Pain Ray Weapon for Iraq, ummm NO

USA army troops denied non-leathal weapon.
USA Troops die, because Col. wants to be politically correct.
The main reason the tool has been missing in action is public perception. With memories of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal still fresh, the Pentagon is reluctant to give troops a space-age device that could be misconstrued as a torture machine.

Sourced from .

http://blog.wired.com/

Despite years of developments and testing, the Pentagon has refused requests to send its most advanced nonlethal weapon to Iraq. In fact, as early as 2003, an Air Force scientist asserted that had the Active Denial System -- which uses millimeter waves to create an intense burning sensation -- been deployed to Iraq, it could have saved lives, the AP reports:

On April 30, 2003, two days after the first Fallujah incident, Gene McCall, then the top scientist at Air Force Space Command in Colorado, typed out a two-sentence e-mail to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I am convinced that the tragedy at Fallujah would not have occurred if an Active Denial System had been there," McCall told Myers, according to the e-mail obtained by AP. The system should become "an immediate priority," McCall said.

"We want to just make sure that all the conditions are right, so when it is able to be deployed the system performs as predicted - that there isn't any negative fallout," said Col. Kirk Hymes, head of the Defense Department's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.

Does Col. Kirk Hymes, need to be moved, promoted out of the way, to Iraq, front lines, then see what he says.
Does this system work?

"How this has been handled is kind of a national scandal," McCall said by telephone from his home in Florida.

Not only did Pentagon officials refuse to send the controversial weapon to Iraq, they blocked a request that came as late as December 2006. The big concern is clearly the public fallout from deploying a microwave weapon.

If that is what stopping the weapon from being deployed then that that decision maker should be sent to Iraq for a personal view of the situation.

G