We
checked Moyes’s description of the BBC online article by James
Westhead. The article, which read like a Pentagon press release, was
dominated by the views of military spokespeople and lacked a single
word of challenge or dissent from anyone else. We posted Moyes’s email
on our message board only to discover that, as so often, our posters
had already seen the article. One of them, Antony, asked:
“What
happens if you can't dive for cover? What if you are in an open area,
if you are pregnant and can only hobble for cover, what about wheel
chair users, babies strapped in buggies...? I could go on. We need
further tests. I suggest we take James Westhead and tie him to a tree
then fire the ‘harmless’ gun at him and document the effect of
sustained exposure.”
We emailed Westhead:
Dear James
In today's article, 'US military unveils heat-ray gun,' you state that
the heat-ray weapon is ‘harmless‘. But you then go on to report the
effects as being ‘too painful to bear‘. How do you define the word
‘harm‘?
Best wishes
David Edwards
We then posted our email on the message board, where Christopher Shaw commented:
Thanks. I also have just sent him a very polite email.
On an emotional, rather than rational level, just the look of that
thing, it's shape, colour etc screams inhumanity, and I think stands as
a visual metaphor for the catastrophe that is technological progress.”
And then a curt response from James Westhead landed in our inbox:
My report said ‘military officials claim its harmless’
Best james
James Westhead
BBC NEWS
We responded:
Thanks, James. This is what currently appears on the BBC website:
The
weapon - called the Active Denial System - projects an invisible high
energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling, but is harmless.
Military officials believe the gun could be used as a non-lethal way of
making enemies surrender their weapons.’
Best wishes
David
Westhead seemed more circumspect in his next response:
Thank
you for that. I suspect my online colleagues have used - or misused -
my original radio report which attributed that claim and edited it out.
Thanks for letting me know. I shall take it up with them now.
Cheers
James
James Westhead
BBC NEWS
We replied:
Thanks, James. Good luck in sorting it out.
Best wishes
David
We then received a final, clarifying message from Westhead:
David
As I suspected .....
My radio report clearly attributed the 'harmless' claim to military
officials. Unfortunately BBC online when they initially put a version
on their website edited out the 'officials claim' line. They say they
had already corrected this when I called them. They apologise for the
confusion.
For my part, I am grateful to you for drawing my attention to it.
Best wishes,
James Westhead
On our message board, Gabriele quickly spotted that the article had indeed been amended:
"‘but is harmless’ becomes ‘but is said to be harmless’ - But WHO said THAT?”
Good
question. The article no longer declared the weapon "harmless".
Instead, it referred to "Military officials, who say the gun is
harmless..." No challenge to this view was included. A later section
reinforced the bias: "it penetrates the skin only to a tiny depth -
enough to cause discomfort but no lasting harm, according to the
military".
Westhead's piece (although his name had now disappeared) also included this disturbing comment:
"The weapon could potentially be used for dispersing hostile crowds in conflict zones such as Iraq or Afghanistan."
Why not also in Britain and America, if the weapon is "harmless"?
Useful Questions And Their Significance
In
the meantime, Richard Moyes of Landmine Action had sent us “questions
(with explanations of their significance) [that] could be usefully
asked regarding the heat-ray weapon“.
The questions were posed by
Juergen Altmann, a physicist from the university of Dortmund
specialising in unconventional weapon technologies:
- What is the beam power (in watts or kilowatts)?
-
Beam power is one of the most basic parameters, it seems that it has not been made public so far.
- What is the intensity (in kW/m2 or W/cm2) at e.g. 30, 100, 300, 700 m?
-
Intensity is decisive for the rate of heating (how many seconds until
pain sets in, until pain is at maximum, until burns of 2nd, 3rd degree
develop). It seems that this distance-dependent quantity has not been
made public so far.
- After
which time (a few seconds) are the pain threshold (skin temperature
about 44°C) and the maximum pain (skin temperature about 54°C) reached
(at some typical distance, e.g. 300 m)? Context obvious.
- What happens to skin at double, triple, quadruple this time?
-
Medical literature suggests 2nd, 3rd degree burns if heating is
continued beyond pain-maximum point. ADS [Active Denial System] data
sheets etc. speak only of first phase.
- How are second-/third-degree burns (potentially life-threatening if more than 20% of body area affected) prevented? Context obvious, this has not been discussed in ADS data sheets etc.
- For subjects exposed from a distance, how do they know where to flee from the beam?
-
Escape from beam or behind a screen was used in the
voluntary-human-subject experiments with ADS. In actual use, there
would not be a screen, and if the beam is wider than the body it is not
clear how a subject would know where the beam margin is.
- What happens in situations when people cannot flee (e.g. in the first rows of a dense crowd)?
- For
protection of the cornea of the eye, is the blink reflex a mechanism
that one can rely on with the great majority of the people?
-
Experiments in Germany have shown that the blink reflex caused by
bright light cannot be relied upon as a protection against laser
irradiation – with lasers of class II (stronger than laser pointers),
it occurs only with about 20% of the people exposed. It is unclear
whether the blink reflex caused by rapid heating of the cornea is more
reliable and will occur with nearly all people.
It
is to his credit that Westhead was willing to respond to criticism and
even to chase down the ‘error’. But Juergen Altmann’s questions
completely expose the BBC’s version of serious journalism. Mainstream
journalists should be asking exactly these questions, investigating
exactly these in depth issues in great detail. But this so rarely
happens. It is so much easier, so much more conducive to comfortable
career development, to accept the official position that the new
heat-ray weapon is “said to be harmless”.
A final word from Antony writing on the powerful resource that our message board has become:
Apart from the lethality of these 'non lethal weapons’ and the fact that by inflicting pain they constitute torture as a summary form of justice, what bugs me about this whole 'non-lethal' thing is the massive increase in state power it holds.
Right
now the state can do very little if a determined group of non-violent
citizens choose to resist state control of their lives. Can you imagine
Greenham common, the miners strike, Iraq war, road building and arms
sales protests in 5 years time?
Should we be surprised to find ourselves hearing the following bellowed at us through a loud hailer:
“’Get
back to work/watching telly or you will be zapped under powers
delegated to 'Securicor Citizens Defense PLC' granted to us through the
standing 'Reid executive order' which in turn is authorized by the 2011
prevention of domestic terrorism act.’?”
For us this was an
inspiring example of how a small band of activists with very different
skills, talents and interests could combine to challenge and change the
mainstream media. To be sure this was a tiny success by a tiny number
of people. But the effort was also small - and we are millions.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The
goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect
for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers
to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Ask
the journalists below why they are not investigating the serious
questions raised by Juergen Altmann and others. Why are they so
casually declaring the American heat-ray “harmless” and quoting “[US]
military officials, who say the gun is harmless”?
Why is not a word of
challenge or dissent included in the BBC online article?
Write to James Westhead
Email:
james.westhead@bbc.co.uk
Write to Steve Herrmann, head of BBC news online
Email:
steve.herrmann@bbc.co.uk
Write to Helen Boaden, head of BBC news
Email:
helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk
Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email:
editor@medialens.org
Writings 
The above quotes from the 1953 film The War Of The Worlds pretty much sum up what ‘heat-rays’ meant to us up until very recently - blistering beams of Martian light that were often seen reducing earthlings to dust during our childhood years. It goes against the grain, then, for us to conceive of such a thing as a harmless ‘heat-ray’. And yet this is precisely what the BBC has claimed of the new American Active Denial System (ADS). 
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