What you need to know about cloud backup

One year later Gaubatz was repeating the story to The Spectator's "Mad" Mel Phillips. This piece had its own self-buttressing logic - he Democrats won't believe WMDs were in Iraq it because it would show Bush was right to invade, and the administration won't believe it because it would mean it and US intelligence agencies were even more incompetent than already thought. This was all slated for revelation on American TV until the FBI intervened, maintaining no show on such things would be broadcast.

Returning to the ADS, Dave Gaubatz was there, too. Working in a security role at the Air Force laboratory in Albuquerque where the pain ray was developed. And a legitimate letter of recommendation from his supervisor proves it.

"The scientists and their directors asked me to evaluate and test the [directed energy] weapons at Kirtland AFB," Gaubatz told FrontPage. "I did this right after 11 September 2001. The weapons were operational and ready for use in Iraq."

The ADS is lethal and it killed goats and other animals, said Gaubatz.

But offing tethered goats in a test, if true, would not seem so hard (see GlobalSecurity.org for health questions related to ADS and millimeter wave). Looking through the literature on the health effects of millimeter waves in the 95 Gigahertz range - the band thrown by the ADS - returns a couple of papers in the journal Health Physics, written by ADS scientists. While circulating information indicates they've probably fried the eyes of an unknown number of rhesus monkeys while working out the top ends of exposure to the radiation, they've been more successful in convincing that having the agency that develops a "non-lethal weapon" also in charge of determining its degree of harmfulness isn't the kind of business to much impress other scientists not on salary. The heating effect on the top layer of one's hide, depending upon power and exposure time, is also discussed in an unrelated paper in which scientists at MIT were burning anesthetized rats with millimeter waves as recently as two years ago.

One speculates if the ADS is a lethal weapon, it might be so in the sense that a magnifying glass can probably torture a tied-up animal to death on a sunny day. None of this does much for its already crap reputation, being yet another reason to regard information on it, figuratively speaking, as stuff to be scraped off the bottom of one's shoe.

Postscript: If you're interested in Dave Gaubatz's recent endeavors, visit kidsandterrorism.com for somewhat less than an eyeful. "In order for me to effectively send research investigators to the fields, it is a fact I need certain equipment and funding..." he writes. "Donate all that you can afford, Donate vehicles, motorhomes, and food. When we travel throughout the U.S. we need safe houses. Our researchers will visit every mosque and Islamic Center in America, Our [sic] teams will evaluate the facilities, people, and determine a threat level to their location. Send money. It will be used to help law enforcement better do their jobs." ®

George Smith is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, a defense affairs think tank and public information group. At Dick Destiny, he blogs his way through chemical, biological, and nuclear terror hysteria, often by way of the contents of neighbourhood hardware stores.

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