Federal agency signed $245 million dollar contract with separate company that specializes in back-scatter machines

Paul Joseph Watson
January 23, 2013

Contrary to reports last week that the TSA is eliminating its expensive fleet of x-ray body scanners from airports, the federal agency signed a contract months ago with a separate company to provide the very same machines.

When Rapiscan, the company responsible for providing the TSA with the x-ray scanners, failed to adhere to a congressional demand to install software which disguised images of travelers’ naked bodies, the media announced that the TSA was abandoning x-ray body scanners in airports altogether.

However, the TSA merely announced that it had ended its $5 million dollar contract with Rapiscan, not that the x-ray devices would be gone for good. In addition, the Rapiscan machines will merely be relocated to other government agencies.

What press reports failed to mention was the fact that the TSA signed a much larger $245 million dollar contract with American Science and Engineering, Inc. back on October 9, 2012.

The press release concerning the contract outlines how AS&E will provide the TSA with “SmartCheck® Advanced Imaging Technology.” One look at AS&E’s website confirms that the technology is primarily used in “backscatter” x-ray body scanners for airports that emit “ionizing radiation.”

A promotional video posted on YouTube also shows AS&E Vice President Joseph Reiss talking about how the company has perfected “back-scatter imaging” using x-rays and is also providing the Department of Homeland Security with backscatter vans that can roam highways and conduct drive-by scans, which was also reported by Forbes in 2010.

The only difference between Rapiscan’s body scanners and those developed by American Science and Engineering, Inc. is that the latter company was able to develop “privacy friendly” software to comply with congressional demands. The scanners they will provide to the TSA are the same x-ray backscatter version that have been linked with cancer by numerous prestigious health bodies.

Although AS&E claims x-ray scanning technology is safe, numerous respected health authorities have warned that the radiation-firing body scanners can cause cancer, including the Johns Hopkins school of medicine, Columbia University’s center for radiological research, the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety, and the University of California.

The TSA will also continue to use ‘millimeter wave’ scanners that pose a threat to health because they emit terahertz photons which can “unzip DNA,” “creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication,” according to the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The mainstream media has got it wrong once again – far from abandoning dangerous x-ray scanners, the TSA has signed a contract worth almost 50 times its previous deal with a company whose primary function is providing x-ray scanners for airport security.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.