“RATS, BUGS, BOYS” REDUX

It’s been nearly two weeks since Defense Tech high­lighted a series of rather silly Pentagon schemes to flus­ter enemy sol­diers by harass­ing them with rats, sting­ing bees, and men in heat. And, since then, the inter­na­tional press has been hav­ing a big ol’ belly laugh with the so-​​called “gay sex bomb.“
One man isn’t smil­ing, how­ever. That would be Edward Hammond, the bioweapons researcher at the Sunshine Project who, uh, turned me on to the pro­posed “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals.” He says that Pentagon spokes­men fibbed when they claimed that the ideas in the doc­u­ment were “rejected out of hand.”

* In 2000, the Joint Non-​​Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) pre­pared a pro­mo­tional CD-​​ROM on its work. This CD-​​ROM, which was dis­trib­uted to other US mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment agen­cies in an effort to spur fur­ther devel­op­ment of “non-​​lethal” weapons, con­tained the “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” doc­u­ment. If the pro­posal had been rejected out of hand and not taken seri­ously, it would not have been placed in JNLWD’s pub­li­ca­tion.
* Similarly, in 2001, JNLWD com­mis­sioned a study of “non-​​lethal” weapons by the National Academies of Science (NAS). JNLWD pro­vided infor­ma­tion on pro­posed weapons sys­tems for assess­ment by an NAS sci­en­tific panel. Among the pro­pos­als that JNLWD sub­mit­ted to the NAS for con­sid­er­a­tion by the nation’s pre-​​eminent sci­en­tific advi­sory orga­ni­za­tion was “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals”.
Thus, the Pentagon’s state­ments (as quoted in news reports) are inac­cu­rate and should be corrected.

January 18th, 2005 | Bizarro, Retro-Futuro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.