Safety & ethics worries sidelined a heat ray for years. The feds asked about using it on protester.
Every few years since 2001, the military has invited reporters to get zapped by a “heat ray.” The dozens who signed up all came away with a similar conclusion: the weapon, officially called an Active Denial System, is brutally painful.
“It felt as if I had opened a furnace with my face too close and been hit by a wall of scorching heat,” wrote Philip Sherwell for the Sunday Telegraph in 2007, calling the pain “intolerable.” Five years later, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman said it felt like he’d “been exposed to a blast furnace.”
The pain faded quickly, which was the point. The military has spent millions on the weapon hoping it could become a less-lethal crowd control option. Yet, other than tests on luckless journalists and military volunteers, the devices have never been used.
Trump administration officials have now reportedly sought twice to change that, first in a 2018 bid to deploy heat rays against migrants at the border and then again this summer — as a whistleblower said in testimony provided to The Washington Post on Wednesday — against D.C. protesters.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/safety-and-ethics-worries-sidelined-a-heat-ray-for-years-the-feds-asked-about-using-it-on-protesters/ar-BB198wpC?li=BBnb7Kz
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