---
title: "Six Thousand Pairs Of Gloves At $2,783 Each. The Schedule Dates To 1974."
dek: "The award buys restraint gloves that deliver a shock. Its technical attachment sets current, pulse width and two intervals. Two specialists placed those numbers independently, and both placed them in a behavioural conditioning protocol run under contract in 1974."
kind: investigation (Investigation)
desk: The Republic
author: June Halloway and Harriet Kwon-Massey (fictional)
published: 2026-08-29T06:10:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/six-thousand-pairs-one-schedule
tags: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Procurement, MK-Ultra, Behavioural conditioning, Detention
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Six Thousand Pairs Of Gloves At $2,783 Each. The Schedule Dates To 1974.

*The award buys restraint gloves that deliver a shock. Its technical attachment sets current, pulse width and two intervals. Two specialists placed those numbers independently, and both placed them in a behavioural conditioning protocol run under contract in 1974.*

The award is public. Six thousand pairs of restraint gloves that deliver an electric shock, $16.7m, $2,783 a pair.

So is the technical attachment. Attachment C runs to eleven pages and sets what the glove must do: peak current, pulse width, the interval between pulses, the duration of a train, and the interval the device must impose before a second application can be made.

Four of those numbers are 132 microseconds, 47 milliseconds, 1.8 seconds and 4.2 seconds.

They are also, in that order, Schedule D of a behavioural conditioning protocol run under a Department contract at a university psychology laboratory in 1974.

## How we established that, and why in that order

We did not go looking for 1974. We would not have found it.

We took the four values out of the public package, took every word of context off them, and sent them to two people separately. Neither was told what the story was. Neither knew the other had been asked.

The first is an electrical safety engineer who sits on a standards committee for medical stimulators. She came back in a day: these are not safety limits, because safety limits are round. Five seconds is a safety limit. Ten milliamps is a safety limit. 4.2 seconds is a decision somebody made about a person.

The second is a historian of Cold War behavioural research. He named the protocol, the archive and the box from the numbers alone, and sent us the finding-aid entry before we asked for it.

> Safety limits are round. Somebody chose 4.2 for a reason and it was not electrical.
>
> — Dr. Ottoline Bashir-Vandermeer

## What 4.2 seconds is for

The 1974 protocol says.

It is the shortest interval at which the subjects in that laboratory did not habituate — the shortest gap between applications that kept the second one working as well as the first.

That is the sentence. It is not a redacted sentence, it is not an inference, and it has been sitting in an open reading room since 1996. By the reading room's own count, four people have called the box up in thirty years.

> **Figure:** Where the four numbers have appeared — see https://theyburied.com/article/six-thousand-pairs-one-schedule

## The paper trail between

The four values do not go straight from 1974 to 2026. They step.

They appear in a state corrections tender in 1993, attached to the phrase *compliance interval*, with no safety standard cited, because no safety standard uses them. They appear again in 2011, in a federal solicitation for a restraint belt, in an annex marked as government furnished, where the word-for-word overlap with the 1974 schedule runs to sixty-one words.

Then in the award package this month, unchanged.

## The answer, and the part of it that matters

The department answered in three days, which is faster than it has ever answered this newspaper, and its answer is printed below without a word taken out.

It confirms the award. It confirms that Attachment C was provided to the vendor as government furnished information, which means the company that will make the gloves did not write the specification and was handed it.

Then it says that a contracting officer receives such material through the requiring activity and is *neither required nor permitted to audit its lineage* — that the question of where the numbers came from is not one the regulations give anybody a place to write down.

We put that to a contracting officer who did the job for nineteen years. He said it is accurate. He also said he had never in his career been asked the question, and that if he had been, he would have had to invent somewhere to put the answer.

## What we could not do

We do not have the unredacted attachment. We have four numbers from two people who recognised them on sight, and the schedule itself is blacked out in the copy anyone can download.

That is a real gap and it is the first thing an honest reader should throw at us. Our request for the unredacted pages is filed. We will publish what comes back, including if what comes back is nothing.

## What this desk takes from it

Not that a programme has run continuously for fifty-two years. We cannot show that and we are not going to imply it.

What we can show is smaller and harder to fix. A number chosen in 1974 because it was the interval at which people stopped getting used to being hurt has been copied forward, by procurement, through three decades and at least three documents, into a purchase order for six thousand pairs of gloves — and the system that carried it has no field anywhere in it for asking where it came from.

The award notice, Attachment C as published, both blind identifications with their timestamps, and the 1974 finding-aid entry are in the vault.

## Sources (invented)

- Dr. Ottoline Bashir-Vandermeer, Electrical safety engineer; sits on a national standards committee for medical stimulators — Sent the four values with no context and asked what they were (21 August 2026)
- Prof. Ignatius Mwangi-Sorbello, Historian of Cold War behavioural research — Sent the same four values separately, with no context and no mention of the first specialist (22 August 2026)
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Office of Public Affairs, and the contracting activity — Written questions 24 August; answer received 27 August (August 2026)
- A former contracting officer, Nineteen years at the department; retired 2023; named in our notes — Interviewed in person, twice, with a second reporter present at the second meeting (August 2026)
- The award notice and Attachment C, Public procurement record — Downloaded from the public award page at no cost (August 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- The unredacted Attachment C. We have the four values from two people who recognised them; we do not have them from the document itself, and until we do this newspaper is relying on other people's memory of a schedule rather than on the schedule. The request is filed and we will publish whatever comes back, including nothing.
- Who inside the department holds the source document. Government furnished information has to come from somewhere and somebody has to sign it out. We have asked for the transmittal and been told it is not a record they hold in that form.
- Whether any pair has been issued. The award is a purchase. We have no evidence of a delivery, a facility, or a person who has worn one, and we are not going to write as though we do.

## Right of reply

**Ellery Dansby-Achterberg, contracting activity, Immigration and Customs Enforcement** (Answered in writing on the third day and asked that the answer not be quoted in part. Printed unedited.):

> I will answer what I can answer and I will be direct about what I will not.
> 
> The award is real. The quantity is six thousand pairs and the value is as you state it. The device is intended for movement of detainees between secure areas and its use is governed by a policy that is published and that you have not read, because you have not asked me for it. I am attaching it. I would rather you wrote about it than about a photocopy from 1974.
> 
> On Attachment C. The technical attachment was provided to the vendor as Government Furnished Information. The vendor did not author it. That is the ordinary position for a performance specification of this type and there is nothing irregular in it.
> 
> I am not able to tell you which office within the Department originated the attachment, and I want to be precise rather than evasive about why: a contracting officer receives government furnished information through the requiring activity and is neither required nor permitted to audit its lineage. I did not ask where the numbers came from. It is not a question the regulations give me a place to write down.
> 
> You will make something of that sentence and I have decided to write it anyway, because the alternative is to imply a diligence the process does not contain.
> 
> What I would say to your readers is this. You have found four numbers in two documents fifty-two years apart and you have written a story in which that is sinister. There is a duller possibility that you have not given the same weight, which is that a specification gets copied forward by people who are measured on delivery and not on provenance, for decades, until nobody in the chain has ever met the reason. I do not know which of those is true here. Neither do you. Your own last section says so, in the first line of it, and I noticed that it does.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.