March 2010 Issue [Criticism]

The Soft-Kill Solution

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New frontiers in pain compliance

by Ando Arike,

Not long ago, viewers of CBS’s 60 Minutes were treated to an intriguing bit of political theater when, in a story called “The Pentagon’s Ray Gun,” a crowd of what seemed to be angry protesters confronted a Humvee with a sinister-looking dish antenna on its roof. Waving placards that read world peace, love for all, peace not war, and, oddly, hug me, the crowd, in reality, was made up of U.S. soldiers playacting for the camera at a military base in Georgia. Shouting “Go home!” they threw what looked like tennis…

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Ando Arikeis a writer living in Brooklyn. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “Owning the Weather,” appeared in the January 2006 issue.

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In addition to such well-known non-lethal technologies as rubber bullets, pepper spray, and Tasers, researchers are investigating many other, more exotic approaches to crowd control: the LED Incapacitator, or “puke ray,” which uses pulsating multicolored lights to produce vertigo and nausea; MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio), which uses a beam of microwaves to induce uncomfortable auditory sensations in the skull; and the Pulsed Energy Projectile, which uses a burst of infrared laser energy to create a “plasma pulse” around the target, overwhelming his or her nervous system.

Connor’s men used both fire hoses and “monitor guns,” a type of water cannon. These devices were rarely deployed in the U.S. after Birmingham. Elsewhere, however, the use of water cannons remains common.

Until the practice was brought to national attention by reporters, electric cattle prods were used throughout the South against civil-rights activists, both in the streets and as torture devices in jails.

Although the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons — including “tear gas” — in warfare, certain “riot-control agents” have long been used in domestic law enforcement. The United States has always claimed the prerogative to use RCAs in riot control during military operations abroad; some 15 million pounds of CS were used during the Vietnam War.

“Taser” is an acronym for the Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle, named after the inventor-hero of the popular boys’ adventure novels, which were a childhood favorite of the weapon’s inventor, John Cover, a NASA scientist.

Günter Schabowski, the German Democratic Republic spokesman who had announced the opening of the Berlin Wall at a press conference on November 9, 1989, told the BBC twenty years later that his premature revelation of the embargoed order was the direct result of the protests. “I wouldn’t say I was a hero who opened the border — truth be told, I acted to try to save the GDR,” he said. “I was still a committed Communist. The opening of the Wall wasn’t a humanitarian but a tactical decision taken because of popular pressure.”

Between 1990 and 1999, U.S. military forces were involved in more than thirty MOOTW in missions ranging from drug interdiction in South America to enforcing “no-fly” zones over Iraq to peacekeeping in Kosovo to humanitarian assistance in Rwanda. The current U.S. involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq are technically MOOTW.

During the course of the 1992–93 Somalia intervention, Operation Restore Hope, U.S. and U.N. helicopter gunships firing at snipers in crowded streets killed as many as 10,000 civilians, a primary reason for local hostility to U.S. forces.

The Department of Justice uses the term “less-than-lethal” rather than “non-lethal,” presumably as protection against civil-liability suits; the Department of Defense continues to favor “non-lethal.”

Current MOUT doctrine is summarized in a 2001 Rand study called Corralling the Trojan Horse. As the title suggests, the general strategy is to restrict and monitor all movement within a city: using physical barriers or other means to “sector and seal,” denying access to key areas, and isolating combatants from non-combatants.

“We Must Fight the Net,” declared the Pentagon in its own October 2003 “Information Operations Roadmap,” which outlined a new strategic thrust for “dominating the information spectrum” by transforming information operations “into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations.”

Conditions may already be improving. The Active Denial System is manufactured by Raytheon, whose chief lobbyist, William Lynn, last year was appointed Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of defense.

Rubber bullets, for example, became notorious in Northern Ireland for the number of deaths and injuries they caused, especially among children; they have become similarly notorious among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. As a 2003 National Research Council report noted, “Control of trauma level from blunt projectiles remains a serious problem.” The evidence from Northern Ireland, in fact, is that rubber bullets often inflame, rather than disperse, crowds.

The emerging paradigm is “effects-based” weapons design, a form of reverse engineering in which the desired physiological and psychological effects on targets are identified — that is, pain or lethargy or disorientation — and then a mechanism is devised to induce that effect. The goal is to be able to control individuals and groups through increasingly selective “weapons-effects.”

According to Amnesty International, between June 2001 and September 2008, 334 people died in the United States after tasering by police — only thirty-three of those people were armed in any way, and only four with firearms — and yet in wrongful-death lawsuits, courts have consistently ruled in favor of police and Taser International.

Russian researchers may have been thinking along similar lines. When fifty Chechen-separatist guerrillas took 800 Moscow theatergoers hostage in 2002, Russian special forces pumped an aerosolized fentanyl derivative through the theater’s ventilation system, knocking everyone inside unconscious before storming the building. The Chechens were shot on sight, reportedly, and the rescue was considered a success, but 129 hostages died from sedative-induced respiratory depression.

Congress ratified the treaty, but with the addition of Condition 26, which exempts the United States from restrictions on the use of riot-control agents during military peacekeeping operations.

The Soft-Kill Solution

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