By Jan Herman<\/p>\n
Remember the\u00a0mysterious black barge anchored in the Hudson River between the\u00a0Manhattan and Jersey shores during our Code Orange New Year<\/span><\/b><\/a> eight\u00a0months ago? Well,\u00a0the barge is\u00a0back. Make that two of them. And just in time for the\u00a0National Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden, which will be protected by “the\u00a0largest armada of land, air and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national\u00a0political gathering.”<\/p>\n Our Upper West Side spotter, who checked the barges out yesterday with her binoculars,\u00a0wonders whether they’re platforms for guided-missile launchers to protect the city from an\u00a0airborne attack. The last time they appeared in the river we never did solve the barge mystery.\u00a0This morning’s report on convention security<\/span><\/b><\/a> in\u00a0The New York Times makes no mention of missile launchers stationed in the Hudson. It does say\u00a0that 26 police launches will patrol the city’s waterways and that seven surveillance helicopters will\u00a0be patrolling the skies.<\/p>\n I guess we should also mention the 181 bomb-sniffing dogs to be put on the streets and\u00a0subways,\u00a0in additon\u00a0to plainclothes detectives who will “eyeball” other riders, along\u00a0with 10,000 police officers to be stationed around Madison Square Garden itself, including\u00a0“special heavily armed ‘Hercules’ antiterror squads, snipers and phalanxes of officers set up around\u00a0the arena to search buses and trucks.”<\/p>\n And let’s not forget: The police will have on hand a bit of high-tech sonic weaponry just in\u00a0case noisy demonstrators need to be brought into line. As reported by the Associated Press, it was\u00a0unveiled last week as part of\u00a0 “a mini-arsenal of\u00a0devices and counterterrorism equipment.”<\/span><\/b><\/a> Called the LRAD (for Long Range\u00a0Acoustic Device),\u00a0the\u00a0weapon\u00a0was “developed for the military and [is] capable\u00a0of blasting warnings, orders or anything else at an ear-splitting 150 decibels.”<\/p>\n The police plan to mount two LRADS on Humvees posted outside the arena. “It would mark\u00a0the first time the instrument — which can beam sounds for 300 yards or more — has been used by\u00a0a civilian force.” This does not go down well with Bill Dobbs of United for\u00a0Peace and Justice<\/span><\/b><\/a>, which has planned a massive antiwar demonstration on the\u00a0eve of the convention. He called the sound system “a potential Big Brother nightmare.” Police\u00a0“are trying to use technology and machinery to control every aspect of life on the street,” he said,\u00a0“rather than relax a little and let a part of democratic society unfold.”<\/p>\n Compared with infrasound, however, the LRAD is a light tap on the shoulder. Imagine the\u00a0authorities\u00a0getting hold of one of French robotics scientist Vladimir Gavreau’s “police\u00a0whistle,” sometimes called a “sound cannon.” It’s an infrasonic device so lethal there is reportedly\u00a0no known defense against it. By lowering the frequency of sound below 15 cycles per second —\u00a0so low that the sound can’t be humanly heard — such a device is capable of spreading death and\u00a0destruction from a source that is impossible to detect without special equipment.<\/p>\n “At a very specific pitch, infrasound explodes matter,” Gerry Vassilatos writes<\/span><\/b><\/a> about Gavreau’s experiments from\u00a0the 1930s to the 1970s. “At others, infrasound incapacitates and kills. Organisms rupture in its\u00a0blast.”<\/p>\n