Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death

[kpete]

Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death

By Robert Parry
December 13, 2007


U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi’s biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.

"A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.

Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – will let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents. These labs are expected to be deployed across Iraq in early 2008.

Duong said the next step will be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed.

Duong justified this biometric-data program as a humanitarian way of singling out “bad guys” for elimination while sparing innocent civilians.

more at:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/121307.html

[CT_Progressive]

1. There is a typo in there. It should read "And should be ARRESTED."

WTF is this "should be killed" bullshit? Doesn't this idiot know US Law?

[frogmarch]

2. Is this for real? :-o

Someone please tell me it's satire.

[Kutjara]

3. Anh Duong is the darling of the Military Channel.

Whenever I have insomnia and flick through the higher reaches of the tv listings, there always seems to be some "documentary" on the Military Channel featuring her. She's all about the fuel-air bombs, the bunker busters, the sort-of-almost-but-not-quite-nukes. The woman still views the world like a terrified child cowering in the smoking ruins of her village in Vietnam forty years ago. I think designing huge bombs is her way of taking power for that powerless child.

She also spouts the uber-patriotic party line at every opportunity, about how killing lots of people is necessary to preserve everyone's freedom, and how America has a duty to kill more people than anyone else. "Shooting on the spot," is no doubt her preferred way of dealing with things that trouble her and that she can't blow up.

[Enrique]

4. was she the woman in "Why we fight"?

[Kutjara]

5. I didn't see that one, so I'm not sure.

But there's a better than even chance she's in anything about huge bombs. She also shows up with disturbing regularity in the "Futureweapons" series.

[TomInTib]

6. Maybe we should have shot her "on the spot".

This biometric claptrap will probably prove to be every bit as fail-safe as fingerprints as a sole source of proof.

[nashville_brook]

7. shooting on-the-spot is the rule of engagement! more from the article... "the KILL or CAPTURE list"

While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might be wearing a suicide vest, the man was questioned about his name and the Americans checked his description against a list from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, known as “the kill-or-capture list.”

Concluding that the man was insurgent leader Nawab Buntangyar, Staffel gave the order to shoot, and Anderson – from a distance of about 100 yards away – fired a bullet through the man’s head, killing him instantly.

The soldiers viewed the killing as “a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement,” the International Herald Tribune reported. “The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him.”