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nicklloydnow · 2 years

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“It wasn’t until Polymeropoulos got home to the Virginia suburbs that it occurred to him that what had happened in Moscow was possibly the result of something far more sinister that what he’d originally suspected. In February, after a few weeks of relative normalcy, he started feeling an intense and painful pressure that started in the back of his head and radiated forward into his face. He went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who, Polymeropoulos says, thought it might be a sinus infection. But Polymeropoulos’s scans were clear, and a course of antibiotics did not alleviate the pain. If anything, it was growing steadily worse. The vertigo and nausea came roaring back. His ears started ringing again. His brain was swathed in a dense fog. By March, his long-distance vision started going and he could no longer drive. Repeated MRI and CAT scans showed nothing suspicious, but Polymeropoulos was now feeling so ill that he started calling out sick.

There was no way this was all the result of food poisoning two months prior, Polymeropoulos realized. But what could it have been? He told me his colleagues at the CIA believed he could have been the target of some kind of technical attack in Moscow. But what kind? Polymeropoulos wondered if the Russians had inadvertently injured him while trying to collect the data in his phone remotely. It was the kind of thing all intelligence services did, the Americans included. Polymeropoulos figured the Russians had just “turned up the juice too much.”

But as his symptoms grew worse, Polymeropoulos and his Agency colleagues noticed that his symptoms lined up with those of American diplomats who had apparently been attacked in Havana.

In late 2016, some two dozen Americans stationed in the revived embassy in Cuba began reporting strange new phenomena. Some heard a strange noise—sometimes high-pitched, sometimes low—and felt a sudden pressure in the skull. Others heard nothing at all, but many of them developed vertigo and nausea, and had trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, persistent headaches, and changes in vision and hearing. Like Polymeropoulos’s constellation of symptoms, some of these effects waxed and waned at seemingly random intervals, while others seemed impossible to cure—all to maddening effect.

As word of what was happening in Havana seeped out into the press, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the events, but no one, not even the CIA, knew for certain who was responsible—or even what had happened. Some speculated that it had been an acoustic attack. Some believed the culprits were hardliners in the Cuban security services who had been determined to sabotage Havana’s new détente with Washington. Still others believed it was all made up, the product of paranoid imaginations or collective anxiety.

Some of the two dozen Americans affected in Havana had been CIA officers under diplomatic cover. Though these apparent attacks baffled officials at the Agency, there was growing suspicion inside CIA headquarters, according to two sources familiar with the discussions, that these attacks had been the work of Russian security services. It was not a wild stretch, and many in Washington’s foreign policy and national security universe were thinking along the same lines. Since 2014, the Russians had become increasingly brazen in going after the U.S. and its allies, and they had every reason to peel their old Cuban allies away from the Americans’ embrace. “These guys have been told they can take the gloves off and do whatever they want to hurt Americans,” says a former national security official. “They’re trying to weaken us generally, and they’ve obviously taken the gloves off quite some time ago.”

(…)

Meanwhile, the roster of victims was growing ever longer. In June 2018, the U.S. State Department evacuated nearly a dozen people from Guangzhou, China, where American diplomats and trade representatives reported feeling symptoms eerily similar to those their colleagues had experienced in Cuba. One victim, Catherine Werner, said that her symptoms began in late 2017, just as Polymeropoulos’s had: a splitting headache, nausea, loss of balance. When her mother went to Guangzhou to help her, she, too, fell ill. Even Werner’s dogs were affected, her mother told NBC News. They began vomiting blood and avoiding the room where Werner and her mother heard the sounds and felt the symptoms start.

(…)

Yet Polymeropoulos was still having trouble getting the CIA’s medical bureaucracy to take his condition seriously. As far as they were concerned, he says, he had passed the test they had administered, even though they could not explain his persistent migraine. Frustrated by their inability to help him, Polymeropoulos asked OMS to refer him to the Center for Brain Injury and Repair, at the University of Pennsylvania, where some of the Havana victims had gone for treatment. The team had published a study in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association about what had come to be widely known as the Havana Syndrome. They evaluated 21 of the Havana victims and found the kind of damage to cognitive, balance, motor, and sensory functions associated with a severe concussion. Unlike with most concussions, however, these symptoms did not quickly dissipate. Instead, they lasted for months, waxing and waning over time.

The neurologists at the University of Pennsylvania found that some explanations for the Havana Syndrome, including mass hysteria and group psychosis, were highly unlikely. Many of the patients didn’t know each other, their performance on these tests could not have been faked, and they did not wallow in their pain. In fact, according to the study, they were desperately trying to get better and “were largely determined to continue to work or return to full duty, even when encouraged by health care professionals to take sick leave.” The study also concluded that these injuries were likely not caused by exposure to chemicals, since no organs other than the brain were involved. Nor were they likely to have been the product of a viral infection, the doctors said, because these patients did not display associated symptoms, like a spiking fever. Still, the University of Pennsylvania researchers couldn’t explain what actually had happened to these patients. Their brain scans were basically normal, and the doctors could not fathom what could have caused this kind of brain injury, one that refused to heal. “These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma,” the study’s authors concluded. Doctors and patients began referring to it as the “immaculate concussion.”

In the spring of 2018, a private neurologist gave Polymeropoulos a diagnosis: occipital neuralgia, a condition resulting from damage to the two nerves that run from the base of the skull, curving toward the front of the head. Despite the private diagnosis, Polymeropoulos says the Agency kept refusing to refer him to the University of Pennsylvania, telling him it wasn’t necessary.

As he grasped for an explanation, Polymeropoulos was paying careful attention to what was being discovered about the incidents in Cuba and China. By the summer of 2018, scientists, intelligence officials, and journalists were zeroing in on a potential culprit: microwave weapons.

The notion of weaponizing microwaves dates back to the Cold War, when, in 1961, an American biologist named Allan Frey discovered that irradiating a human head with microwaves could produce the sensation of sound—even in deaf ears, even from thousands of feet away. Playing with the frequency and intensity of the microwave beam could produce a range of different sensations in a person. In 2018, Frey told the New York Times that the Soviets took immediate notice of his work and flew him to Moscow, where they squired him around secret military facilities and asked him to give lectures about the effects of microwaves on the brain.

As the Cold War progressed, both the United States and the Soviet Union raced to find military uses for what came to be called directed energy weapons. American researchers had studied things like beaming words into subjects’ heads—great for psychological warfare—while also researching the thermal aspects of microwaves. Packaged in the right way, researchers theorized, a microwave weapon could be mounted on a truck, where it could cast a beam outward to create an invisible barrier anywhere, anytime, capable of immobilizing any person who got within its range. This research ultimately culminated in the development of a weapon the Pentagon calls an Active Denial System, or ADS. In a video touting its capabilities, the U.S. military boasts that this highly portable weapon can be attached to a military vehicle and used to direct precise beams of electromagnetic radiation at, say, an armed militant in a crowd or a suspicious person approaching a military checkpoint. The beam would instantaneously produce a sensation of heat on the skin, which would trigger a person’s reflex to flee. (This summer, a military official inquired about deploying the technology against American protesters who flooded into the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest police brutality.)

On the other side of the world, the Soviets focused on the non-thermal applications of microwave radiation. A 1976 report compiled by the Pentagon’s intelligence branch, the Defense Intelligence Agency, reviewed Soviet research on the topic. The report detailed Moscow’s investigation of the effects of microwaves on the nervous system. Soviet, and later Russian, scientists found that exposing an animal’s brain to microwaves changed the frequency at which neurons fired. Neurons also became suddenly out of sync with one another. Some brain cells in mice were found to have withered. Nerves became damaged. The radiation also showed the potential to disturb the sacrosanct blood-brain barrier and, according to the DIA, resulted in “the alterations of brain function.” The most common symptoms reported in humans who had been exposed to microwaves for long periods of time sounded familiar: headache, fatigue, perspiration, dizziness, insomnia, depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, and lack of concentration.

Like Frey, Soviet researchers found that turning the intensity of the beam up or down could produce differing effects in its target. A target’s unique physiology—a slightly different curvature of the skull, for example—also determined how this directed energy would affect them. A weapon that created an ever-changing kaleidoscope of neurological symptoms would have a powerful psychological dimension. If everyone’s symptoms are all slightly different, victims might question whether they’d all been exposed to the same thing—or if they’d been hit at all.

In September 2018, a California physician and scientist named Beatrice Golomb published a paper that tried to link the suffering of American diplomats to directed microwaves. She connected what came to be known as the Frey effect—using microwaves to create the false sensation of sound—with the fact that some, but not all, of the diplomats in Havana reported hearing the kinds of noise described by Allan Frey. This would suggest that these symptoms were not the result of sonic attacks, as some had speculated. She also offered an insight that could explain Polymeropoulos’s persistent migraines. “Brain injury may be a predisposing factor for…[microwave] injury,” she wrote. That is, people like Polymeropoulos, who was frequently around explosions in his time in Middle Eastern war zones, may be especially vulnerable to brain injury from directed microwave weapons.

(…)

Not all scientists agree with Golomb’s conclusions, and some challenge her methodology. Andrei Pakhomov, a scientist who studied microwaves both in Russia and in the United States and wrote a comprehensive review of Soviet research on the subject, told me he is still not convinced that microwaves could do this kind of damage. Douglas Smith, a neurosurgeon who heads the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair and was the principal investigator on the JAMA study, says he doesn’t understand how microwaves could target an organ so precisely, damaging the brain but not any peripheral nerves. Still, the fact that the Havana victims felt the buzzing and tingling on one side of their face, or that the sensation stopped when they moved to another room, indicated to Smith that these injuries were caused by some kind of directed energy weapon. “We believe there was something directed, but we don’t know what it was,” he told me. “It is quite a mystery. There’s no question that something happened, but there’s not a fingerprint for this kind of injury.”

(…)

Sitting in his office in Langley, Polymeropoulos was convinced he knew who was behind these apparent attacks: Moscow. He had been charged with pushing back against the Russians, and now, he figured, the Russians were retaliating, including against him personally. Without conclusive intelligence linking the attacks to the Kremlin, however, there was little he could do. As the 2018 holiday season—and the one-year anniversary of that night in the Marriott—rolled around, Polymeropoulos had an idea. It was customary for the heads of the Russian and American clandestine services to exchange holiday cards. By now he understood the Russians well enough to know that the ritual of these kinds of holiday swaps was extremely important in Russian culture, especially in the world of Russian bureaucracy. It was a sign of respect and an acknowledgment of status. Before the cards went out, Polymeropoulos wrote to the new CIA director, his old comrade Gina Haspel, and asked her not to send holiday cards to the Russians that year. According to sources familiar with the incident, Polymeropoulos had hit his mark: The Russians were furious.

(…)

Polymeropoulos was still in touch with his friends and colleagues at Langley, and what they told him alarmed him. Apparent attacks were continuing around the world. Two sources with knowledge of the situation—and who asked for anonymity to discuss matters that they did not have authorization to disclose to the press—told me about the ongoing attacks. In the fall of 2019, two top CIA officials, both in the clandestine service, traveled to Australia to meet with officials in that country’s spy agency. (Australia is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance with the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and New Zealand.) While in their hotel rooms in Australia, both of the Americans felt it: the strange sound, the pressure in their heads, the ringing in their ears. According to these sources, they became nauseous and dizzy. They then traveled on to Taiwan to meet with intelligence officials there. They felt it again while in their hotel rooms on the island.

By now, this was no longer a novel occurrence, and CIA people had come to call it “getting hit.” One senior intelligence officer in EEMC, the Center Polymeropoulos used to run, had gotten hit twice while traveling under cover, first in Poland in the spring of 2019, then again in Tbilisi, Georgia, that fall. He, too, was diagnosed with occipital neuralgia and experienced symptoms similar to Polymeropoulos’s. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

According to these sources, the attacks were becoming increasingly daring: One of the CIA officials hit in Australia and Taiwan was among the agency’s five highest-ranking officials.

(…)

Whoever was behind the attacks also began going after Americans on American soil. An American diplomat and his spouse, who had been hit when they were stationed in China, traveled to Philadelphia to get specialized treatment at the University of Pennsylvania. One night in June 2018, according to three government sources, the couple was startled awake by a sound and pressure in their heads similar to what they had felt back in China. On the advice of FBI agents, the family moved to a hotel, but on their second night there, they were again awoken in the early morning hours. Terrified, the parents ran into the room where their children were sleeping to find them moving in their sleep, bizarrely and in unison. In the weeks afterward, the children developed vision and balance difficulties. The family members, whose identities GQ is not revealing for privacy reasons, declined to be interviewed for this story. “I can’t say anything about that,” says attorney Janine Brookner, who represents the family.

Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.

(…)

In the meantime, a team was assembled at Langley to investigate the incidents overseas. Investigators came to believe that the injuries to victims’ brains were caused by a microwave weapon, which could be beamed at its target through walls and windows, and could even be effective from a couple miles away. Given the work Polymeropoulos and his team had been doing to thwart the Russians since 2017, and the fact that much of the scientific literature on the biological effects of microwaves had been published in the Soviet Union and Russia, it seemed plausible to the investigators that the Russians could be behind this.

The most compelling evidence, however, came from publicly available data. As has been widely reported, mobile phones track people’s movements, and location-data companies accumulate this information and sell it. Using this sort of data, CIA investigators were able to deduce the whereabouts of Russian agents, and place them in close physical proximity to the CIA officers at the time they had been attacked when they were in Poland, Georgia, Australia, and Taiwan. In each case, individuals believed to be FSB agents were within range of the CIA officers who had been hit in 2019. In two of the incidents, location data apparently showed FSB agents in the same hotel at the same time their targets experienced the onset of symptoms.

(…)

The attacks on CIA officers infuriated people in the Agency. “There’s a gentlemen’s agreement not to do these things,” Polymeropoulos explained. “There’s never any physical stuff.” (When I asked him if the CIA had ever physically hurt Russians when he was running EEMC, Polymeropoulos was adamant, saying, “We never harm other officials like that. It’s counterproductive.”) But the Russian government was clearly feeling more emboldened. “They know that our president is at war with our intelligence community, so kick them when they’re down, get back at them for everything they’ve done before,” the former national security official told me. “It’s a kick in the balls, isn’t it?” Whatever punishment Washington had meted out for, say, meddling in the 2016 election was clearly not deterring the Russians. “The Russians have factored all this in,” the former national security official said. “They don’t care about sanctions.” As a result, the Russians seemed to be going further than ever. In 2019, according to two sources, Russian operatives even slipped date-rape drugs into the drinks of an undercover CIA officer at a diplomatic reception.

(…)

Nearly three years after that terrifying night in the Moscow Marriott, Polymeropoulos’s constant migraines have still not abated. Botox, plasma, steroid injections, visits to a chiropractor—nothing has helped, and painkillers don’t seem to touch it. He is enrolled in an NIH study for which, once a year, he is hooked up to an elaborate machine that spins him around to test his balance. It takes him days to recover from the nausea and dizziness it triggers.

He’s not alone. Smith, of the University of Pennsylvania, told me that “the good news is that everyone improved and many people’s symptoms resolved.” Yet many of the State Department staffers affected in Cuba and China are still disabled. Some are wheelchair-bound; others have to wear weighted vests for the rest of their lives to correct their balance. Many have had to retire prematurely.

“Sadly, it sometimes seems like those tasked with unearthing the truth of the matter are more concerned with limiting the patients’ understanding of their own ailments and burying the issue,” says New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen

Polymeropoulos says the CIA still refuses to send him to Walter Reed for medical treatment, but according to a source on the Hill working with affected diplomats, the State Department and Department of Commerce have treated their employees far worse than the Agency has. “These employees were struggling not only with their injuries, but they were ostracized and some were even reprimanded for saying they were sick,” says New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen. In 2018, she was approached by a constituent who had been hit in China. Since then, Shaheen and her staff have become unofficial case workers for dozens of diplomats and trade officers affected by the Havana Syndrome in Cuba and China. “There has been very little progress, from what I’ve seen,” Shaheen says. “Sadly, it sometimes seems like those tasked with unearthing the truth of the matter are more concerned with limiting the patients’ understanding of their own ailments and burying the issue.” Shaheen is also aware of similar attacks on Americans on American soil, but says she doesn’t know of anything that’s being done to counter that threat.

(…)

Smith’s ongoing research has offered new insights into the Havana Syndrome—if little encouraging news for those suffering from it. In 2019, Smith and his team published a follow-up study that used advanced neuroimaging and brain-connectivity studies to look at the brains of diplomats hit in Havana. This technique showed what less sophisticated imaging had missed. The patients’ brain connectivity was severely affected, especially in the cerebellum and brain networks that control auditory and visuospatial functions. Their volumes of white matter—the inner, deeper part of the brain—were significantly reduced. White matter is made up of axons, the delicate wiring of the central nervous system. According to Smith, it was the axons and their carefully arranged structure that were damaged in people suffering from the syndrome. “If the axons break, that’s it,” he told me. “They won’t reconnect. And you’re not going to grow new axons. You only have the ones you’re born with.” The brain can learn to make up for and work around some of the damage, Smith says, but that takes time and the compensatory mechanisms are often far from perfect.

(…)

This is a fairly accurate assessment of how the Russian government operates abroad, especially under Vladimir Putin’s leadership. Historically, he has kept pushing the boundaries until he's met resistance, though in recent years, he has become far more brazen. Neither sanctions nor the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the United States and other Western countries for deploying the nerve agent Novichok against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on British soil seems to have made much of a difference. Last summer, a man was assassinated in a Berlin park in broad daylight, an attack the German government blamed on Moscow. In August, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok in Siberia. And there is no sense that the Russians are letting up: This year, the American intelligence community announced that Russia was again interfering in the presidential election with the aim of helping reelect Donald Trump.

American foreign policy specialists who want to reinvent the U.S.-Russia relationship can’t quite understand why the Russian security services are still doing this—other than because they can, and because, with Trump in office, they will most certainly get away with it. “They create the reason to keep fighting with them,” says the former national security official about the Russian government. “We don’t even know why they’re doing this. We don’t even want anything from each other anymore, other than an arms-control agreement. We have to kind of push back, we have to do that, but we also have to find a way of living together too.” Yet the Russians, the former official explains, “can’t get used to the fact that we’ve moved on. They want to pull us back into the fight again—the question is for what? This is what we kept telling [Russian officials], that if you want to have a relationship of equals and get stuff done, knock this other crap off.”

Until recently, the details of the CIA investigation that links Russian intelligence services to the attacks have been tightly held at Langley. Earlier this month, according to three sources, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence asked for and received a briefing on the matter from the CIA. “The Committee has long-standing concern related to whether foreign adversaries might be seeking to do harm to Americans abroad, particularly the men and women of the intelligence community who often toil in shadows with no public recognition of their many sacrifices,” said Chairman Adam Schiff in a statement to GQ. “We have conducted, and will continue to conduct, rigorous oversight to ensure the health and safety of all intelligence community personnel.” But Schiff and his staff declined to comment on whether a briefing had even happened, let alone on its substance. It is not clear if information from the December 2019 briefing to the NSC ever made it to the president, and the White House has not been briefed since.

The secrecy ensures that Russia suffers no consequences for its actions, and the impunity may motivate Russian security services to carry out more attacks. This has caused growing anger at the CIA, that neither their director nor the commander in chief seems willing to protect them or American civilians. This is why intelligence officials leaked the information about Russian bounties on American troops in Afghanistan to the press, and it was the stated motivation of my sources in revealing the highly sensitive information they possessed on the microwave attacks. They felt they had no other recourse. It was also another way to continue the work Polymeropoulos did at the EEMC: expose what he thinks are Russian covert operations with the aim of thwarting them.

The fact that the Agency has not aggressively pursued the investigation or gone after the people involved infuriates Polymeropoulos too. “If there was an al-Qaeda threat against our officers, we would do everything possible to shut it down, but also to catch the people involved,” Polymeropoulos told me. “I don’t see any of that happening here. What I would have expected would be this full court press that, you know, if we have senior people traveling and you think the Russians are going to hit him, have teams ready to try to capture” the people carrying out the attacks. As far as Polymeropoulos knew, the Agency wasn’t doing this—or even sending a private, high-level message to their Russian counterparts warning them to stop. The fact that the CIA still wasn’t doing any of this was damning, in Polymeropoulos’s eyes.”

#ioffe #julia ioffe #concussion #immaculate concussion #putin #russia #terrorism #microwaves #trump #cia #gq

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treatian123 · 2 months

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What is Havana Syndrome? Know Causes and Symptoms

Have you ever heard of Havana syndrome? Well, it’s a mysterious condition that has captured the attention of researchers. In this blog, we will delve into the causes, symptoms and ongoing investigations surrounding this syndrome Havana syndrome is a series of unexplained health issues first experienced by U.S. embassy staff in Havana, Cuba in 2016 reported hearing shrill sounds at night, as experienced by staff in other locations globally and Washington DC. Read More https://treatians.com/havana-syndrome/

#Havana Syndrome #treatians

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recentlyheardcom · 8 months

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SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of letting a "terrorist" act against Cuba take place on U.S. soil, saying a recent attack against the Cuban embassy in Washington was the result of "despicable anti-Cuban" U.S. intentions.The United States has neglected to ensure the safety of the Cuban mission and was only keen to put countries it dislikes, such as Cuba, on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, a spokesman of North Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement.Along with Cuba, North Korea, Syria and Iran are on the State Department list.An assailant attacked the embassy on Sept. 24 with two Molotov cocktails. No one was hurt and there was no significant damage.The incident was "a grave terrorist attack", the North Korean spokesman said, adding there was a pattern as it followed a 2020 incident at the same embassy in which someone fired a rifle at the building."This goes to prove that the above-said incidents were committed evidently at the tacit connivance of the U.S. administration," the unnamed spokesman said in the statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.U.S. authorities arrested and indicted a man soon after the 2020 shooting.The United States should "acknowledge the blame for not only the recent incident but also all the past terrorist cases and probe their truth to show its sincerity," rather than focussing on naming countries as state sponsors of terrorism, he said.White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the United States strongly condemned the attack and that U.S. law enforcement authorities would investigate. No one was in custody as the investigation continued, the Secret Service has said.The embassy reopened in 2015 when Cuba and the U.S. restored diplomatic ties. Havana has said it is unreasonable for Washington to keep Cuba on its terrorism list and maintain a Cold War-era economic embargo.(Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing by William Mallard)

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tastydregs · 1 year

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Newly Declassified Report Contradicts Officials, Suggests Havana Syndrome Might Be Caused by Directed Energy

Several weeks after the intelligence community very publicly disavowed claims that “Havana Syndrome”—the bizarre rash of neurological disorders plaguing U.S. foreign service officials—was the result of a directed energy weapon, a newly declassified report alleges that may very well be what it is.

The group behind the report, the Intelligence Community Experts Panel on Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs), was established by the government to figure out just what the heck had happened to the 1,000-ish American officials who claim to have suffered from “Havana”’s bizarre symptoms. Those symptoms, which first cropped up at a U.S. embassy in Cuba in 2016 and soon spread to other parts of the globe, include a rash of inexplicable ailments—things like hearing and memory loss, severe headaches, light sensitivity, nausea, and a host of other debilitating issues.

If you’re somehow just joining this story, you should know that one of the most prevalent and controversial theories about the syndrome’s origins is that it’s caused by a “sonic weapon”—some sort of unknown mechanism that can direct electromagnetic energy at targets, thus spurring the kinds of mental and physical anguish that “Havana” victims seem to suffer from. It’s a wild explanation (albeit one that scientists seem to agree is technically possible) and one of the most recurrent theories amidst a truck load of others (this interminable list has included everything from pesticides exposure to mass delusions to crickets).

Well, after a substantial research effort to get to the bottom of Havana Syndrome’s seemingly impenetrable mystery, the IC panel ultimately released their findings to the government, but the contents of the report have remained classified—until now, that is.

In an exclusive, Salon has published the full 153-page report put together by the panel. The document (which is heavily redacted) was recently declassified as the result of a lawsuit filed by the James Madison Project, a non-profit that lobbies against government secrecy. It had previously been reported that the panel’s findings supported the notion that electromagnetic energy may have been the culprit, but the full findings of the report have not been made public until now.

According to the report, a plausible explanation for the disorders may be “pulsed electromagnetic energy.” It reads:

Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radio frequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics, although information gaps exist. There are several plausible pathways involving forms of electromagnetic energy, each with its own requirements, limitations, and unknowns. For all the pathways, sources exist that could generate the required stimuli, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements.

Furthermore, the report speculates that such energy could be “propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials.” This could potentially be done using “commercial off-the-shelf technology” and devices exist that “are easily portable and concealable, and can be powered by standard electricity or batteries,” it states.

The report is really interesting but it’s also sorta funny because it appears to say the exact opposite of what the government just came out and told everybody less than a month ago. On March 1st, Haines told journalists that most cases of Havana Syndrome could likely be attributed to “environmental factors” or “conventional illnesses.” The notion that the symptoms would’ve been caused by a “directed energy weapon” was considered “highly unlikely” in most instances, Haines told the public. While she and other officials left the door open for alternative explanations, the press conference seemed like a clear attempt to shut down further speculation about the bizarre episodes.

But far from waving off victims’ symptoms as the result of “environmental factors” or some sort of mass delusion, the recently declassified report refers to Havana Syndrome as a “unique neurosensory syndrome” that is “distinctly unusual,” and is “unreported elsewhere in the medical literature.” Aside from the “electromagnetic energy” explanation, it also seems to dismiss most of the other theories that have been posited to explain the syndrome’s genesis.

For example, one frequently proposed explanation for the bizarre disorders has been mass delusion—a sort of weirdly global psychological affliction impacting U.S. officials all over the world. But the report states that psychosocial factors alone “cannot account for the core characteristics [of Havana Syndrome]” and that “incidents exhibiting these characteristics do not fit the majority of criteria” for a “mass sociogenic illness.”

The other, often proposed explanation—that the symptoms are the result of run-of-the-mill environmental factors or common illnesses—is also dispensed with; the report states that based on “literature reviews and discussions with a group of experts gathered from government and academia...the Panel determined that the core characteristics cannot be explained by benign natural or environmental factors.”

The other potential causes of the syndrome that the panel looked into—like ionizing radiation and chemical and biological agents—are given some consideration but the panel ultimately concludes that they are “implausible explanations for the core characteristics in the absence of other synergistic stimuli,” the report states.

Mark Zaid, an attorney with the James Madison Project (and a representative for some of the Havana Syndrome victims), told Salon that he thought the report showed that the government was clearly hiding something. “The U.S. government is covering up evidence as to what AHIs are,” Zaid told the outlet. “It is becoming apparent that these events were perpetrated either by foreign actors, or it is an experiment gone horribly wrong.”

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eagletek · 1 year

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PETA asks Pentagon to cease animal testing related to 'Havana syndrome'

The animal rights group PETA sent a letter to the Pentagon on Monday, demanding that they cease testing on live animals in their quest to understand the mysterious ailments known as “Havana syndrome.” Havana syndrome was first reported in 2016 by diplomats working at the U.S. embassy in Cuba, who reported a strange set of symptoms ranging from cognitive problems to hearing and vision loss. Since…

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minnesotafollower · 1 year

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U.S. Admits “Havana Syndrome” Not Caused by Foreign Adversary

In 2016, officials in the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba reported ringing in the ears followed by pressure in the head and nausea, headaches and acute discomfort. Subsequently similar symptoms were reported by “U.S. career diplomats, intelligence officers and others serving in U.S. missions around the world” and the symptoms became known as the “Havana Syndrome.”[1] Apparently in late February…

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#"Havana Syndrome"#Engineering and Medicine #National Academies of Sciences #U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)#U.S. Embassy (Havana Cuba)#U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken #William J. Burns (CIA Director)

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zvaigzdelasas · 1 year

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The demonstrations broke out in Caimanera, a small fishing village near the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, [...]

The U.S. embassy in Havana condemned the government's handling of the demonstrations.

"Last night, Cuban security forces responded violently to peaceful protests in the town of Caimanera, beating citizens for demanding human rights," the embassy said on Twitter. "Cuba also shut down its internet for fear of freedom of expression. The Cuban repression of the rights of its citizens is cruel and useless; freedom always wins."[...]

The demonstrations broke out in Caimanera, a small fishing village near the U.S. military base at Guantanamo,

Oops accidentally pasted a sentence twice there. Shame there's no way to edit posts [12 May 23]

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castroscrew · 1 year

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three worlds theory… but on steroids

The Cuban government has chosen to strengthen its alliances with countries from the “third world” in continents from Africa to Asia. Particularly, a strong alliance has been created among Latin American countries to promote unity, independence… and socialism. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro have journeyed to a few countries to promote Marxist revolutions-- eight to be exact. This led to more countries seeking a defensive alliance with Cuba, especially with Che Guevara's guerilla warfare tactics. However, two countries--Mexico and Argentina (former Nazi paradise) did not approve of Che and Fidel's visit, and as a result banned Cubans from traveling there without a dual citizenship.

This along with increased reliance/ trade/ visits with the Soviet Union has caught the attention of the United States. The United States has grown angrier and angrier at the committee, especially since a few members decided to plant an American embassy in Havana. This was a bad mistake, and resulted in an attempt on Castro’s life while he was delivering a speech about the new healthcare system.

Although Castro was left unharmed, the Cuban people, upon hearing this news, have become riled up. Protests have broken out in Santiago De Cuba and Havana. Cubans have been calling for a further break in US-Cuban relations. The U.S. and CIA have denied all claims of wrongdoing, and claim the agent was framed by the Castro administration. However, this could be a bluff.

Additionally, members of the government have negotiated the Guantanamo Bay prison camp lease to end in exchange for the price of American businesses which were nationalized. Kennedy did not believe that this was a fair trade, and increased economic sanctions on sugar.

Soon after this, either a member of the American embassy in Havana or a member of the Cuban government, set some of the biggest Cuban government buildings on fire with intentions unknown. Could there be a mole in the government?? First the Castro assassination attempt and now this.

With Cuba trying to people-please by working with all three "worlds," infighting, and inconsistency on foreign policy, the government must get its priorities straight.

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newstfionline · 1 year

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Thursday, January 5,2023

House G.O.P. Paralyzed as Right Wing Blocks McCarthy Speakership (NYT) Republicans were deadlocked over who would lead their new majority after Representative Kevin McCarthy of California lost six votes for the top job, as hard-right lawmakers in open revolt dealt their party leader a humiliating setback and prompted a historic struggle on the House floor. The mutiny, waged by ultraconservative lawmakers who for weeks have held fast to their vow to oppose Mr. McCarthy, paralyzed the House on the first day of Republican rule, delaying the swearing in of hundreds of members of Congress, putting off any legislative work and exposing deep divisions that threaten to make the party’s House majority ungovernable. This did not end the California Republican’s bid for speaker. He has vowed not to back down until he secures the post, forcing votes until he wins and raising the prospect of a grueling stretch of votes that could go on for days.

Apartment Rent Growth Slows (WSJ) The pandemic-fueled boom for multifamily building owners is fading fast going into 2023. Apartment vacancies are piling up. The biggest wave of new rental buildings in nearly four decades is expected to cut the pace of rent growth across the country. Some in-demand Sunbelt cities are already experiencing rent declines, in part because many tenants and people searching for apartments feel they can’t devote any more of their income to rent.

Move on from COVID? Child care disruptions continue (AP) Forty-seven. That’s how many days of child care Kathryn Anne Edwards’ 3-year-old son has missed in the past year. RSV, COVID-19 and two bouts of the dreaded preschool scourge of hand, foot and mouth disease struck one after another. The illnesses were so disruptive that the labor economist quit her full-time job at the Rand Corp., a think tank. She switched last month to independent contract work to give her more flexibility to care for her son and 4-month-old daughter. In the first and even second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, multi-week quarantines and isolations were common for many Americans, especially children. But nine weeks of missed child care, nearly three years in? “The rest of the world has moved on from the crisis that I’m still in,” said Edwards, who studies women’s issues. “That’s sometimes how it feels like to me.” This fall and winter have upended life for working parents of little children, who thought the worst of the pandemic was behind them.

US reopening visa and consular services at embassy in Cuba (AP) The United States Embassy in Cuba is reopening visa and consular services Wednesday, the first time it has done so since a spate of unexplained health incidents among diplomatic staff in 2017 slashed the American presence in Havana. The Embassy confirmed this week it will begin processing immigrant visas, with a priority placed on permits to reunite Cubans with family in the U.S., and others like the diversity visa lottery. The resumption comes amid the greatest migratory flight from Cuba in decades, which has placed pressure on the Biden administration to open more legal pathways to Cubans and start a dialogue with the Cuban government, despite a historically tense relationship. They are anticipated to give out at least 20,000 visas a year, though it’s just a drop in the bucket of the migratory tide, which is fueled by intensifying economic and political crises on the island.

Bolivia farm region blocks borders, grain transport as protests lead to clashes (Reuters)Protesters in Bolivia’s farming region of Santa Cruz are blocking highways out of the province, threatening to snarl the domestic transport of grains and food, as anger simmers following the arrest of local governor Luis Camacho. The region, a stronghold of the conservative opposition to socialist President Luis Arce, is in its sixth day of protests that have seen thousands of people take to the streets and nights of clashes with weaponized fireworks and cars burned. The protests, sparked by the Dec. 28 arrest of Camacho over an alleged coup in 2019, are deepening divides between lowland Santa Cruz and the highland, more indigenous political capital La Paz, which have long butted heads over politics and state funds.

Where The Money Isn’t (AP) Denmark ended 2022 without recording a single bank robbery, in no small part because there are only 20 bank branches in the entire country that still bother to carry cash. Cash transactions are nearly obsolete in Denmark, replaced by cards and smartphones, and the number of bank branches period is down from 219 in 1991 to just 56 in 2021. For the past six years, cash withdrawals have shrunk by about three-quarters every year. Even ATM robberies hit zero last year as well.

Ukraine Keeps Downing Russian Drones, but Price Tag Is High (NYT) Exploding drones are lumbering and noisy and relatively easy to shoot from the sky and, over the New Year’s weekend, Ukraine says, its military downed every single one of about 80 that Russia sent the country’s way. “Such results have never been achieved before,” a Ukrainian air force spokesman said on Tuesday. But some military experts wonder if the successes are sustainable. Ukraine is getting more and more skilled at knocking down drones, but there is a growing imbalance: Many of its defensive weapons like surface-to-air missiles cost far more than the drones do. And that, some military experts say, may favor Moscow over the long haul. Artem Starosiek, the head of Molfar, a Ukrainian consultancy that supports the country’s war effort, estimated that it costs up to seven times more to down a drone with a missile than it does to launch one. That is an equation that the Kremlin may be banking on, some analysts say.

Blame game (Washington Post) The deaths of scores of Russian troops in a devastating strike on New Year’s Day has set off a blame game among Russian officials now facing criticism for allegedly packing hundreds of soldiers into a barracks and storing ammunition in the same building—all within Ukrainian firing range. In a rare admission of heavy losses, the Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday that 89 soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel, died after Ukrainian forces hit their garrison in a missile strike. In a statement, the ministry blamed the attack in part on the “massive use … by personnel of mobile phones.” The signals alerted the Ukrainians to the garrison’s location, the statement said, adding that a commission is working to investigate the incident. But war commentators and ordinary Russians cast the casualty estimate as a gross undercount, and some said the true death toll numbered in the hundreds. Even if understated, the public acknowledgment of the precision Ukrainian attack set off the most public outpouring of grief over fallen soldiers in the more than 10 months since the start of Russia’s invasion.

Restrictions on travelers from China mount as covid numbers there surge (Washington Post) Nearly a dozen countries have imposed entry restrictions on travelers arriving from China as it battles a surge in covid infections that has raised alarmed about the emergence of new variants and concerns about Beijing’s disclosure of information on the outbreak. Morocco went so far as to ban Saturday all arrivals from China, regardless of nationality, “in order to avoid a new wave of contaminations in Morocco and all its consequences.” China has repeatedly described such measures as having no scientific basis. At a regular press briefing Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning criticized the measure and called on countries not to use pandemic prevention as an excuse to engage in “political manipulation.” On Tuesday, she warned that her country would take “corresponding measures.” China also requires a negative coronavirus test for any arrivals, but will soon scrap a mandatory week-long quarantine.

Taiwan to give cash payouts to citizens in ‘New Year blessing’ (Reuters) Taiwan plans to give cash payouts of nearly $200 to every citizen this year, Premier Su Tseng-chang announced on Wednesday, saying the island’s economic growth will be shared by everyone. The export-reliant economy, a global tech powerhouse for products including semiconductor chips, grew 6.45% in 2021, the fastest rate since it expanded 10.25% in 2010. While economic growth is expected to slow in 2022 and 2023, the government has made plans to plough an extra T$380 billion ($12.4 billion) in tax revenue from last year back into the economy to help protect the island from global economic shocks, including subsidies for electricity prices and labour and health insurance.

Government-Sponsored Flight (Guardian) In an attempt to reinvigorate the shrinking population of its rural towns, Japan is offering Tokyo families ¥1 million ($7,500) per child to move to the countryside. According to the Japanese press, the incentive is set to go live this April, providing urbanites a boosted incentive to turn from city mice to country mice. The new incentive is a huge jump from the government’s previous policy, which provided relocation checks of ¥300,000 (just under $2,300) to families moving out of the metropolis. The ¥1 million payment will be provided to families moving out of the 23 “core” wards of Tokyo, though they will need to stay in their new hometowns for five years if they want to keep the money. Other stipulations include that at least one parent must continue working their old job remotely, find a new job at a small or midsize company in their new town, or start their own business there. Half of the cash will be provided by the national government, with the other half paid out by the municipality welcoming the family. Japan hopes that 10,000 individuals will move from Tokyo to the countryside by 2027 thanks to the cash incentive.

Right-wing Israeli minister challenges own government with visit to Temple Mount (Washington Post) Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, visited a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem on Tuesday, despite reported objections by the prime minister and senior security officials. Israeli media said that Benjamin Netanyahu and others warned that a provocative visit to what Jewish Israelis refer to as the Temple Mount in the heart of the Old City could worsen an already escalating conflict with Palestinians and embitter relations with the wider Arab world. While there were no immediate demonstrations in Jerusalem, the move drew condemnations from nations across the region, including ones with which Israel is hoping to build new ties. Jordan summoned Israel’s ambassador in protest, and Netanyahu’s first trip to the United Arab Emirates since signing a normalization deal there in 2020 was delayed after Abu Dhabi called for an end to the “serious and provocative violations.” A visit to the site by Ariel Sharon, then opposition leader, in 2000 with an army of security guards set off the years of fighting of the second intifada. More recently, confrontations have been sparked by trips made by right-wing Israeli lawmakers to the site, which is revered in Judaism. Palestinians see these moves as part of an effort to extend Israeli control over the site—which also is revered by Muslims, who call it the Noble Sanctuary.

Drone advances (AP) Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers. That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own. Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

#headlines #news

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