Heat ray sought against DC protesters, major says
Testimony also hits on sound cannons before clash in June
Hours before law enforcement officers violently cleared protesters from a square outside the White House in June, a top military police officer sought out weaponry like powerful sound cannons and a device that “causes targets to feel an unbearable heating sensation,” an Army National Guard major told lawmakers in written testimony.
The major, Adam DeMarco, an Iraq War veteran who serves in the District of Columbia National Guard and was called in to enforce the crackdown on protesters, told House lawmakers last month that he had received an email from a top law enforcement official at the Defense Department asking if the Guard was equipped with sound cannons or a nonlethal heat ray, known as the Active Denial System, or ADS.
“ADS can provide our troops a capability they currently do not have,” the officer wrote, according to DeMarco’s testimony, reported earlier by NPR. “The ADS can immediately compel an individual to cease threatening behavior or depart through application of a directed energy beam that provides a sensation of intense heat on the surface of the skin. The effect is overwhelming.”
DeMarco also said that federal officials stockpiled “approximately 7,000 rounds” of live ammunition in the hours before the clash, transferring the munitions from as far as Missouri and Tennessee to the nation’s capital.
The Guard did not have either device, DeMarco said.
But the exchange, including the previously unreported disclosure that top military officials sought out military-grade equipment, provides a window into the law enforcement response toward the peaceful demonstrators who had gathered outside the White House to protest the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, while in police custody May 25 in Minneapolis.
A Defense Department official told The Washington Post that the inquiries were “routine inventory checks to determine what equipment was available.”
In an interview Wednesday night, David Laufman, the lawyer representing DeMarco, dismissed that characterization.
“This was an official inquiry made by a Department of Defense official into the availability of a heat ray to use against American citizens peacefully expressing their First Amendment rights,” Laufman said. “There is nothing ‘routine’ about giving serious consideration to using such a device against our fellow citizens peacefully demonstrating in the streets of our nation’s capital.”
After a weekend of unrest in the spring in Washington, the Trump administration deployed federal law enforcement throughout the city to quell demonstrations. Outside the White House, in Lafayette Square, some of those forces used tear gas and stun grenades to clear protesters so Trump could walk through to pose for photographs with a Bible at a church damaged by a small fire the night before.
Top administration officials have defended the response to the protests, arguing that law enforcement officers in the square in the days leading up to the clash had been met with violence from bad actors. Testifying before Congress in July, Gregory Monahan, the Park Police’s acting chief, said that his officers acted with “tremendous restraint.”
Top Republican lawmakers, as well as Attorney General William Barr, have previously sought to discredit DeMarco, noting that he ran as a Democratic House candidate in 2018.
DeMarco, who also testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources as part of the panel’s investigation into the clash, offered a different picture, telling lawmakers that the police used “excessive” force on protesters.
The heat ray that officials had sought was developed with the intent of repelling individuals without injury. But military news releases describe the technology as causing an “unbearable heating sensation,” and a system deployed to Afghanistan with the Air Force in 2010 ultimately was never used and was withdrawn, in part, some speculated, because of public opposition.
In a meeting days before the 2018 midterm elections, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested using the device on migrants at the southwestern border, but the idea shocked attendees, and Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, angrily dismissed the idea outright.
DeMarco, in his written testimony, also told lawmakers that military officials had sought out powerful sound cannons known as Long Range Acoustic Devices, which can be used to loudly issue commands to crowds but can also serve as a deterrent. A federal judge in New York ruled in 2017 that the sound the cannons emit could be considered a form of force, after the police used such a device to emit a series of piercing beeps directed at protesters who later said they had developed ringing in their ears and dizziness because of the noise.