Tase the World

Edison Would Be So Proud

Our Electrified World

First, a bit of light tech news out of the Consumer Electronics Show, because you wouldn't want to have to kill and torture helpless people without a soundtrack.

Today at CES, Taser International introduced the Taser MPH -- the first combination hand-held music player and Taser.

The player, which has a 1-GB capacity that can hold about 150 songs, is embedded in a holster that slips on your belt. Feel the need to zap someone and you can unholster the Taser, use the built-in laser pointer to aim, and blam -- a couple of darts carrying 50,000 volts hits your victim.

And you don't have to miss a beat.

Guffaw, guffaw, don't have to miss a beat. Hilarious.

Not like these things have any negative consequenc--what's that?

A man in his 20s died after a Coral Gables police officer used a Taser stun gun to subdue him Friday morning.

..

Miami-Dade police said Jones displayed ''aggressive and combative behavior'' so a police officer used a Taser stun gun to restrain him.

After the discharge, Jones became unresponsive, and paramedics took him to Doctor's Hospital in Coral Gables, where he was pronounced dead.

What about something with a little 'local flavor'?

After an ambulance had been dispatched to Borden's Bedford home last Nov. 6, he was transported to the jail for violating house arrest. Borden was disabled and a diabetic. While in the jail, he was observed talking to inanimate objects.

In trying to subdue Borden, as he lay handcuffed on the floor, jailers shocked him three times with a Taser, which delivers a 50,000-volt shock. Borden's pants were around his ankles at the time he was shocked.

The county coroner ruled Borden's death a heart attack brought on by electric shock, an enlarged heart and pharmaceutical drugs in his body.

Ah, the highlights of our own local Bloomington police using tasers. In that case, they took a mentally ill man with an enlarged heart out of the back of an ambulance and then tasered him to death. "Oops."

But surely that's an isolated incident, and the police don't routinely use tasers to torture or dominate people... oh geez.

But, Andrews points out, using the TASER to bring down a threatening suspect isn't always the way the gun is used.

In Glendale, Colo., Glen Leyba was on his apartment floor, thrashing violently. A police officer, hoping to control him, stunned him three times, before he died. While the coroner blamed a drug overdose, the family blames multiple, unnecessary electric shocks, Andrews reports.

Shelly Leyba, Glen's sister, says, "Glen was in a medical emergency, down on the ground, no threat."

..

On Long Island, David Glowczenski was suffering a mental breakdown, so his family called police for help.

His sister, Jean Griffin, says, "We called them for safety because he was disoriented. …And an hour later he was dead."

Glowzenski died after a confrontation in which an officer stunned him nine times with a TASER, and he wasn't on drugs or alcohol, Andrews notes. "He committed no crime; he didn't do anything wrong," Griffin says.

I'm not even going to go into the whole 'Don't Tase Me Bro' thing, where a peaceful political event was turned into a ghoulish freakshow as a student who simply asked one too many questions was himself put to the question, so to speak, by overzealous cops.

Despite the speaker he was interrogating asking him to be allowed to finish.

Sigh.

Americans have a fascination with military technology. We, as Jon Stewart said this week on A Daily Show in his GW voice, 'love the boomy-boomy'.

It's one of our greatest failings that we believe not only that we CAN solve almost any problem with the application of grotesque amounts of force, but that we're right to do so; more than justified, *called* to put the world to order at the end of a gun, the blast of a thermobaric bomb, or the barbs of a Taser.

Look folks, here's how this works. A taser sends 50,000 volts down two long fires with barbed fishooks at the end, which puncture the victim's skin and pump about 1000+ volts of that into their nervous system. Waves of excruciating pain and paralysis pass through them, and they fall to the ground.

That's if all goes according to plan. Often, the police then proceed to Taser them. Again. And again. And again.

Then, perhaps, they die. But so what if they don't?

Lately we've seen a lot of argument about these new, meticulously designed torture methods, Tasers, waterboarding, and the like, that don't kill, at least most of the time, because of precise engineering. If they live, the Conservatives ask, what's the harm?

We no longer live in a world where it's crazy to ask if you can torture someone as long as they live.

This substitution of precise bio-physical engineering for ethics is happening across the entire spectrum of US executive power. The Army is developing their so-called 'Agony Ray', a microwave gun that heats the nerves in your skin so that you feel like you're on fire. They can blast an entire crowd of people at once with this, and there's only a SLIGHT risk that it will boil your eyeballs and blind you. Which makes it ok.

The CIA has famously been deploying waterboarding, but they have many other nasty tools, often engineered at one point or another by our lovely German friends, to wrack the body and mind. The 20th Century didn't just see advances in guns and planes and cannon, it also saw a quantum leap in inquisitions.

Of course, in a move that would have pinhead Thomas Friedman giddy with glee, we're outsourcing much of these torture sessions overseas. Cuts down on overhead, what without courts, lawyers, or civil rights getting in the way of the bottom line.

The book opens with a description of the basement of the Syrian secret police's "Palestine Branch" interrogation centre. It is called "The Grave"thanks to its coffin-like cells. with barely enough room to lie down.

The torture masters here employ a device called the "German chair", an empty metal frame used to stretch a prisoner's spine to near breaking point. Moroccan jailers allegedly used a scalpel to cut the genitals off Ethiopian student Binyam Mohamed. While incarcerated in Cairo, Mamdouh Habib was placed in a cell which filled with water until it reached his neck. Egyptian Abu Omar became incontinent after he was hung upside down and given electric shocks to his genitals. Worse still, there is evidence that some prisoners in Uzbekistan were boiled alive.

In this way, the US outsourced torture and gained intelligence through extreme methods its own agents were not able to use.

So it goes, as we indulge our bloodlust without getting our hands dirty, ever looking for the neater, cleaner, faster, whizzier way to induce human suffering. Whether it's handing our victims off to third world shops to do it in our name or using high technology to hide the scars of our work, the end result is the same. We have become a nation of torturers, sophisticated and cynical, unwilling to even sully ourselves while brutalizing others.

Finally, on the Taser front, Amnesty International, noting that more than 200 people have died after being Tasered, has called on the device to be severely restricted in use, treating it more like a gun than a fist. Ideally of course, it would be recalled entirely.

Instead, the Taser people are bundling mp3 players inside, so you can listen to your favorite songs while you protect the public from themselves and their freedom.

God Bless America.

Sources: The LA Times
Miami Herald
The Bloomington Alternative
CBS News
Amnesty International
The Courier-Mail
Engagdet