your clothes. Just be sure that you fall to ground and act like you're writhing in agony. If the tazer doesn't appear to have the intended effect, then they'll have to fall back on pre-tazer technology and choke you into submission (or death, whichever comes first) with a baton.
Do you have more info or a link about getting arrested for carrying goggles? I can't find anything on it.
Not if it's under your colthes,,, a dam good idea. I hope the anarchists catch on I know they have ear protection against the sound machines.
>^^<
There is already clothing material available (to ruling class elites only of course) that will nullify a Taser. Sounds like this could be the start of a booming underground industry. Also, wearing metal mesh clothing will have only a limited effect on this outdoor microwave of death as the shielding only acts to redirect or attenuate the signal. Knowing the wavelength of this death machine would help but I submit that ferrite foam would be a MUCH better choice to defeat one of these tortue devices. This type of material is used extensively in anechoic chambers.
Everybody wants criminals "locked up" yet nobody wants to be a prison guard. This would be a good force multiplier in places where the loonys out number the guards. Pelican bay in Ca ot San Quenten, I've seen riots that'd have you peeing the bed forever, yet the guards wade in and bust'em up many times getting knifed and beaten for their trouble.
As long as we insist on locking everybody up forever, there aren't a lot of choices. This will likely save lives. Inmate and officer
>^^<
Certainly makes anyone with any concern for "others" ashamed to live in this country.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Aside from the fact that the U.S. McGovernment and its fascistic-ally programmed citizenry have no more interest in the concept of rehabilitation of prisoners and reintegration of them into an economically fair, environmentally sustainable economy than they even understand the concept of such an economy, this article is just another example of how the Amurkan Militarized Police State keeps persistently seeking ways to introduce these WMT (Weapons of Mass Torture) into society. First there were the Long Range Accoustical Devices (LRADs) trotted out at the G-20 in Pittsburgh and by another California police entity at some local event there. Now its a version of the Active Denial System "pain ray" being test-cased on prisoners.
Down in the Gulf Oil/Corexit Deluge cover-up, BP has been receiving a $2400 tax kick-back per "work release" prisoner to "hire" (public/privatized?) prisons to compel prisoners to work in the clean-up operations sans respirators or cell phones (because the use of protective gear would indicate the toxicity of the chemicals they are cleaning up and cell phones might allow some prisoners to document their experience and thereby increase BP's liability).
[Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/mcclintock08232010.html]
These fascist test-cases of WMTs on protesters and prisoners and deliberate exposure of prisoners to highly toxic substances without protective gear will continue, no doubt with gradually growing Big Media & McGovernment infotainment lies in support of them, until they are as normal as predator drone civilian death statistics. Only the stats will soon be of American citizens, officially incarcerated or just natural born inmates of fascist Fortress Amurka.
Sounds like the ultimate torture device - effective yet leaves no burn marks and allows the torturer to be insulated from the tortured. I wonder what the impact would be on prisoners who were restrained and forced to be zapped for minutes or hours, how long would it take until they had a heart attack from the shock. Sadists all over the world are delighted by this invention.
---
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."
-- Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967
God Bless America! Taxpayers dollars well spent indeed. I think when Guillotine invented the guillotine he was one of the people during the French Revolution to be victimized by it. We can only hope that the inventor of this machine will be one of Gods chosen. You wonder what kind of parents the inventors, sponsors and other people associated with this had? As a matter of fact you wonder about all the peoples parents who have kids that work on weapons of mass destruction. What an Intensive Care Ward society we have turned into.
Obviously it was conceived by the type of guys who play god burning ants with a magnifying glass.
Lets see that cuts it to,,,, nearly everybody.
>^^<
The guillotine was a humanitarian advance on the existing methods of execution used at the time. As for the pain ray - I agree, but rioting in the streets is Doing It Wrong, the activity of people that would rather emote than accomplish anything.
Not too scifi to consider that once everyone has been implanted ID's + cell phone + restraint? Why not a cop dials your number and down you go.
Grouped nu8mbers for crowds same as cell phone number scanning. Multi conviction inmates on "parole" have another just for them, Life just get better all the time. Evenyually we'll have to jump into the street when one of our betters walks by to avoid getting zapped bu a proximity device in your chip.
>^^<
Slowly, day by day, year by year, they introduce these things and they become unsurprising. We say nothing (oh, we write letters and sign petitions ... ). We write clever despairing angry comments. They see how easy it is. We hope to escape their notice.
Is there any hope really?
well, just in case there is a god.......
OMG................................
Dear Sheriff's Dept:
40 million? Since the military didn't want it, did you get a fire sale price? Did you just get the ONE for that price? Wow, and i keep hearing that my state is broke!
Actually, wouldn't it have been better use of the taxpayers' money and the peoples' business to find out WHY the inmates are attacking each other?
You know, things like over crowded conditions, poor food and medical and all those guards that would fail a psych test?
How many teachers, police (and hey, training for the inmates so that they don't make the revolving door of useless locked up time a career,) could you get for that amount of money? You are going to need more money once the law suits start.
ACTIVE DENIAL SYSTEM...such an undemocratic name.
This is surely a precursor to what the American citizenry will face from it's own government after the people of this country come to realize how close to chaos we are getting. It's coming friends, most likely in my lifetime and I'm 48. Is it scary yes, but, what is more depressing is the fact that the populous in this country is resigned to thinking that their government isn't capable of horrors that a fascist state can inflict upon it's citizens when the time comes to implement their agendas. Oh yeah, Americans are armed which is exactly why we see these weapons designed to control mass numbers of people. We better get it straight in this country real soon or we will see ourselves behind fences looking out at what was once America, and, by the way, America is gone folks. The great experiement is over and it failed terribly.
Just for a change, it would be so nice to see this fucking nation come up with something that benefits all of humanity instead of always bringing death and destruction.
I've heard that these scramble your innards like eggs if left on too long. My life is becoming a worse nightmare daily. What happened to LOVE??????
Chilling.
Chilling.