General Mann: “That skeleton beam must be what they used to wipe out the French cities.”
Dr. Forrester: “It neutralizes mesons somehow. They're the atomic glue holding matter together. Cut across their lines of magnetic force and any object will simply cease to exist! Take my word for it, general, this type of defense is useless against that kind of power! You'd better let Washington know, fast!” (The War Of The Worlds, 1953, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046534/quotes )
“Too Painful To Bear” But “Harmless”
The above quotes from the 1953 film The War Of The Worlds pretty much sum up what ‘heat-rays’ meant to us up until very recently - blistering beams of Martian light that were often seen reducing earthlings to dust during our childhood years. It goes against the grain, then, for us to conceive of such a thing as a harmless ‘heat-ray’. And yet this is precisely what the BBC has claimed of the new American Active Denial System (ADS).
This was brought to our attention in a January 25 email from Richard Moyes, Policy and Research Manager at Landmine Action:
“Dear editors,
I thought you might be interested in this confirmation from the BBC that the US’s ‘active denial system’ directed energy weapon is ‘actually harmless‘... despite those experiencing it finding the feeling ‘too painful to bear.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6297149.stm
Richard Moyes”
We checked Moyes’s description of the BBC online article by James Westhead. The article, which read like a Pentagon press release, was dominated by the views of military spokespeople and lacked a single word of challenge or dissent from anyone else. We posted Moyes’s email on our message board only to discover that, as so often, our posters had already seen the article. One of them, Antony, asked:
“What happens if you can't dive for cover? What if you are in an open area, if you are pregnant and can only hobble for cover, what about wheel chair users, babies strapped in buggies...? I could go on. We need further tests. I suggest we take James Westhead and tie him to a tree then fire the ‘harmless’ gun at him and document the effect of sustained exposure.”
We emailed Westhead:
“Dear James
In today's article, 'US military unveils heat-ray gun,' you state that the heat-ray weapon is ‘harmless‘. But you then go on to report the effects as being ‘too painful to bear‘. How do you define the word ‘harm‘?
Best wishes
David Edwards”
We then posted our email on the message board, where Christopher Shaw commented:
“Thanks. I also have just sent him a very polite email.
On an emotional, rather than rational level, just the look of that thing, it's shape, colour etc screams inhumanity, and I think stands as a visual metaphor for the catastrophe that is technological progress.”
And then a curt response from James Westhead landed in our inbox:
READ FULL ALERT
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php
This media alert will be archived shortly here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/070126_bbc_heat_ray.php
Dr. Forrester: “It neutralizes mesons somehow. They're the atomic glue holding matter together. Cut across their lines of magnetic force and any object will simply cease to exist! Take my word for it, general, this type of defense is useless against that kind of power! You'd better let Washington know, fast!” (The War Of The Worlds, 1953, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046534/quotes )
“Too Painful To Bear” But “Harmless”
The above quotes from the 1953 film The War Of The Worlds pretty much sum up what ‘heat-rays’ meant to us up until very recently - blistering beams of Martian light that were often seen reducing earthlings to dust during our childhood years. It goes against the grain, then, for us to conceive of such a thing as a harmless ‘heat-ray’. And yet this is precisely what the BBC has claimed of the new American Active Denial System (ADS).
This was brought to our attention in a January 25 email from Richard Moyes, Policy and Research Manager at Landmine Action:
“Dear editors,
I thought you might be interested in this confirmation from the BBC that the US’s ‘active denial system’ directed energy weapon is ‘actually harmless‘... despite those experiencing it finding the feeling ‘too painful to bear.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6297149.stm
Richard Moyes”
We checked Moyes’s description of the BBC online article by James Westhead. The article, which read like a Pentagon press release, was dominated by the views of military spokespeople and lacked a single word of challenge or dissent from anyone else. We posted Moyes’s email on our message board only to discover that, as so often, our posters had already seen the article. One of them, Antony, asked:
“What happens if you can't dive for cover? What if you are in an open area, if you are pregnant and can only hobble for cover, what about wheel chair users, babies strapped in buggies...? I could go on. We need further tests. I suggest we take James Westhead and tie him to a tree then fire the ‘harmless’ gun at him and document the effect of sustained exposure.”
We emailed Westhead:
“Dear James
In today's article, 'US military unveils heat-ray gun,' you state that the heat-ray weapon is ‘harmless‘. But you then go on to report the effects as being ‘too painful to bear‘. How do you define the word ‘harm‘?
Best wishes
David Edwards”
We then posted our email on the message board, where Christopher Shaw commented:
“Thanks. I also have just sent him a very polite email.
On an emotional, rather than rational level, just the look of that thing, it's shape, colour etc screams inhumanity, and I think stands as a visual metaphor for the catastrophe that is technological progress.”
And then a curt response from James Westhead landed in our inbox:
READ FULL ALERT
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php
This media alert will be archived shortly here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/070126_bbc_heat_ray.php