Wired: Pain Ray, Rejected by the Military, Ready to Blast L.A. Prisoners
Pain Ray, Rejected by the Military, Ready to Blast L.A. Prisoners
By Noah Shachtman Email Author
August 24, 2010 3:02 pm
Inmates of the Pitchess Detention Center, watch your step. If you get out of line, you may get blasted with an invisible heat ray.
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 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 commander Charles “Sid” Heal tells Danger Room.