Pain ray really killer ray gun, many goats dead, says 'expert'

The US military's pain ray, aka the Active Denial System, is a certified excrement magnet. In March Reg readers learned that the US Air Force wonder weapon is still being pitched as a game changer in Iraq, a prediction that's never even been close to being tested.

ADS defenders claim the Pentagon, afraid that using it would be a public relations disaster, won't give the non-lethal pain ray, a gun that shoots millimeter waves, the green light. It's something the US would use to torture foreigners, preferably smaller and not as well-armed as our boys.

Ah, but maybe it's not just a pain ray - maybe it's a death ray, too! And it's been hiding in plain sight under cover of a non-lethal weapons program.

This interesting allegation comes by way of a man named Dave Gaubatz, and FrontPage magazine.

Gaubatz, described as a former veteran of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, informed FrontPage that 60 Minutes, as well as everyone else, had been fed a crock on the pain ray. It was originally designed, he said, as a straight lethal ray gun and it's been operational for years. It was ready for use in Iraq where it could have slain the enemy and saved American lives. And 60 Minutes made a big mistake by not getting the truth of this and "putting our soldier's lives in danger everyday."

"Each day that goes by and another soldier dies should weigh heavily on every member of 60 Minutes," said Gaubatz.

Well into the weird, Gaubatz explained that journalists have all been fed a story about the non-lethal weapon. This is true, but only to a point - one not yet in crazy world. Then the narrative jumps the cliff. The journalists are culpable because they're "liberals who know less about the Ray Gun [yep, that's in caps] than they do basic fundamentals of war."

Keep in mind that FrontPage magazine isn't a news organ. It's the publication of David Horowitz, the head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, an organisation well known for its right-wing disinformation. Its latest helping is the claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was raised and schooled as a Muslim and is hiding this from voters. Another scoop is that global warming is a smokescreen liberals are using to promote their agenda in which the godly's right to be fruitful and multiply is obstructed.

Gaubatz has been in the news before with the same tenor of allegation. In 2006 the New York Times, reported that Gaubatz, then working as an investigator for a medical examiner in Dallas County, Texas, had been - by his own description - "a lone American [battling] politicians to locate WMDs" in Iraq.

Gaubatz claimed that while working as a civilian in Iraq in 2003 he went on an expedition with a colleague. They identified four suspected chemical weapons depots in sourthern Iraq. Try as Gaubatz might, he couldn't get the US military to investigate them. The New York Times, for its part, contacted Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group. Duelfer, while not referring directly to Gaubatz, told the newspaper that "lots of good-hearted people thought they saw something" in Iraq but, in the end, no such stories had panned out. Further, the ISG had the cooperation of top-level Iraqi officials with incentives to tell the truth - WMDs had long been destroyed. -reg