There’s been much talk about how successful The Surge has been in Iraq. In fact President Obama was given much heat during his presidential campaign that he did not support The Surge. McCain vehemently drove home the point at every chance he had thath Obama was wrong about his vote against The Surge. It’s evident that The Surge in fact was a success in terms of US Forces being able to contain and kill Al Qaeda operatives. Yet the questions has arose as to whether it was General Petraeus’ keen sense of strategy in deploying the extra 20,000 soldiers onto the field or was it perhaps the use of new military classified weapons that were implemented in The Surge. A recent interview with Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward tells CBS 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley that the military has “top secret” operational capabilities. In this interview, Woodward does not explain what this secret weapon is.

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Upon some research online I came across this article that speculated that the US Military has been using ultramagnetic weaponry that shoots out what appears to be flames but more or less lightning bolts that not accurately destroys a target but also incinerates human bodies, literally zapping them into the size of an infant child, much the way a microwave radiates in heating up food.

According to Rense.com:

A nightmarish US super weapon reportedly was employed by American ground forces during chaotic street fighting in Baghdad. The secret tank-mounted weapon was witnessed in all its frightening power by Majid al-Ghazali, a seasoned Iraqi infantryman who described the device and its gruesome effects as unlike anything he had ever encountered in his lengthy military service. The disturbing revelation is yet another piece of cinematic evidence brought back from postwar Iraq by intrepid filmmaker Patrick Dillon.

In the film, al-Ghazali, whose english is less than fluent, describes the weapon as reminiscent of a flame thrower, only immensely more powerful. It is unclear what principle the weapon is based on. Searching for a description, al-Ghazali said it appeared to be shooting concentrated lightning bolts rather than just ordinary flames. Drawing on his many years as a professional engineer, al-Ghazali speculates that radiation of some kind probably figures into the weapon’s hideous capabilities. Like all men in Saddam’s Iraq, al-Ghazali was compelled to serve in the Iraqi equivalent of the Army National Guard and fought in three wars over the past thirty-odd years. Via email, he told me he has seen virtually every type of conventional weapon employed in battle, and is well acquainted with their effects on people and machines, but nothing in his extensive combat experience prepared him for the shock of what he saw in Baghdad on April 12th.

On that date, al-Ghazali and his family sheltered in their house as a fierce street battle erupted in his neighborhood. In the midst of the fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging “like a wet rag” as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a result of the mysterious tank-mounted device.

In a city littered everywhere with burned-out civilian and military vehicles, US forces were abnormally scrupulous about immediately detailing bulldozers and shovel crews to the job of burying the grim wreckage. Nevertheless, telltale remnants remained as Dillon found when al-Ghazali later took him to the site. Dillon said they easily uncovered large puddles of resolidified metal and mounds of weird fibrous material that, al-Ghazali explained, were all that remained of the vehicles’ tires. Dillon, who accumulated plenty of battlefield experience as a medic in Viet-Nam, and has since covered a number of wars from Somalia to Kosovo, told me that he has witnessed every kind of conventional ordnance that can be used on humans and vehicles. ” I’ve seen a freaking smorgasbord of destruction in my life,” he said, “flame-throwers, napalm, white phosphorous, thermite, you name it. I know of nothing short of an H-bomb that conceivably might cause a bus to instantly liquefy or that can flash broil a human body down to the size of an infant. God pity humanity if that thing is a preview of what’s in store for the 21st century.”

Another undisclosed source mentions:

HPMs are man-made lightning bolts crammed into cruise missiles. They could be key weapons for targeting Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. HPMs fry the sophisticated computers and electronic gear necessary to produce, protect, store and deliver such agents. The powerful electromagnetic pulses can travel into deeply buried bunkers through ventilation shafts, plumbing and antennas. But unlike conventional explosives, they won’t spew deadly agents into the air, where they could poison Iraqi civilians or advancing U.S. troops.

The HPM is a top-secret program, and the Pentagon wants to keep it that way. Senior military officials have dropped hints about a new, classified weapon for Iraq but won’t provide details. Still, information about HPMs, first successfully tested in 1999, has trickled out. “High-power microwave technology is ready for the transition to active weapons in the U.S. military,” Air Force Colonel Eileen Walling wrote in a rare, unclassified report on the program three years ago. “There are signs that microwave weapons will represent a revolutionary concept for warfare, principally because microwaves are designed to incapacitate equipment rather than humans.”

HPMs can unleash in a flash as much electrical power-2 billion watts or more-as the Hoover Dam generates in 24 hours. Capacitors aboard the missile discharge an energy pulse-moving at the speed of light and impervious to bad weather-in front of the missile as it nears its target. That pulse can destroy any electronics within 1,000 ft. of the flash by short-circuiting internal electrical connections, thereby wrecking memory chips, ruining computer motherboards and generally screwing up electronic components not built to withstand such powerful surges. It’s similar to what can happen to your computer or TV when lightning strikes nearby and a tidal wave of electricity rides in through the wiring.

Most of this “e-bomb” development is taking place at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M. The Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland has been studying how to deliver varying but predictable electrical pulses to inflict increasing levels of harm: to deny, degrade, damage or destroy, to use the Pentagon’s parlance. HPM engineers call it “dial-a-hurt.” But that hurt can cause unintended problems: beyond taking out a tyrant’s silicon chips, HPMs could destroy nearby heart pacemakers and other life-critical electrical systems in hospitals or aboard aircraft (that’s why the U.S. military is putting them only on long-range cruise missiles). The U.S. used a more primitive form of these weapons-known as soft bombs-against Yugoslavia and in the first Gulf War, when cruise missiles showered miles of thin carbon fibers over electrical facilities, creating massive short circuits that shut down electrical power.

Although the Pentagon prefers not to use experimental weapons on the battlefield, “the world intervenes from time to time,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says. “And you reach in there and take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might use it.”

One wonders perhaps Obama knew about such use of these weapons were too inhumane that he was opposed to The Surge because of it. Then again, now that Obama is sitting as the current President, his executive role is forcing him to take a harder approach is resolving such terrorist threats. In either case, the use of such a weapon is startling.