Tag Archives: Christian Science Monitor

| Pentagon unveils laser capable of shooting down drones, mortars!

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Pentagon unveils laser capable of shooting down drones, mortars ~ RT.

The US Army has successfully used a vehicle-mounted laser to shoot down numerous mortar rounds and drone aircraft for the first time.

Taking place over the course of several weeks, the test involved destroying more than 90 incoming mortar rounds and multiple drones. Eventually, the Army hopes to test an even more advanced laser system that could shoot down more dangerous weapons, such as incoming cruise missiles.

Named the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD), the current version of the weapon features three to five lasers that can be attached to the top of a military vehicle in a dome-like turret structure. According to Terry Bauer, the Army’s program manager for the weapon at Boeing, when the HEL MD hits a target like a mortar, it heats up the insides to the point that the mortar explodes in mid-air.

“It falls as a single piece of metal with a little bit of shrapnel. It basically falls where it was going to fall, but it doesn’t explode when it hits the ground,” Bauer said to the Christian Science Monitor. “We turn it into a rock, basically.”

When it comes to shooting down drones, the laser can be used to blind an unmanned vehicle’s cameras and take apart its tail, causing the whole thing to come crashing down to earth.

The Army hopes to use the laser to protect bases that come under fire from mortar and rocket attacks. This happened frequently during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Monitor reported that the cheap cost of using lasers would make the weapons a sensible choice for the Pentagon.

Still, officials said it is unlikely that the HEL MD will be ready for combat use before 2022, as the Army is moving to test more advanced versions over the coming years. The current system is equipped with a laser with the strength of 10 kilowatts, but future versions will be outfitted with 50- and 100-kilowatt lasers.

“If you’re engaging a target at the same range, a 100 kW laser will destroy the target in one-tenth of the time than the 10kW would,” Bauer told AFP.

The HEL MD is just one of the laser-equipped weapons being developed by the United States military. As RT reported in November, the Department of Defense is looking into attaching high-powered lasers to its next-generation fighter jets, which would be capable of tracking and disarming enemy sensors, destroying incoming missile attacks, and going on the offensive.

Meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced in October its plans to develop drone-mounted laser systems that would be able to shoot missiles down from the sky.

High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) (Image from army.mil)

High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) (Image from army.mil)

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| US strike on Syria would be illegal ‘act of war!’

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US strike on Syria would be illegal ‘act of war’ ~ Alastair Crooke, The Christian Science Monitor.

The Obama administration is right to be caution about US intervention in Syria. For the US to launch a military strike without UN Security Council sanction would constitute an illegal ‘act of war’ against a sovereign state. (The Kosovo precedent cannot make an illegal act legal).

A scrum has erupted in the press these last few days: heads down, padded shoulders locked, like some football “rush” intent on pushing and jostling a president cradling the ball of military intervention physically across the “red line” on Syria. The speed and thrust of this dash for the line, however, seems to convey the momentum of unchallengeable “truth.” Awkwardly, reality is rather different: There has been absolutely no evidence published to support the allegation that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were responsible for this latest, or any other gas attack in Syria.

Unwelcome as it may be to certain European and regional governments, who have been cheerleading the case for American intervention, neither the Russians nor the Chinese, both of whom are well represented on the ground in Syria, have believed either the earlier US finding of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian security forces or indeed this latest allegation.

On the contrary, Russia previously has given evidence to the UN Security Council to show it has seen opposition forces that have used sarin gas against civilians (echoing the conclusion of Carla del Ponte, the former international prosecutor and current UN commissioner on Syria). And Russian officials state that the latest use of gas was delivered by a homemade missile, fired from a position known to be under opposition control.

Although the European constituency (Britain and France) are chafing with impatience to begin retaliation even before evidence has been amassed, the US administration has been more cautious. This is wise. Wars are always treacherous in their facts, and for the US to launch a military strike without Security Council sanction (which it will not get) would constitute an illegal “act of war” against a sovereign state – and a crime. (The Kosovo precedent cannot change an illegal act into a legal one).

But more substantially, what might be the outcome of, let us say, a cruise missile fired at a military target in Syria: a rhetorical strike, as it were, rather than a major military intervention?

So far, Syria has always turned a blind eye. The government knows well that Western special forces have supported the insurgents, but it has chosen to overlook this covert aspect. Mr. Assad has always insisted, however, that his “red line” is Syrian sovereignty. An explicit and public US attack on his country plainly crosses this “line.” It is by no means assured that the Syrian government would remain passive: that it would not respond. Neither is it likely that Russia or China easily would tolerate the West again (after Libya) bypassing the UN and the international order to concoct some spurious “Friends of Syria” legitimacy for its illegal military action.

Still less clear would be the consequences inside Syria of such an intervention. Does anyone seriously imagine that a cruise missile attack on their homeland would make ordinary Syrians long for the inchoate, warring and violent opposition factions to take over their country? It will of course do the reverse. It will strengthen Assad. But it will concomitantly reinforce the conviction of extremists and their varied intelligence-service patrons that only by a “massacre” which can be blamed on Assad will the West be driven to overthrow Assad – a result the opposition is unable to achieve by its own efforts alone.

And then, there are the “known unknowns”: The Middle East is both angry and frightened, too; it is bitterly divided and increasingly violent. To toss a few cruise missiles into this volatile, unstable brew simply is to invite the unforeseeable and the unwanted to make its explosive appearance.

Alastair Crooke, the legendary ranking MI6 officer in the Middle East, is now director of the Conflicts Forum, which promotes dialogue between the West and political Islam.

ALSO BY THIS WRITER: Libya vs. Bahrain: danger of the West’s double standard 

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| Desmond Tutu wins Templeton Prize for ‘affirming life’s spiritual dimension!’

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Desmond Tutu wins Templeton Prize for ‘affirming life’s spiritual dimension’ ~ , Correspondent, The Christian Science Monitor.

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Tutu, the first black man to lead South Africa’s Anglican church, also headed the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He is a ‘living model of the benefits of religion,’ the Templeton Foundation said.

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On April 16 1996, South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chair Desmond Tutu sat listening as activist Sinqokwana Ernest Malgas described the torture he had been subjected to by the apartheid police force.

A 30-year veteran of the freedom movement himself, Reverend Tutu was no stranger to stories like this. But as Mr. Malgas talked, his speech mangled and slurred by a stroke he had suffered from a police beating, Tutu laid his head down on the table in front of him and began to cry.

The image of Tutu weeping quickly circled the globe, a reminder of the towering moral challenge South Africa faced as it strove to reconcile centuries of racial injustice.

Perhaps no individual more deeply embodied this national reckoning with forgiveness than Tutu himself, who on Thursday received the Templeton Prize, an annual award of 1.1 million pounds ($1.7 million) awarded to a living person “who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

“Archbishop Tutu exemplifies a new and larger, living model of the benefits of religion – especially when framed and tested in the context of real people – in real, everyday circumstances,” said John Templeton Jr., the president of the Templeton Foundation.

Tutu said he was “totally bowled over” by the award, which honored the retired Anglican archbishop for more than a half-century of spiritually grounded human rights activism.

Tutu joins the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, and Billy Graham among heavyweight activist clerics who have been honored by the Templeton Prize, the largest annual monetary prize for an individual in the world.

Standing just 5-ft. 3-in., Tutu has long occupied an outsized presence in South African politics. As an Anglican leader throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, he pushed for international divestment from South Africa, spoke out against police brutality, and led marches of tens of thousands against the white minority government. In 1984, his efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, and two years later he became the first black man to lead the Anglican church of South Africa.

“The [Anglican] church in South Africa fought in the struggle because we were called upon to find what it means to be the body of Christ in our time and place, and we believed that God is a God of all,” says Thabo Makgoba, the current archbishop of Cape Town. “Politics is part and parcel of where God’s people find themselves.”

And as the country transitioned from the rigid rule of a white minority to full democracy in the early 1990s, Tutu unrelentingly preached reconciliation. As head of the TRC, a restorative justice body, he guided the country through hundreds of hours of testimony from apartheid victims and perpetrators, and granted amnesty to hundreds who confessed to politically motivated crimes.

In the years since, the diminutive bishop has unflinchingly thrown his moral authority behind a variety of causes – not all of them popular – including the release of Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning, divestment from Israel, and an end to corruption and nepotism in the South African government.

Throughout his career, Tutu has always displayed a remarkable ability to use humor to incisively cut to the heart of social justice issues, Reverend Makgoba says.

“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land,” Tutu explained in a video published on the Templeton Prize’s website. “They said, ‘let us pray,’ and we dutifully shut our eyes. And when we finished … lo and behold, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

Tutu also preaches an inclusive version of spirituality. In his 2011 book, “God is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations,” he wrote that no religion had a monopoly on truth about God.

“We should in humility and joyfulness acknowledge that the supernatural and divine reality we all worship in some form or other transcends all our particular categories of thought and imagining,” he wrote.

The Templeton Prize has been given annually since 1973. It was endowed by Sir John Templeton, a British-American stock trader and philanthropist. Tutu will formally receive the award in a public ceremony at London‘s Guildhall on May 21.

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