Talk:Veiling-glare laser

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I removed the following text:

There is a common rumor (possibly originating in Gordon Thomas' book Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad) that a veiling-glare laser was used by Mossad agents to blind or disorient Princess Diana's driver, Henri Paul, causing the vehicle to crash. Seen in this context, a veiling-glare laser or other blinding energy weapon (which the United Nations has banned) is yet another nearly untraceable assassination method. Any investigation of an incident caused by such a weapon would naturally be concluded to be an accident.

because by its own admission it is only a rumour, it certainly is not a common rumour, and it plum doesn't make sense: the veiling-glare laser was only being placed in development in 2002, 5 years after Princess Diana died. Further the 2nd and 3rd sentences are speculative and quite possibly plain false. Now if you believe such conspiracy theories, conceivably the Mossad or someone else could have dazzled a driver in some other way. But then that doesn't have much to do with this article. And finally, anyone who has ever been out driving at night on a rural road, and suddenly been hit with the full power headlights of an oncoming road train will know that the experience of being completely whited-out whilst driving at speed is unpleasant and alarming but a very, very uncertain form of assassination. The most likely result is that the driver would brake smoothly to a halt, pull on his UV filtered sunglasses whilst drawing his pistol, and say "someone just shone a bright light in my eyes, can anyone see where the bastard is hiding?" (or perhaps, "en ce moment, quelqu'un a brillé une lumière briller dans mes yeux, peut-quelqu'un découvrir où le bâtard se cache?"). If the Mossad are the scarily efficient assassins Thomas apparently believes, I do not think it likely they would adopt techniques with such a low probability of success and such a high probability of "going loud".

I also made quite a few other edits, because whilst investigating the above I found that several things did not agree with other sources on the subject. Most importantly, our article gave the impression that this was an actual weapon that already existed. I corrected these and added a reference (there was none previously). I also wikified the formatting, added more links, and bypassed a lot of redirects -- Securiger 08:18, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]