'Havana syndrome' likely caused by directed microwaves – US report
bbc.com
bbc.com
Here's a pair of twitter threads detailing why this seems like unsubstantiated nonsense, one posted after this was announced and one with access to the report.
https://mobile.twitter.com/weinbergersa/status/1335096557079...
https://mobile.twitter.com/weinbergersa/status/1335304431756...
Just a ton of hot air blown for no purpose
Overall, FND seems to be the most plausible explanation at the moment.
As mentioned elsewhere though, signals intelligence at diplomatic posts (see Stateroom and the SCS) would likely have detected at least lower frequency microwave energy. At higher frequencies it is less commonly used for communications and hence less likely to be monitored.
Don't know why everyone is expecting solid proof here. There's a reasonable chance this would have been detected, but we're unlikely to know even if it was. Microwaves are still a plausible explanation.
Occam's razor. Doctors see these symptoms many times every day. For some reason, embassy staff are different from the rest of us humans, and we have to concoct some incredibly implausible reason for their symptoms.
"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.
The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before. The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.
It's fair to invoke Occam's razor if you need an immediate hard conclusion but there's no reason for experts to not explore this and state what they're finding. The problem is when there are so many non-experts with limited information jumping to the conclusion that this must be nothing but a drum beat-up to war because of the conspiracy amongst warmongers for which there is also no proof.
If it is due to some weapon, the operation would be designed to be unattributable. And if it could be attributed no one is going to tip their hand as to their capability of finding out. So we're unlikely to get solid proof for any of this and need to follow up on plausible explanations. I said that microwaves are a one, not saying other explanations aren't also. And I'm not rushing to conclusions.
There are no brain abnormalities. They simply found different values for grey/white matter in certain areas of the brain from controls, but these values vary among the population, and it isn't evidence of brain damage.
>"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.
Indeed, and these symptoms can be very serious in many cases (having experienced them myself, to a much worse degree of impairment than described here).
>The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before.The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.
It's not "nothing". FND (and variations thereof) is incredibly serious, and not "mass hysteria", and it is the most common complaint seen by neurologists. People who actually understand about FND are saying it is the most plausible explanation for these symptoms:
https://www.edinburghneuroscience.ed.ac.uk/news/functional-n...
From what I understand, you're saying the FND occurrence rate among these embassy workers is the same as that of the general population, but for some presumably conspiratorial reason, they're being treated specially.
Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.
No, not conspiratorial. People just don't like functional disorders, as they think it means they are weak/crazy/lazy etc. Having recovered from CFS, I have seen this preducice first-hand.
>Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.
Unfortunately FND (and functional disorders in general) are very misunderstood by almost everyone, including the authors of this report (they say that vestibular and balance symptoms would be "hallucinations" and are very uncommon, and liken them to schizophrenia).
According to the DanFunD study, the prevalence of functional disorders is about 16% in the general population (which includes all the symptoms being discussed).
The report stated that they were lacking too much data to determine it was a mass psychogenic illness, and could not make a conclusion on the subject. It would still fit the available data though.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201911/...
That doesn't make sense, because the supposed culprits in the narrative are non-Cubans.
That’s the rather tidy thing about claiming to be attacked by a weapon no one can see and that leaves no evidence of use: you’re free to build theories that suit your geopolitical ambitions.
If you believe that there are several diplomats with real injuries and persistent symptoms, then it stands to reason that something happened. No amount of FUD can controvert that.
Personally I have no geopolitical ambitions. What I do have is a great deal of faith in the American investigative apparatus, and none whatsoever in the honesty of Russia and China.
* Whatever skepticism you have toward NAS, I have a thousand times more skepticism toward a tweet thread from Sharon Weinberger.
* Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications. The peer review process is not itself a form of research. The paper should be judged on its own merits and the credibility of its authors.
* Contrary to what Weinberger said, a 64-page NAS document is available at https://www.nap.edu/read/25889/chapter/1
Peer review is the process by which that judgment is made.
Criticizing peer review is a little bit like criticizing democracy. It's the worst possible way to go about doing things, except for all of the others we've tried.
Not if you are yourself a scientist.
Peer review is a social method of establishing the validity of research, but it's not the only method. Another would be collaboration between well-credentialed investigators. Yet another is having the backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution.
Peer review is lauded by people who either (A) don't know anything about research, or (B) do research without stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution. Its chief proponents are the publications and conferences themselves, whose entire business model depends upon a perception of the elevated status of peer review.
Plenty of fictitious and fraudulent claims have been validated by peer review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...
If you want to review the research, read it yourself and evaluate the methodology.
While plenty of bad claims have been validate by peer review, it doesn't mean that peer review doesn't massively reduce the number of outrageously incorrect claims.
In any case, as it stands, the NAS article wouldn't pass peer review, because it makes borderline unphysical claims without providing enough evidence, even though doing so is quite easy. As for stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution, one of the authors is fairly kooky and the institute itself has a massive conflict of interest.
There's a reason even the State Department is distancing itself from this thesis.
If you are a "brand name" researcher (i.e. already well known and respected by your peers) peer review is even less meaningful as it's pretty much a rubber stamp.
It's not like many of these fields are just starting up.
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
Studies that don't replicate are cited at the same rate as those that do:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
This year I've read a lot of epidemiology papers, and sometimes their peer reviews. There's something deeply wrong with peer reviewers in this field because they often write long, detailed reviews that completely ignore glaring problems in the papers, problems that jump out to 'lay' readers on the first glance through. My guess is that there are very complicated sets of unwritten rules about the sorts of problems that are and are not legitimate to criticise in peer reviews, and problems that are a little bit too fundamental, of the form "this entire paper should be rejected out of hand", don't get given when a paper has 25 authors at prestigious universities, even if the methodology or conclusions are absurd.
But in fields that the method is closer to science (e.g. physics, chemistry, neuroscience), I would expect that the overall field is converging to the truth and that senior authors will therefore be more tuned in to the best estimate of truth or how to get to it than junior authors.
Even in microbiology there are a huge number of papers that don't replicate.
To me it looks like the problems are general. They aren't restricted to a small set of social sciences.
What is a "well-credentialed" Investigator if it's not measured by peer review? It seems to me like an argument from authority, which is ten thousand times worse than "problematic peer review" you claim. Define well-credentialed without peer review without a cycle please.
What is "backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution"? They already exist, they are called journals, which perform, surprise, peer reviews. Other alternatives you mention are probably private organizations, you seriously believe it's less problematic than already less problematic journals? Much naivety in this argument.
Peer review has its problems, but as you've been told before, it's the best we have come up with. Your proposals are much worse than what we have.
Credibility is one heuristic that let’s us figure out what might be worth investing time into, since your answer cannot be “everything”.
With respect to publishing, there is a significant volume of work, and we should be able to keep up with it long as people review as much as they publish.
That tweet was made before the report was released, but there were a few press stories about it. The second thread opens with a link to the report.
>Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications.
And this paper is of such low quality they couldn't even manage that. It has no merits, and even the paper admits the data is shit and the conclusion is unfounded.
I see what you did there!
Microwaves (mostly) just heat things up. Even the area denial "giant microwave generator" on a truck weapons simply make you feel like you're burning up. How could they possibly find a frequency or modulation that
A) Only affects the brain
B) Isn't stopped by exterior walls
C) Doesn't cause heating effects on the rest of the body (and everything else around you, or at least between you and the source of the radiation)
D) Isn't incredibly obvious when it's sitting around. Either this would have to be fairly high power, i.e. physically large, or it would have a high gain antenna (also large). If the power is low, it'd have to be close to the victim, like in the same room. The other problem is how do you hide the antenna? It can't sit in a van because the metal exterior would attenuate it.
For a related effect, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCrtk-pyP0I
It's analogous to using a couple of forks to operate a pickle from 120V.
Is that not resonance?
"Frey reported these symptoms with an RF source transmitting at 1.3GHz(which provides the greatest absorption depth into cortical tissue)..."
So they are implying that not all RF is stopped by the skin and some does penetrate deep enough to reach the brain. I don't suppose it will be long until some shortsighted YouTuber tries this as the experiment would not be hard to replicate at all.
What are the reported symptoms from military radio engineers standing in the transmission path of high-power/long-distance ship-to-ship microwave links?
https://www.propublica.org/article/drive-by-scanning-officia...
> ABC News reporters Richard Esposito and Ted Gerstein provide one of the few accounts of the backscatter van in a book they wrote chronicling a year inside NYPD's bomb squad. Describing the security ahead of President Bush's motorcade to the 2004 Republican convention, they wrote that every vehicle entering the street in front of the hotel was ordered to drive between two unmarked white vans, which X-rayed each vehicle for bombs.
Yet that didn't happen. I don't see any reason why no measurements and proof would be measured given the extreme ease of doing so, except that it just didn't happen.
Depends on the frequency range being continuously monitored. If it's above the usual signals intelligence range there's a good chance it wouldn't have been recorded.
"Yet that didn't happen."
And we wouldn't know if it had. Holding on to what you can detect and attribute carries advantages too.
As for the last one, if there was proof, then the State Department wouldn't abandon the theory, and such wildly speculative and substance-less research wouldn't be commissioned.
With a gamma knife, a number of lower power beams converge on the target from different locations to create a higher intensity at a calculated location, and everywhere else the intensity is low enough to write off.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/brain-stereotact...
The experience described by targets seems to indicate room-scale effects.
I don't know how building walls would affect coherent radiation at various frequencies, but if 80% of the energy made it to the destination, the other 20% could explain the variety of symptoms experienced in the room.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser#:~:text=A%20maser%20(%2F....
That's a wavelength of 21cm.
That means that your beam waist is never going to be less than 21cm, which means that your beam divergence is going to be of at the very minimum 0.21/pi radians = 3.8 degrees, likely twice that.
That's just not targeted enough to be able to hide the massive EM interference it would cause (like, instantly destroying electronics). And also, if the transmitter was 200 meters away, it would have to be dozens of meters big, assuming you got some lending system. Otherwise, it would still be huge, but it would also spew radiation at a truncated cone with a radius in the meters.
Also, building walls would certainly deflect a lot of the radiation and cause decoherence but also heating and destruction of electronics.
In any case, if it was any kind of EM weapon at a suitable frequency, it would be incredibly detectable and we wouldn't have this discussion.
As far as I can see there is absolutely none. A list of symptoms, based on interviews and self-reporting, no clinical measurement of any kind. And report that speculates on a cause in east and west.
Nothing beyond that.
The professionals signing off on this really should think carefully whether they are being used for political purposes.
The purpose of the release of this sensational and unsubstantiated report is for the outgoing administration to box in the incoming Biden administration on foreign policy.
This will make it harder for Biden to normalise relations with Cuba.
The credibility of US intelligence leaves a lot to be desired. This one really takes the cake.
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/20420409-nas-asses...
These symptoms are also present in everything from Lyme disease to minor/asymptomatic COVID. They are also associated with positional vertigo.
Unless US intelligence knows something they have not shared, I don't see the "sonic attack" angle. We don't know what happened, we don't know what caused it, but it's an embassy, so it must be the fault of spies?
Suppose someone left a fork in their container while reheating their lunch in a microwave with a failing magnetron. It is an embassy-- suppose a bug interfered with a jammer. Suppose any other freak occurrence occurred that would emit this sort of energy.
Literally anything that disrupts the inner ear calcium deposits could produce these symptoms. Sound vibration or changes in air pressure could do it too. It happens to people who don't work at the US embassy in Cuba too, but that results in a vertigo diagnosis instead of accusations of theoretical attacks by unknown adversaries for unclear purpose.
The Russians studied this sort of thing 50 years ago? Ok. But what is the connection to the current political relationship between the USSR and Cuba? Why apply 50-year-old research--now--in Cuba, specifically? Why not test this on a control group that would not put the attacker in-scope of US intelligence? We will look like idiots if this turns out to be an intern fooling around with a directional microphone they found while cleaning out a supply closet.
Sure, something happened in Cuba that produced these symptoms in a group of people. But fuck me, if anything the mass hysteria seems to be coming more from US intelligence than the actual victims.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003111753.h...
But the most important part is in the summary:
> Multiple hypotheses and mechanisms have been proposed to explain these clinical cases, but evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven, and the circumstances remain unclear.
Pulsed, directed microwaves just seem to be "the most plausible mechanism". So, nothing conclusive.
That's mere sabotage there. A very good reason to do it.
There could be more specific reasons too. The effects of all that on certain procedures and decisions. Part of a larger plan.
And such a convenient technology. It begs to be used.
Some victims were approached by the Russians and told to go back to the US immediately before (within a day or two) of the attacks.
Such warnings are apparently extremely unusual, and a violation of professional etiquette between the US and Russian intelligence agencies.
I'm skeptical, tbh. Every single time someone has proof that it's definitely the Russians, I follow that rabbit hole and the actual evidence is tenuous or non-existent
As for its being Russians in this case, it's still turtles all the way down: Just as it makes no sense that it's the hosting country, it makes no sense that it's the Russians, especially if they tip their hand in such a way. What advantage would Russia have for intimidating the US embassy staff by sending thugs to "get out or else"? The embassy are glorified messengers with limited negotiating skills. Even if the entire diplomatic corps quit en masse, the US would just send more.
If there were some advantage to sickening, crippling and otherwise poisoning diplomatic staff, why are there not more such incidents across the world?
We have intelligence agencies that pour hundreds of billions of dollars per year into recruiting human sources at the highest levels of foreign governments, intercepting vast amounts of encrypted data, and doing all sorts of complex analysis. It's entirely possible that the CIA has a source within Russian intelligence that has already handed them a copy of the machine's blueprints and operational plans, but the CIA can't reveal that information because it would destroy sources and methods. So instead, they're taking secret internal actions while also pushing hard on public agencies like NAS to look carefully at the non-classified evidence.
I guess it's also possible that the CIA has no evidence and just wants to pick a fight with Russia for some private reason of its own. I can't rule that out, but it would rely on a lot of people -- including Trump appointees -- having seen the (lack of) evidence and basically agreeing to go forward anyway. That seems surprising to me.
I think at the end of the day the best thing you can do is weigh motivations. Does Russia have a reason to mess with embassy staff? Well, it doesn't make sense to me personally, but then again, neither does killing your opponents in public using Novichok or Polonium. Does the bureaucratic CIA have some incentive to promote a baseless intelligence war with Russian agents, one that is likely to get people on both sides hurt? It's possible, but also seems pretty unlikely.
One reason a Cuban entity might not want normalization is that a lot of property was taken over during the Revolution, and US Cubans (and other former property owners) have been clear about wanting it back.
Basic background: https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/news-and-politics/property-ri...
If they were soldiers, sure, that makes sense. But I thought the the job of diplomats is essentially to be a messenger between governments. "Carry out foreign policy objectives" means to relay accurately the stance and desires of the home government. Hurting a diplomat in no wise hurts the home government, it just makes communication more difficult.
I know I'm missing something, because I don't think this would happen if there weren't an advantage of some sort somewhere. I just don't see how it's to the advantage of the hosting country. In fact, I would think it works against the interests of the hosting country.
This article goes into in-depth detail on one particular person's experience:
https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-micro...
or
After taking office in 2016 the president sought to roll back the cuban thaw and needed a convenient pretext.
suspiciously this weapon was never deployed against a single person at Guantanamo bay.
Having briefly lived in the Caribbean, I can confirm this kind of fumigation for mosquitos is common. The time period matches the Zika virus outbreak when even more fumigation than usual might have been done . . . it certainly was in Grenada where I was living at the time.
> A 2019 US academic study found "brain abnormalities" in the diplomats who had fallen ill, but Cuba dismissed the report.
BBC writes that "Cuba dismissed the report" but failed to mention that many others did too:
> The latest brain scans may provide fresh evidence of some injury, but the study was not without critics and some researchers have questioned whether there was any kind of attack at all.
> “Finding evidence of brain change doesn’t provide evidence of brain injury or damage,” said Dr. Jon Stone, a professor of neurology at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study.
> Dr. Sergio Della Sala, a professor of human cognitive neuroscience also at the University of Edinburgh, in an email called the study “half baked.”
> He noted that 12 of the affected workers who had a history of concussion prior to going to Cuba were included in the analyzes. “In comparison, none of the controls declared previous brain injury. This in itself could cause statistical group differences,” Della Sala said.
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/scans-show-changes-to-br...
The microwave thingy is just so far-fetched. If such a weapon exists, wouldn't the US intelligence agencies already have developed it? Sounds implausible that China, Cuba, and presumably also former Soviet states, would have access to this super-sneaky microwave weapon but not the US.
One thing Americans and Canadians have in common is that we're both English-language readers who consume much of the same media.
If that were the case, then I'd expect British and Australian diplomats would be affected as well.
That might create a lot of false positives unless calibrated correctly, so everyone would need to carry logging devices or something, and then wait for a few attacks.
"It's not peer reviewed," "I didn't read the paper and I don't know much about microwaves but I personally don't think microwaves work that way", "But I read something else about pesticides two years ago."
Anyone want to read the paper and respond to it instead of racking their brains for weird meta-arguments?
> Multiple hypotheses and mechanisms have been proposed to explain these clinical cases, but evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven, and the circumstances remain unclear.
Talent in one area doesn't translate to the same level of talent in other areas. For instance, Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling, called "one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time" by New Scientist, promoted high-dose vitamin C as a cancer treatment long after it had been discredited (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research...).
Also, IIRC, Chomsky's contributions to linguistics are somewhat controversial, and I've read that his lock on the field may have set it back by decades.
The vitamin C episode is also covered in the same book :)
Also agree the point on talent in general.
In this specific case though I get the impression Chomsky is more highly regarded than most political scientists.
GP comment set the bar rather low by associating criticism of mainstream media with randoms on facebook. Regardless of whether you agree with him I think Chomsky safely exceeds that bar.
Overheating your brain with 10000W nanosecond GHz pulses could have very strange health effects.
Also, 10 000W wouldn't be enough because that power isn't into a single resonant cavity, we'd be talking about pulses with instantaneous power an order of magnitude higher at the very least.
Didn't the incident happen at night?