Via the poised urgency of Jeff Gates’ Life Outtacontext:

Kevin Sites, a CNN reporter in Kuwait, has been sharing personal reflections on the soon-to-be war front with readers of bOingbOing via email. Here’s an excerpt from his latest (read his entire post here):

For most of the journalists here in Kuwait, this is the fear and this is the joke; that for all our technology—our videophones and portable dishes, our Thurayas, and Iridiums and Neras, our digital cameras and laptop editing systems—-we could end up covering this war with wind up film cameras.

It’s on the grapevine that the U.S. Air Force has developed an electro magnetic pulse weapon at Kirtland Air Force that could be used in war against Iraq. The concept is devastating simple; flying over the target area, the military emits a microwave swath, which basically fries the electronics of any appliance or device in its path.

Like a giant switch, when the EMP weapon is flicked on, the lights go out. People, however, are supposedly spared—unless they happened to be wearing a pacemaker or are hooked up to other life sustaining machinery. The EMP weapon does not apparently differentiate between cell phones and hospital respirators.

Be sure to scroll down below this item at Gates’ site for something that has struck me too — the devolution of media depictions of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.