Pentagon officials were hesitant to deploy the microwave weapon in Iraq because they feared it would be 'misconstrued' as a torture device
Photo: AFP via Getty Images The fallout from the Trump administration’s violent clearing of demonstrators in order to make way for the president to take a photo with a mishandled Bible continues to get worse. According to sworn testimony from a D.C. National Guard Major shared with the Washington Post, federal officials began stockpiling ammunition to potentially use against demonstrators on June 1, including sound cannons and “heat ray” devices that make people feel like their skin is burning.
Major Adam D. DeMarco, the senior-most D.C. National Guard officer on the ground that day, provided his account to the House Natural Resources Committee earlier this summer. In his depiction of the crackdown on protestors, he claimed that federal officials had transferred close to 7,000 rounds of ammunition to the D.C. Armory during the first week of protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
Just before noon on June 1, the Defense Department’s top military police officer in the Washington region sent an email to officers in the D.C. National Guard. It asked whether the unit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, also known as an LRAD, or a microwave-like weapon called the Active Denial System, which was designed by the military to make people feel like their skin is burning when in range of its invisible rays.
While the Defense official allegedly considered the heat ray for use on American citizens, it appears that one would need to go a war zone for a more humane precedent. During the early years of the Iraq war, Pentagon officials were hesitant to deploy the microwave weapon because they feared it “could be misconstrued as a torture machine,” according to the Associated Press.
Whistleblowers have revealed some especially cruel information regarding the Trump administration this week. In addition to the consideration of using a heat ray on unarmed citizens, a whistleblower alleges that there were “mass hysterectomies” at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Georgia, where detainees were subjected to the procedure without being given complete information about what was happening.
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