It's a US embassy. It's full of spy equipment. If it was microwaves, they'd have a full recording of the spectrum and would have probably triangulated it by now.
If I had to guess, my guess would be on the countermeasures deployed there. Critical enough to keep secret even if they knew what was the cause.
I agree that if it was just EM even a undergrad physics lab could've found it in 10 minutes, worth keeping in mind all the wacky shit the KGB used to track people (radioactive dust on shoes for example) - spy tech was insane multiple careers ago, it's probably not gotten worse (although I imagine the internet has killed off a lot of physical spying).
If Los Alamos Labs is any indication, physical spying is still around and kicking but doesn't use traditional movie inspired "agents" just regular people willing to sell to a bidder or who believe in something other than the US.
I’m no spy, but I believe your description of agents has always been true. Note that, outside fiction, “intelligence agent” is distinct from “intelligence officer.” The latter is a professional spy who recruits and handles the former from among regular people who might be leveraged, paid, or ideologically keen.
Only in popularizations are the two roles confused - though I suppose there are rare circumstances in which an officer goes undercover in order to directly pilfer secrets, as opposed to recruiting someone who can. Hard and rare one expects: language, culture and competent counter-intel have made recruiting someone already inside easier and wiser.
Also I don’t think competent professional spies have ever used “movie inspired” anything, but the generous interpretation of your comment assumes you meant the reverse.
But still a poor assumption to think the fiction ever got it right, starting with the confusion over what an “agent” is but including everything else.
Excepting Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” and “The Quiet American,” which I suspect nailed the respective damnfool incompetence and arrogant ignorance of a certain type of mid-century patriot keenly. “Harlot’s Ghost,” though mystical, may also speak bizarro truth.
Spies have historically been unhappy people with personality problems or emotional issues that put them at odds with their own countrymen. Almost 20 years ago I had to go through a bunch of background investigations in the military, and after a couple of interviews a theme emerges making it clear that they were trying to filter out people who basically had self-esteem issues. They definitely try to keep you unaware of what they're really after though, which yields some really weird results. I wonder how that is going now... probably not well.
Anyway, Hollywood spies do kind of exist - but they aren't the Rosenbergs breakdance fighting on a rooftop. They're active duty military on "loan" to the NSA's Special Collection Service. They rarely return to the military, not because a life of blackbag jobs and no stability is fun, but because the military really doesn't want them after the CIA has potentially screwed them up.
I once met someone who went around surreptitiously maintaining recording equipment near airports that tracked tail numbers of landing aircraft. They would have done their work in the 1980s and AFAIU mostly involved retrieving film and tending to cameras positioned in hotel and apartment windows.
I don't know which intelligence agency they worked for, though; not even which country. I presumed they worked for either the U.S. or Israel; probably the latter given the low-tech, laborious method. The person didn't tell me directly. My boss told me about our visitor's career after they left. I was working at a political advocacy organization that promoted U.S.-Israeli security ties and which regularly worked with people--mostly retired--from the intelligence and defense communities.
heh, like I said - the military doesn't want them afterwards. Bill Hicks had a bit about the military's esprit de corps, and how nonsensical it seemed to him - an organization tasked with killing people and breaking things so fixated on old fashioned ideas like honor and a sense of duty. Well the US military has a very long institutional memory and rarely does anything without good reason: the morality conditioning is a very effective, functionally useful, program. They can drop 150 18-year-olds into a distant village for months with little to no supervision and it doesn't devolve into a 24/7 machete-rapefest. Look at what happened in East Germany when an army with no such program rolled in... industrial scale inhumanity. Same thing frequently pops up in Africa when one tribe temporarily becomes king of the hill. Anyway, the "clandestine services" are morally bankrupt and the DoD is aware of how dangerous a game it is to play with people they've invested a lot of time on.
This is obviously just a guess... assuming this took place on US soil: it sounds to me like that dude worked for somebody doing something "extra-legal" and it wasn't the USG. Israeli is a pretty big fan of honeytraps and blackmailing intelligence assets. So that is where I'd put my money.
Also: the civilian side of the US intel industry puts almost zero effort into OPSEC. Just search LinkedIn for prior military who list "remote sensing" or whatever the current euphemism is for NSA stingray tender, you'll get a results page full of laughably low effort cutouts.
IIRC, Europe was mentioned. That doesn't necessarily exclude other countries, including the U.S., but this organization had relationships with and members retired from high-ranking government offices, including CIA directors, defense secretaries, Pentagon leadership, etc. IOW, not the kind of place that would consort (at least knowingly and in the office) with people who directly participated in intelligence operations against the U.S. At least until the Trump Administration current and former officials were still rather hostile to the threat of intelligence operations against them.
I'm always slightly lost when people use movies as a reference when talking about espionage because I even as entertainment pretty much all I consume is non-fiction. When I did eventually consume some le Carre (RIP) I think I enjoyed it much more than I would've done because I understood why he decided to write and the parallels he drew.
One of the most famous examples is Adolf Hitler. Being a bad painter did not pay the bills, so he had a side job for the army checking all kinds of obscure political meetings.
One day he was ordered to verify a DAP meeting, and actually liked what was told. Someone pissed him of, causing him to start one of his famous angry speeches. The DAP was impressed, offered him a position, and the resulting meteoric rise ultimately started a world war.
Weak men with no prospects really are the biggest threat to a society, huh? They'll adopt any position and'll do anything for a mirage of recognition or whatever abates their resentment and perspective of disempowerment. The San Bernardino mass shooter went after women cause girls rejected and emasculated him as he claimed in his video manifesto uploaded to YouTube.
> It's a US embassy. It's full of spy equipment. If it was microwaves, they'd have a full recording of the spectrum and would have probably triangulated it by now.
IIRC, I do not think they're claiming these attacks happen at the embassy itself. My understanding is most, if not all, embassy staff live outside the embassy in local housing, and that most of these events are claimed to have happened there.
So the embassy is probably full of equipment like you describe, but a diplomat's apartment is not. IIRC, earlier, when the government wasn't taking these reports seriously, diplomats were complaining that they weren't being given adequate monitoring equipment [1]/
[1] Their complaints included funny sounds, so they were only given a microphone and has their complaints dismissed when the microphone didn't pick anything unusual up. Apparently microwaves can also trigger the (false) perception of sound, but they were not given anything to detect those.
My understanding was that objective physiological differences were found in the original group reporting "Havana Syndrome", and clearly the government is still claiming it is real. Your link doesn't mention Havana at all - why do you think this case was mass hysteria? I'm aware that hysteria can cause physiological symptoms to some extent, but this doesn't read to me like something that was purely psychosomatic.
So they did MRIs, but I read some pretty intelligent commentary from someone that worked with MRIs in a lab setting. Essentially what they said is there's enough variation in brains and MRI data that if you go looking for differences in an open ended way, you'll find them. That's apparently why the criteria for diagnosing based on MRI are very narrow and specific.
Additionally, everyone keeps insinuating this is Russia, but I have yet to see a single person articulate an answer to "what does this actually accomplish?" that wasn't empty blather. Moreover, to carry out some similar attack in a variety of nations around the world would take an enormous investment in resources, and would carry a grave risk of exposure. Again, to accomplish what exactly?
The proposed mechanisms don't hold water either. Ultrasound doesn't go through masonry walls. Microwaves struggle to as well, but also embassy's are bristling with spectrum monitoring equipment. If someone was blasting buildings with RF they'd know it.
My personal view is something did happen in Havana, and organophosphate exposure seems the most likely to me. They fumigate way over health limits in the rich part of the city, and I could see embassy staff not acclimatized to it having a reaction.
Once the idea of a mystery weapon attacking embassy staff idea was planted in the minds of our diplomatic core, at that point I think it turned into hysteria. Suggestion is powerful and the human mind is definitively irrational.
I'll be glad to change my mind if anyone comes up with evidence that motivates it. Absent that I'm not going to assume an elaborate clandestine attack vs more banal explanations.
Many people seem to have this irrational bias that "nothing ever happens". If they hear of an event or phenomenon that doesn't fit into their model of the world, then it must be that the event was hallucinated, regardless of how much evidence there is.
We understand so little about the brain I'm not sure how meaningful a label like FNSD is. I bet there are a bunch of issues that could be classified as FNSD today but will be one day understood as different well-defined disorders. And there are a lot of diseases with complicated interplay between inherent biology and the environment.
Russia says they've been working on "psychotronic weapons" that sound very similar to Havana Syndrome[1]. Nobody in the mainstream media believes this is real though. Since the consensus seems to be that it's not real, they will never ever get to the bottom of it, at least officially. BTW, this all started after a whole bunch of mysterious deaths of Russian diplomats.[2]. What I think is going on here is that there's some spy war that involves weapons that the people conducting it would rather the public didn't know about, so they are dancing around the issue and act like they wish people would stop asking about it.
Yeah nobody thought remote viewing was a thing until it was said to be real, and Russia was experimenting with it I think before the U.S. did according to a documentary I passively watched.
"The microwave auditory effect, also known as the microwave hearing effect or the Frey effect, consists of the human perception of audible clicks, or even speech, induced by pulsed or modulated radio frequencies. The communications are generated directly inside the human head without the need of any receiving electronic device."
Ah interesting. I’ve been wondering if the victims could have at the time expected any extra compensation, early retirement or monetary for being injured on the job. Does the State Department or CIA make that public?
I can believe some were injured by one of the methods discussed. But I can also believe many noticed they could also claim to have been affected too.
So a bunch of government employees all somehow trip and fell on the job and got the same exact injury, but only in specific geographic locations, mostly in Cuba. Got it, makes perfect sense </sarcasm>
One trips and falls, maybe a few more. The rest are not stupid and realize they too can claim they heard sounds, felt dizzy, had weakness and difficulty concentrating. Especially, if they watched their highly sought after post in Havana now possibly shutting down with the new administration at the time. They get to retire early and get extra benefits for being injured on the job by the “enemy”.
It's important to realise long covid is a large part the same as the Havana Syndrome. You'll notice the similar symptoms in many cases. Like foggy memory.
People have been hurt by the lockdown mentally. Lost friends and so much more.
Mass psychogenic illness (mass hysteria is the old name) is a legitimate disease.
But if you don't address it head on, you help no one.
I've been fasciated by this story since it was first reported on in 2016. What better threat to America than one that's invisible, difficult to detect, and strategically only seems to affect American citizens?
American embassies affected? Microwaves?
This is new communication equipment.
Improperly shielded or malfunctioning.
They can't admit it at this point in time.
I take every CIA press release with a huge grain of salt as it is. But a presser about a mysterious ailment heavily suggested to be an attack perpetrated by Cuba, at a time when American media is hyping "anti-government" protests in Cuba, and U.S. officials are calling for more action to be taken against Cuba as a result?
It's not heavily suggested by the CIA to have been perpetrated by Cuba; I think that's an incorrect assumption on your part.
Since the incidents, involving up to 130 U.S. personnel, have happened in Cuba, China, Russia, and elsewhere (including at least one possible incident inside the U.S.) it would have to be someone with the resources to carry out such attacks across the world (and the CIA director said as much if you listen to the interview). The most likely culprit being eyed by Pentagon officials is Russia (as previously reported[1]), but the CIA director chose not to name names during this latest interview even when directly asked if it was Russia.
Logic tell me that "it would have to be someone with the resources to carry out such attacks across the world" 99% point to USA?
Not trying to disclaim you, but this part of reasoning seems rather weird. Even China has more global influence than Russia? Or even UK, France, German.
If you think this attack by "enemy", why not just kill someone? I mean, given the length of what's happening, it must be that there is no way to obtain concrete evidences.
Russia would know for sure that US would accuse Russia anyway, even without any concrete evidences; which has been the behavior pattern of US for quite a long time.
Turns out that, if we follow logic, then we can fairly sure that this is indeed a unsolved case. And more investigation is needed. And that's what CIA chief is doing, and I think CIA chief is doing something right.
Russia and China easily have the resources to carry out clandestine ops around the world. Given that this seems to do with signals / electronics, it may not require particularly large teams or equipment.
I think many more countries could do this around the world... I'm not sure about Cuba, but maybe even yes.
> Don’t be daft, you’re sitting there lapping up the propaganda without thinking about it.
This isn't only harsh, it's also wrong. There was no special press conference to announce it. The news is reported by the media. CIA on the news! Big deal.
As for why now, who knows, but if it's something that occurs occasionally without explanation, five years and counting, in the American soil even, then any intelligent agency worth their salt would put resource to solve the mystery.
Perhaps it's you who leap to conclusion without thinking?
Oh come on, just a random interview. Right. Yep, I’m sure that happens all the time.
…oh wait, no, it doesn’t.
I’ll say it again: it is naive to assume that this is not orchestrated by a press division. Any vague hand waving to the contrary simply doesn’t acknowledge the reality of how media content is produced.
> As for why now, who knows…
Believe what you want to believe I guess.
Maybe you’re right, maybe they just wanted to let us know their doing their jobs now, because they’re feeling nice, or like, it happened to come up in the interview.
…but, in my view, people can, do and and will continue do their jobs without making media content for it.
When media content like this appears, it is orchestrated.
You hit the nail on the head. This is old news; they've been investigating this for years.
They chose now of all times, with the protests going on in Cuba and U.S. officials openly calling for U.S. intervention, to release another presser about a years-old story which gins up negative sentiment against Cuba.
"In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, Burns also discussed the CIA's future in Afghanistan and the theory that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by a leak from a Chinese state-run laboratory in Wuhan."
This was not a random press conference organized just to loud speak the words "Havana syndrome". It's almost like you didn't even read the linked article.
Do you think that the majority of people read the full article?
Do you think the CIA thinks the majority of people read the full article?
Do you think the CIA engages honestly with the press to simply provide information to the public?
GP's analysis is correct: the CIA knows that people will read vaguely and shallowly and take away a confused anti-cuban sentiment, and this is their intended outcome. "Heavily suggested" doesn't mean "actually, if you read the full article, they didn't say that", it means they're heavily trying to suggest this.
>the CIA knows that people will read vaguely and shallowly and take away a confused anti-cuban sentiment, and this is their intended outcome
If the CIA's goal were to foment anti-Cuban sentiment in relation to Havana Syndrome, why would they have the press write articles which don't blame Cuba, and depend on the public not actually reading those articles but still making the connection by vague association... rather than simply blaming Cuba, so the articles would blame Cuba, and even people who read the articles would make that association directly?
You're reaching. This isn't part of some subtle CIA propaganda double fake, it's just the result of Hacker News preferring to depend on commenters to provide context for articles they don't read.
Because directly blaming Cuba would be all downside, no upside. If they directly and straightforwardly blamed Cuba, Serious Readers might actually wonder about their basis for doing so (as there isn't one), and might actually think critically about what they're reading. But if they blare "HAVANA SYNDROME" at the top, the majority take the intended message, and the Serious Readers say "well it's all very complex, there's a lot we don't know, who can say?"
Of course it’s been heavily suggested! They have been openly hypothesizing this is some sort of directed microwave attack on people, from Cuba.
Articles by the NYT initially put the microwave hypothesis hand in hand with strained US-Cuba relations!
Of course now it’s being revealed that people in other countries are having it so it’s hard. But they’re actively implying this is some microwave super weapon (it feels so absurd that when talking about it even Obama alum Ben Rhodes basically talks about it as “allegedly some weapon thing” in a “don’t believe that” theory).
I’m curious what is going on here too, but definitely don’t believe the weapon hypothesis compared to the much more banal explanations that we all know.
It was "hypothesizing this is some sort of directed microwave attack on people, from Cuba", because it originated from Havana, Cuba, affecting Americans, Cuba's adversary. Once it started to appear in other locations, even in DC, that isn't main hypothesis anymore.
> definitely don’t believe the weapon hypothesis compared to the much more banal explanations that we all know.
Although nobody knows what is behind the phenomenon, you must admit that it's strange that it seems to only occur to American staff at those locations. It may not be a weapon, but it does seem to target American facilities. For all we know it could be a malfunctioning American system inside those locations.
> heavily suggested to be an attack perpetrated by Cuba
Every article I read has suggested Russia may be likely, but only as an early suggestion, and they only used "Havana" because that's where the initial incident took place.
This is why reading articles is important.
Much like the people who can't get over the simple "UK strain" or "South Korean variant" of COVID merely because it was initially identified in those countries.
What is the practical benefit in assigning the variants names based on the country of first detection? What happens when a second new variant is detected in South Korea? (in reality, it seems no novel strains have yet been detected there: search "Korea" on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2)
No valuable time is wasted plucking letters out of the Greek alphabet. The names are easy to remember. As long as they are applied consistently, who cares?
> What is the practical benefit in assigning the variants names based on the country of first detection?
It's really easy and natural to do that, since the name evolves straight out of the conversation. Especially when it's something new, unknown, and no one really understands what's going on.
> No valuable time is wasted plucking letters out of the Greek alphabet. The names are easy to remember. As long as they are applied consistently, who cares?
That's an artificial naming convention that had to be designed. And it might not be as practical as you assume it is. IIRC, NOAA recently abandoned a similar Greek-letter naming convention.
Some valuable time is also wasted with people needing to answer "WTF is that?" when all the sudden sources start talk about stuff like the "Beta variant," or people having to explicitly explain connections that would have been clear with a geographic name. As someone who has been following the news, the headline "India variant 2x more transmissible than UK variant," would have let me skip reading the article, since it told me everything new I needed to know (e.g. India outbreak caused by new more transmissible variant).
Fortunately there's a little extra capacity available by using Greek ligatures/numerals like "stigma". It's a ligature combining "sigma" and "tau", and is also used as a numeral representing the number 6.
I don't get the logic behind terming "China virus" as malicious use, while we call past viruses names such as "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome" and "Spanish flu" and "Japanese encephalitis". The only difference between one and the rest is that its host country it was named after raised a ruckus about it in a highly biased and obliging media under a belligerent president, while the other countries either did not care enough in the past or in the present.
Originally people were using "Wuhan Flu", which was consistent with norms. Then the CCP launched a massive international PR campaign to declare that racist. Then the CCP started domestically claiming it was from the American government and calling it the American virus. At this time Andrew Cuomo was calling it "a European virus" to appease China.
So Trump started saying "China virus" out of spite. Trump supporters followed suit.
If you read up about this, there are multiple very reliable sources for different attacks of this nature, in various locations, most not tied to Cuba in any way, going back quite a few years now. I especially recommend Marc Polymeropoulos as a source: 26 years in the intelligence service and was a target.
Given the CIA's well-documented history of openly lying to the public (Colin Powell comes to mind), I don't consider a 26-year member of the CIA to be a particularly reliable source.
I'm not denying that this could all be true. Even if it's true, the timing of this press release with everything else going on about Cuba in the news is a very obvious strategic play. This is old news, why release a new statement about it right now of all times?
Any intelligence service worth their salt (I can't get away from the salt theme today) would obviously use media statements as part of their strategy. It stands to reason that anything the CIA says or does in the public sphere is well-planned and has intention behind it that we can only guess at.
There are also some well documented competence problems.
In the mid 2000s the Canadian Mint was briefly stamping poppies into their coins and putting a red enamel on them to commemorate remembrance day.
A CIA employee found one in his pocket coming back from Canada and claimed the Canadian government was planting listening devices on a coin to record him.
Just my reaction take on the Marc Polymeropoulos guy, i watched some videos and i don't trust him. Feels like they made up a story and he is the designated person to tell it. Also maybe unrelated how come he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry?
Why would anyone trust someone who worked for or works for the CIA exactly? Their job is to lie to people and be good at it.
And aggression against Cuba by the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus has been going on for six decades. Accompanying that has been numerous press releases, op-eds, and articles over the years attempting to sway public opinion towards U.S. intervention in Cuba. This fits right into that pattern. I'm not saying it DEFINITELY is that, hence the "grain of salt" phrase - I just view any CIA statement relating to Cuba with a huge degree of skepticism. That's all.
Attacks targeting U.S. intelligence personnel were reported, beginning in late 2017, in locations around the world, including in Moscow, Russia; Poland; Tbilisi, Georgia; Taiwan and Australia;[82] other reports came from Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Austria, among other countries.
Look, I don't agree with US policy towards Cuba but arguing that the whole thing is a PR campaign isn't very persuasive either. It might be a case of psychological contagion among a relatively small and insular community (ie the diplomatic corps) or it might have some factual basis. There's some evidence (detailed elsewhere in this thread) to suggest the latter.
Skepticism is good, but I think your argument here is mere contrarianism.
There is no sway and if so by who? I think you may be nitpicking. Don’t forget the Cuban thaw under Obama. Instead of following the media, follow actual policy. I have no doubt Biden will follow suit with Obama’s policy on Cuba.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. The Cuban thaw under Obama was largely reversed by Trump, and Biden has not done much of anything to relax the embargo again since his term began (but correct me if that's wrong).
Any press release is a form of PR, and the CIA is no different. Government officials release press statements all the time in order to sway public opinion on a specific issue.
In recent history, the buildup to the Iraq War is a perfect example, in the way that demonstrably false statements to the media and deliberate misdirection were used to gin up public support for the war. There are several great documentaries, books, and podcasts that go over it in great detail. I highly recommend looking into that period of time as an example of what I mean by "sway."
> Accompanying that has been numerous press releases, op-eds, and articles over the years attempting to sway public opinion towards U.S. intervention in Cuba.
My point is that your statement above is made incorrect by actual policy.
> was largely reversed by Trump
Again you are incorrect. Trump actually made very little changes.
EDIT: I'm still not sure what you mean by "incorrect when it comes to actual policy," in case that wasn't clear. The policy of the U.S. has been to prevent Cuba from engaging in international trade as a sovereign nation for decades. That is still the case. Even during the pandemic, Cuba was not allowed to receive vaccine supplies from the international community, and had to develop their own. What is that if not an act of aggression?
What Trump says and does are two different things. Follow the policy. He never actually reversed it.
> EDIT: I'm still not sure what you mean by "incorrect when it comes to actual policy," in case that wasn't clear. The policy of the U.S. has been to prevent Cuba from engaging in international trade as a sovereign nation for decades. That is still the case.
There cannot be a campaign to sway public opinion for US intervention when there has been a policy in effect for the warming of relations for the last 7 years. It's a contradiction in policy.
> There cannot be a campaign to sway public opinion for US intervention when there has been a policy in effect for the warming of relations for the last 7 years. It's a contradiction in policy.
That is simply not true. I don't know how you can see the current situation as "warming" just because a few select economic interests have access to the island now - the vast, vast majority of trade and economic activity is still blocked by the United States. I'll repeat again that pandemic aid of all things isn't even allowed in.
Also, it is absolutely the case that different areas of the U.S. government can have seemingly different attitudes and policies towards certain issues. The government is not a monolith, and the intelligence apparatus especially is almost completely unaccountable to any outside interests, including Congress and the judiciary. Your assumption that that "oh well Obama let cruise ships go there again, so the CIA must have completely given up their decades-long goal of overthrowing the Cuban government" is way off.
EDIT: and before you say something like "the CIA is beholden to the executive branch, so they must be in sync" I'll just repeat again that your view of the policy as "warming" is a big stretch. TL;DR: Obama's slight relaxation of the embargo doesn't mean that the intelligence services don't still want to destabilize the Cuban government and pursue U.S. intervention, and if that is the case, press releases to gin up anti-Cuban sentiment would be part of that playbook. Those are absolutely still compatible. I rest my case.
The name is the thing. For the same reason people didn't like when Covid was referred to as "the China Flu." The name creates a negative association. Names, phrasing, and associations can be very powerful.
So despite all the evidence in the article, you're going to assert that the CIA, despite explicitly saying they don't know where exactly it comes from, is trying to blame Cuba for it to destabilize them, because of the name?
You realize part of the issue with the "China Flu" label was conservatives beating the shit out of Asians?
You realize that there are no reports of US citizens beating the shit out of Cubans because of Havana syndrome? And that a niche affliction in the foreign service is different than a pandemic killing 600,000 domestically?
You're reading too far into what I'm saying. I was not likening it to the phrase "China flu" in that I think the CIA is encouraging hate crimes against Cubans. I'm saying that the name of any phenomenon is able to generate an association and a sentiment about what it's named after.
> you're going to assert that the CIA, despite explicitly saying they don't know where exactly it comes from
The CIA has a long and well-documented history of lying to the public. I'm not asserting that I know what's going on, I'm asserting that the CIA has previously used interviews and media statements to influence public opinion about countries the U.S. is seeking to destabilize. Colin Powell is the most famous and egregious example in recent history. This is obviously not as overt as what Powell did, but every statement the CIA makes to the media should be viewed in that context.
Are you thinking about the naming of COVID variants? That was a decision by the WHO - that's not relevant here, and 'Havana Syndrome' was named before that decision anyway.
If you hire medical personnel to determine if havana syndrome is real, and if they say its not real then their position goes away, of course they will say it is real and serious.
It's disturbing that our intelligence apparatus seems unable to accept the obvious conclusion that Havana Syndrome is mass hysteria. I fear they're caught in some sort of loop where investigating it _creates_ cases, which increases their certainty, which causes them to allocate more resources to investigating it, etc.
this is not just a mass hysteria/placebo/negative-placebo effect.
"Among patients compared with controls, there were significantly greater ventral diencephalon and cerebellar gray matter volumes and significantly smaller frontal, occipital, and parietal lobe white matter volumes; significantly lower mean diffusivity in the inferior vermis of the cerebellum (patients: 7.71 × 10−4 mm2/s; controls: 8.98 × 10−4 mm2/s; difference, −1.27 × 10−4 [95% CI, −1.93 × 10−4 to −6.17 × 10−5] mm2/s; P < .001); and significantly lower mean functional connectivity in the auditory subnetwork (patients: 0.45; controls: 0.61; difference, −0.16 [95% CI, −0.26 to −0.05]; P = .003) and visuospatial subnetwork (patients: 0.30; controls: 0.40; difference, −0.10 [95% CI, −0.16 to −0.04]; P = .002) but not in the executive control subnetwork (patients: 0.24; controls: 0.25; difference: −0.016 [95% CI, −0.04 to 0.01]; P = .23).
I don't have the expertise to critique these findings, but they smell very weird (tiny sample size, control group that seems weirdly specific), and "an investigation that seems incredibly motivated by a particular conclusion managed to find the evidence it was looking for" still makes a lot more sense than, "some organization is injuring US diplomats, all over the world, with no clear goals or demands, with a wide constellation of symptoms, that an awful lot like mass hysteria."
If there's really a there there and they solve the "who, what, why", then I'm happy to eat crow. But I don't think they will because I don't think there is.
> I don't have the expertise to critique these findings, but they smell very weird (tiny sample size, control group that seems weirdly specific)
Huh? I think you're misunderstanding the situation here and misapplying a heuristic. That sample size of 40 people may be the universe of cases (at the time) or a significant fraction of it, and I don't know what could be "weirdly specific" about "48 demographically similar healthy controls."
Perhaps there's a nuance I'm missing, but it's odd to me that you'd look at 48 _government employees_ and not as many people off the street of a similar age etc. as you could afford. Is there reason to believe people who work in government have different brains? Are we trying to see if these government employees are different than other government employees, or that they're different from _people in general_?
40 is a significant fraction of 200, but it's still a small number. You subject 40 people to a whole battery of imaging and examination, and I'm sure you'll find something odd in at least one of the tests. "Intensive and repeated investigation of a small population yields artifacts, and there is no plot" seems the stronger case to me.
If there is a plot, then I'm sure the CIA can solve it. That's what they do, and they have all the resources in the world to do it. If they don't solve it, then I think we should accept that there was no plot and that mass hysteria is the best explanation. Similarly if they do solve it, then we have to accept that.
Several years in, the explanations are shifting and vague, which is the hallmark of mirage.
I think you need before and after comparisons, because people "who believe they were subject to weird stuff have smaller brains" might be confusing cause and effect
>It's disturbing that our intelligence apparatus seems unable to accept the obvious conclusion that Havana Syndrome is mass hysteria
They are intentionally ignoring the possibility. The major report released by the government claiming microwave attacks was the most likely stated that a psychogenic cause fit all available evidence but they lacked the psychiatric evaluations to call it the cause.
I don't think it's 'mass hysteria' - There is lots of evidence that suggests whatever people were exposed to caused some form of brain damage confirmed by MRI scans.[0]
They just cant figure out exactly what caused it. I think a recent study pointed towards pesticides, but the evidence was pretty lacking.
I really doubt that 'mass hysteria' is causing people to get brain damage that shows up on MRI scans.
That is complete nonsense. The study you're quoting was discredited. They essentially grouped a bunch of random symptoms together and said they were the same thing. If you run enough tests for different things you'll eventually find something "wrong", that doesn't mean there actually is.
People can't walk, have semi or permanent headaches, have to retire early, etc. People's families (including children) have been seriously ill as well.
And you are convinced hundreds of people are making this up?
You're being downvoted as if the U.S. intelligence apparatus hasn't done this before. Using media statements to sway public opinion on specific issues is a standard part of their playbook and has been for decades.
This quote seems to suggest that they've ruled Cuba out:
> The director says he is seriously considering the "very strong possibility" that the syndrome is the result of intentional actions, adding that there are a limited number of "potential suspects" with the capability to carry out an action so widely across the globe.
The US has diplomatic and economic relationships with plenty of oppressive regimes around the world, not sure why Cuba should be an exception. Aside from some 60-year-old egg on their face related to failed coup attempts, that is (though in this case, bacon may be the better breakfast food analogy).
It's a US embassy. It's full of spy equipment. If it was microwaves, they'd have a full recording of the spectrum and would have probably triangulated it by now.
If I had to guess, my guess would be on the countermeasures deployed there. Critical enough to keep secret even if they knew what was the cause.