Results tagged “Air Force” from SpyTalk

Watch Where You Point that Death Ray, Soldier.

By Jeff Stein | October 16, 2008 1:13 PM | | Comments (0)

People with a heartbeat will remember how the Air Force gave new meaning to loose nukes in August 2007, when an AF crew in North Dakota mistakenly loaded a half dozen warheads on a B-52, which flew off to Louisiana blithely clueless about its hot cargo. Nobody missed them for hours.

The Air Force is still smarting from that incident, which may have prompted it to get a better handle on its death ray weapons.

It's published a new manual on the handling of Directed Energy Weapons, or DEWS in Air Force lingo.

Death rays by any other name, the DEWS "include, but are not limited to, high-energy lasers, weaponized microwave and millimeter wave beams, explosive-driven electromagnetic pulse devices, acoustic weapons, laser induced plasma channel systems, non-lethal directed energy devices, and atomic-scale and subatomic particle beam weapons," manual instructs.
 
They "create unique hazards that are different from conventional and nuclear weapons," says the manual,  whose publication was was first reported by Steve Aftergood, editor of Secrecy News.

Indeed, some DEWS use ionizing radiation, which can scramble a person's DNA, the manual advises. 

And watch where you point that that thing, it says. There way be "effects due to beam drifting and failure to achieve pointing accuracy and to maintain pointing stability."

Could DEWS be the new secret counterterrrorism weapon Bob Woodward hinted at? 

Of course, there may arise "situations of urgent military need where the operational necessity outweighs the operational risk," the Air Force says. Who has time for elaborate safety folderol when the enemy's coming over the wall?

In that case, "If EOC is requested by combatant commands, the PM will submit a certification waiver through the MAJCOM to HQ AFSC/SEW for AF/SE coordination and will be forwarded to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force for approval."

Everybody got that?

UPDATE: Danger Room's Sharon Weinberger discovers that the Pentagon's controversial "pain ray," a directed energy weapon that creates an intense burning sensation designed to repel a potential enemy, is far from safe in untrained hands.   

Tags: Air Force, death rays, Directed Energy Weapons (DEWS), nuclear weapons, Secrecy News, Steve Aftergood

JFK Irked by A.F. Brass's Lavish Spending, Too

By Jeff Stein | July 29, 2008 12:00 PM | | Comments (0)

David M. Barrett, author of The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy, has a timely remembrance of how President Kennedy exploded when he discovered Air Force brass had bought top-of-the-line furniture for Otis Air Base on Cape Cod. 

Supposedly, Barrett writes at the History News Network, the brass bought the $5,000 bed it in case the famously pregnant First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy needed it in an emergency. But when Kennedy woke up to an embarrassing feature story about it in the July 25, 1963 Washington Post, he was infuriated. 

Fortunately, for those who love political history, the tape recorder was rolling when JFK telephoned two people just after seeing a photo in the morning's Post of an Air Force officer with the furniture.

But let Barrett tell the rest of the story -- and hear JFK's taped rage -- an echo of the latest Air Force furniture-spending scandal.

Tags: Air Force, John F. Kennedy, lavish spending, scandal

Iran Captures U.S. Spies

By Jeff Stein | July 2, 2008 12:07 PM | | Comments (0)

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

"The danger of these cross-border activities was explained to me by one intelligence source," Ignatius writes.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

The Bush administration's covert action program against Iran includes American special operations troops dispatched into the country, according to Seymour Hersh's blockbuster in The New Yorker last weekend.

Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

Over at the Christian Science Monitor, meanwhile, Shlomo Ben-Ami and Trita Parsi argue that "serious diplomacy, not military action, will bring regional security" to the Middle East.

Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.

Ben-Ami is a former foreign minister of Israel. Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance -- The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.





   

Tags: Air Force, covert action, diplomacy, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, spies, U.S. Special Forces