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...

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In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military units already are operating under loose rules of engagement that allow them to kill individuals who are identified as suspected terrorists or who show the slightest evidence of being insurgents. American forces also have rounded up tens of thousands of Iraqi military-age males, or MAMs, for detention.

“The detainees have risen to over 18,000 and are projected to hit 30,000 (by the U.S. command) by the end of the year and 50,000 by the end of 2008,” Cordesman wrote in his trip report.

The sweeps have enabled the U.S. military to collect biometric data for future use if and when the Iraqis are released back into the general population.

Gone are the salad days when you could just round up tens of thousands of people and slaughter them wholesale. Over the years, do-gooders have erected legal barriers that tried to make consequence-free murder a thing of the past. Ever imperfect, such proscriptions certainly made things embarrassing if nothing else.

Fortunately your tax dollars are developing cutting-edge new technologies that enable heroes to continue God's work at the retail level. The new "lab in a box" neatly sidesteps half a century of sissification. Now we can just have mass arrests, process them, and put these animals back out into the wild. Our handheld biometric screeners will then be able to identify the tagged population and it's happy hunting! At a roadblock, roundup or house-to-house search, this exciting new technology makes killing hajis easier than a weekend at a canned bird hunt. Hell, you can just line the fuckers up on their way to work, scan 'em, bag 'em, and tag 'em without even leaving your checkpoint!

Not only does this allow us to routinize and systematize the murder process, it also protects anyone involved at all levels of the chain of command from pesky prosecutions! As the man says, "Distance from executions helps render responsibility hazy."

These little gadgets will surely grease the wheels for a smooth-running terror operation. As a matter of fact, the do-gooders might have even done us a favor. Killing a lot of people all at once is pretty scary to anyone who witnesses or hears about it, but memory is short. Killing the same amount of people spread out over a period of time and space keeps everyone on their toes at all times. After a while it will get around that a trip to the pokey for any reason will end in a death-sentence down the road. The Wogs won't go anywhere near an American soldier once the word hits the street. We're probably getting more terror and obedience per unit with the "lab in a box" than we ever did with a 500lb. bomb. That means efficiency and savings. Unless of course turning people's lives into a hopeless hell-on-earth makes them suicidally aggressive. That kind of thing will certainly fuck up your margin.

(via Tiny Revo, via Robert Parry)