Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if these could be self-manifesting symptoms from people experiencing burnout, etc. I think there is an example where some town put up a cell tower and everybody started complaining about headaches, despite it being turned off. I think all possibilities should be considered.
Honestly, if I were to attack diplomatic officials, it would be far easier to get them to ingest something. A slow acting toxin for example that you wouldn't normally be searching for on a postmortem - especially if all you're trying to achieve is to impair their mental agility to better your position in talks.
I know people working in foreign Countries who purposely pay more money for Western-import food to avoid accidentally doing this to themselves. In poorer locations you cannot be sure where or how the food was grown. For all you know it comes from an old lady's garden who lives next to the chemical processing facility. Locating the source of food in an completely un-tracked market will be near impossible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon
2.4 GHz is used to heat your food in the microwave. Pulses that increase the fluence by an order of magnitude or more could probably boil water for a microsecond inside the brain and cause some strange reactions.
What is unproven though, is how one would ever shrink the size of an electronic weapon like this.
What is the proposed system for getting microwaves past the skin into the brain without creating the same effect as the ADS?
Surface of the skin has less water than tissue inside, so you would feel pain beneath the skin.
Microwaves attenuate as they penetrate a resistive or high-permittivity substance, because they deposit some of their energy as they pass through. In the limit of infinite depth, no radiation survives and there is no heating. Given a homogenous substance, the heating is always strongest at the surface, decaying exponentially (to a good approximation) as you go deeper.
However, heating is not the same thing as temperature. The surface of food in your microwave is exposed to room-temperature air and can therefore cool down by conducting its heat to that air. Food just under the surface can conduct its heat to the surface food, while deeper food cannot. It's easy to set up situations where this results in a reverse thermal gradient penetrating some distance into the food, or even all the way to the center. This is one of the most significant advantages of microwave heating in industrial material processing, because there are many cases where the normal thermal gradient produces cracking and microwave-induced reverse thermal gradients do not.
You can set up a forward thermal gradient with microwave heating by some combination of hot air, strong attenuation, short exposure times, shorter wavelengths, and great depth, although unless the air is actually hotter than the highest temperature reached within the food there will always be a reverse thermal gradient present at the surface, since the heat equation always produces a continuous temperature field at t ≠ 0. You may be able to get the reverse thermal gradient to be entirely outside the solid body if you work hard enough, but a much easier way is to only measure the temperature at intervals large enough that the entire reverse thermal gradient is smaller than the first interval. For example, if the thermal maximum is 8 mm under the skin, you could measure the temperature at the surface, 1 cm, 2 cm, 3 cm, 4 cm, and 5 cm.
The attenuation is dependent on the attenuating medium and on wavelength. As explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System the ADS uses 95-GHz radio waves with 0.4-mm penetration depth in human flesh, while your microwave oven used 2.4-GHz radio waves with 17-mm penetration depth in human flesh.
nabla9 has been downvoted for politely and straightforwardly, if briefly, explaining these perfectly correct and verifiable facts, facts which are central to the discussion. This makes it clear that the voting public at HN has extremely poor judgment and should not be permitted a vote on comments of decent people.
> When the radar transceiver is energized, it poses a microwave radiation hazard to personnel. The hazard distance for the Q-47 is much greater than the distance for the Q-37. The hazard distance for troops extends in front of the radar for 217 meters over the radars full 1600-mil area of scan. The radar also poses a hazard for electrically detonated explosives. Figure E-14 depicts the radar’s radiation hazard area.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141226051243/http://armypubs.a...
IIRC workers in front of radar antennas noticed chocolate bars melting in their pockets during WWII, and that observation inspired the development of microwave ovens. Not sure how long it took for people to realize that their internal organs were doing something similar to the chocolate bars...
Note to self: pay attention when trimming HF transmitters about where you keep stray digits and where the locations of the tops of trimmers are relative to those digits.
If they were tuned to water molecules, they’d be great at defrosting, and unable to do this: https://youtu.be/xwEQZw3KPWg
No. Microwave hot pockets are famous for coming out boiling on the outside, cold on the inside (if you don't let it sit for a couple minutes to equalize).
Could it be there is some way to target a location with multiple radio beams such that the damaging effect occurs at the point of interference? Maybe just constructive interference from multiple weaker beams? Something like this would need to be aimed precisely of course.
I was further led to thinking about the way you can generate sound at a distance from beams of ultrasound. [0] Either the fluid within the beam or an object struck by the beam acts as a demodulator. I don't really know if something like this could apply with radio.
The other thing that I thought of was the way microwave ovens excite water molecules specifically. Maybe there is some other wavelength or combination of them which excites other specific molecules or structures present in the brain?
Yes, a phased array [1], which is likely what the GGP was referring to by "What is unproven though, is how one would ever shrink the size of an electronic weapon like this."
Advanced radars work by creating a concentrated beam of RF with constructive interference and scanning it across the sky, but the installations are huge. A smaller directed microwave weapon would be meters across, hard to hide, and noisy.
Phased arrays can be very small.
Note that just putting a couple of antennas close to each other to improve angular resolution on the radar isn't really a phased array in the sense that we're talking about.
Specifically, I believe the one on the 737 is the Rockwell Collins WXR-2100.
What you need is a horn antenna that directs the beam from the distance, across the street for example. It's also possible to have multiple horns around the target. Only in the intersection of the beams the radiation reaches dangerous levels.
Back of the envelope math: per Wikipedia: "The gain of horn antennas ranges up to 25 dBi, with 10 - 20 dBi being typical." Let's say you are transmitting 4 kW with a 20 dBi horn, thus having 400 kW EIRP. At a distance of 15 meters, the energy spreads across a sphere of 4PI15^2 = 2800 m^2, for an energy density 140 W/m^2. So yes, this indeed exceeds health limits (in .cz: 50 W/m^2 for workers, 10 W/m^2 for civilians) and is kind a lot.
On the other hand, having a 400 kW EIRP source anywhere nearby should be immediately obvious to a NSA or probably anyone with almost any radio receiver, the interference would be terrible.
This was exactly my thinking, somebody in the local area surely would have noticed this thing was turned on. You're not going to dump 400kW of energy without screwing with something.
> So yes, this indeed exceeds health limits (in .cz: 50 W/m^2 for workers, 10 W/m^2 for civilians) and is kind a lot.
Is that an enormous difference? It's three times health limits - but how long would you need to hold it there to get health problems? My guess is quite a while to fry your noodle?
Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist.
Advanced problem: how do you avoid accidentally killing someone while targeting this?
You're just talking about shooting "at" someone's head, you're talking about positioning their head in 3D space and shooting so precisely (through potentially layers of brick, metal brick ties, lath etc.) that you hit only inside their head and don't leave any marks or burns on the skin.
We don't have the technology to reliably do this today at range.
That it could maybe be done under ideal conditions doesn't explain how you do it when the target is mobile (but let's be generous and say you assume they're in bed), and you need to accurately visualize where they are through an unspecified amount of intermediate interfering elements (people's bedrooms aren't glass boxes).
Foil wall insulation would disrupt an attempt at microwave beamforming - so how is targeting being achieved so precisely as to be undetectable and cause no other environmental effects?
You could definitely point a bunch of microwave equipment at someone's room and cause some damage, that's not in question - but to somehow cause a bunch of neurological problems, but not leave thermal burns, or heat up jewellery, or fry electronics?
And this isn't a "with todays tech" issue either. This is all being proposed as being totally possible with 90s-era technology. The sheer amount of wireless tech innovation and availability since then has been enormous - what feels possible today is ignoring that in the 90s a cellphone looked like a brick with an antenna on it. Solid-state microwave elements weren't COTS parts you bought from China in bulk.
We're talking about doing a lot of very difficult to do things, with equipment and power outputs which would require substantial draw from either residential electricity supply systems, or banks of lead-acid batteries (no lithium ion in that age either - so you have a transport and weight problem).
The more disperse you propose the signal is, the less plausible it gets too - at some point your number of field teams and the size of the equipment is going up and up and up and all of this is happening within line-of-sight (or near enough) of a target - microwaves don't penetrate multiple buildings.
The entire blog was written as if the cause was "overthinking" and he physically depleted some resource in his brain leading to seizures. In reality the illness he linked to clearly states that it is a psychological condition of being overworked/stressed, and treatment needs to be "culturally sensitive" and done with CBT, which would not be the case if you were just missing some chemical in your brain.
My take is, like yours, that all the cases are industrial injuries. Much better for the Government to blame 'adversaries' than to be on the hook for possibly millions of dollars in Workers' Compensation payouts.
If anyone else remembers the slides detailing this device please post the source.
[1] https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/2013-2014/CommitteeDocu...
Edit: ocr-ed version here:
https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/files/Bioeffec...
Afflatoxin. Common in food and gives you liver cancer.
The TL;DR is that various agencies strongly resisted attempts to dig into why the USSR was directing microwaves at the embassy, despite the fact that the USSR had already been caught placing microwave-powered listening devices inside the building. The book describes an argument between State, CIA and NSA in which the former two mostly wanted to ignore the signals. The belief was (1) that no technology had been demonstrated that these signals could exploit, and (2) even after the NSA cooked up some examples, people refused to believe that the USSR was sophisticated enough to exploit them. (I won't spoil the book by giving away the resolution.)
I'm not offering this as any kind of proof that the current batch of Havana syndrome cases is real: just pointing out that while "we've never seen it before so it probably doesn't exist" can be a reasonable heuristic in day-to-day life, it's not necessarily a great one in the world of spying.
A famous instance of this is 'the thing' :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)Interesting to learn that USSR (& associated block) had set a safe exposure level of 0.010 mW/cm2, while in US the level was set in 1953 to, and remains at, 10 mW/cm2 for GHz freq. range.
The paper notes (and it is worth quoting at length in the context of this thread):
"It is essential to understand the historical context in which this episode occurred. On the one hand, the Soviets had considerable experience in researching the biological effects of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields, while the Americans had experimented with microwaves as a weapon of mind control. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that with this background, the matter was considered to be so significant.
...
"It was certainly suspicious that the Soviets had a maximum exposure level 1000 times lower than that of the Americans. What did the USSR know about the effects of microwaves that the US did not know? As pointed out by Guthrie (11), the standards in the US were approved in 1953 and were based on theoretical considerations, under the assumption that microwave radiation produced only thermal effects on biological systems, and that these effects could not be cumulative as microwaves are non-ionizing. Guthrie (11) recognized that, by 1977, several medical studies had already cast serious doubt on previous assumptions.
"For example, Dr. Milton Zaret, Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center, who had conducted several microwave investigations for the US government, said, “The American National Standard Institute’s standard is not a safe standard. Instead, it is a statement defining the highest possible degree of occu- pational risk. It was based solely on whole body thermal burden calculations. It ignored the question of organ sensitivity and delayed effects following chronic low-level exposure” (11).
"Professor Herman Schwan of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the proponents of the 10 mW/cm2 standard, stated “No one knows whether safe exposure standards, which may be appropriate for adults, are so for children” (11).
"However, as Guthrie (11) explained, the Soviet bloc also had other safety standards. At the Symposium on the Biological Effects and Health Implications of Micro- wave Radiation, held in 1970, Karel Marha of Czechoslovakia explained that they had proposed a standard of 0.01 mW/cm2, as it was recognized that there was evidence of biological effects up to levels of 0.1 mW/cm2, so a safety factor of 10 had been proposed until finally deciding on the standard of 0.01 mW/cm2. These maximum levels were introduced to prevent not only damage to the organ- ism but also any unpleasant subjective feelings. In addition, the standard in Czechoslovakia was lowered to 0.001 mW/cm2 when it was assumed that exposure did not occur during a working day, but over a 24-h period."
"The Soviets were, however, not the only ones deeply interested in this issue; the Americans had, since the 1950s, been investigating the possible use of microwaves as a weapon of mind control.
"As Krishnan (10) explains, in the 1950s the CIA had looked into the use of electromagnetic fields for mind control purposes as part of its MK ULTRA project. MK ULTRA was a top secret program first set up in the late 1940s to investigate behavioral modification and the control of individual minds in the service of American geopolitical and ideological interests (24).
"Subproject 62 of MK ULTRA was run by the neurosurgeon Maitland Baldwin, and aimed to analyze the effect of electromagnetic waves on monkeys. This was one of 149 subprojects designed by the CIA, and was entitled “Effects of radio-frequency energy on primate cerebral activity” (25). In one of these experiments, monkeys were exposed to high-powered (100 V) frequencies of 388 MHz, resulting in several changes in the electroencephalogram, as well as arousal and drowsiness. In addition, he observed lethal effects after just a few minutes of exposure (10).
"Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who actively partici- pated in the MK ULTRA project, carried out experiments using personnel from the purpose-built Radio Telemetry Laboratory, probably with the intention of finding out more about the effects of the microwave bombardment of the American embassy. In 1965, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) commissioned the Walter Reed Army Medical Center Research Institute and the Johns Hopkins University to study the possible bio- logical effects of microwave exposure on humans, in what was dubbed the Pandora Project (10).
"As Krishnan (10) also pointed out, Dr. Milton Zaret acknowledged that effects on the nervous system due to microwave exposure were possible, and Robert O. Becker, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the effects of electromagnetic fields on living tissues, indicated in an interview to the BBC in 1984 that he thought it was unquestionable that exposure could produce disturbances in the central nervous system. Becker did not believe that, with the technology avail- able at the time, someone could be made to instantly fall asleep, but that exposure to microwaves could possibly interfere in an individual’s decision-making ability. This could produce a situation of chronic stress resulting in the embassy staff operating less efficiently than usual, to the obvious advantage of the Soviets.
"Weinberger (26) tells how the Americans themselves deceived the embassy staff when, in 1965, doctors began performing blood tests. The staff were told that the doctors were looking for a new virus but, in reality, they wanted to integrate the information obtained into the Pandora Project. In October 1965, Richard Cesaro took over the DARPA Program Plan 562, the technical name of the Pandora Project. Cesaro had been responsible for translating dozens of Soviet investigations into this subject, and realized that the neurological effects of microwaves fascinated the enemy.
"As Weinberger (26) continues, the Pandora project involved experiments on monkeys carried out in government laboratories rather than universities, due to the top- secret nature of the project. The monkeys were exposed to the same signal levels that the embassy received in Moscow. The results were not subject to peer review but, in Decem- ber of 1966, Cesaro reported that the first monkey involved in the tests had shown erratic and repetitive behavior, which led him to assert that it was unquestionable that the signal had penetrated the central nervous system and caused changes in the assigned work functions. He was so convinced by the results that he recommended that the Pentagon immediately begin to investigate potential military applications, and requested that the project be extended to include experiments on humans, something that certain sections within the CIA viewed with suspicion, as it was too reminiscent of the questionable practices of the MK ULTRA project. It was May of 1969 and the scientific committee of Pandora was considering extend- ing the study to include eight humans, but in the end this did not occur as the results of experiments carried out on primates were still being reviewed and there were doubts over whether this behavioral change was in fact produced by the microwave signals. In 1968, Dr. James McIlwain took over the Pandora Project and, after reviewing the results thus far obtained, concluded that the microwave signals did not result in the ability to control the minds of the monkeys.
"As Weinberger (26) concludes, in 1969 DARPA ended its support for Pandora, and Cesaro was fired. At the end of the decade, the American intelligence services claimed that the Soviets had used these waves not to control the minds of diplomats, but to activate listening devices on the walls of the building."
The refs cited are:
10: Krishnan A. Military neuroscience and the coming age of neuro-warfare. Routledge, 2017.
11: Guthrie LB. Legal implications of the Soviet microwave bombardment of the US Embassy. Boston College Int Comp Law Rev 1977;1:Article, 6
24: Lemov R. Brainwashing’s avatar: the curious career of Dr. Ewen Cameron. Grey Room 2011;45:60–87.
25: Ross CA. The CIA Doctors: human rights violations by American psychiatrists. Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications, 2006.
26: Weinberger S. The secret history of diplomats and invisible weapons, 2017, August 25. Retrieved from: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/25/the-secret-history-of-d...
He says that the US safe limit was arrived at by exposing hot dogs to radar transmitters and noting the lowest level at which they did not cook.
The Soviets did their experiments on developing chicken embryos in eggs and arrived at a much lower limit.
The Moscow embassy was subjected to a beam that was precisely set to the maximum safe US limit…continuously. Staff had to be rotated out every few months because they felt unwell.
Somewhere else I read that after the war, the US got all the good German rocket scientists while the Soviets picked up the electromagnetic experts. Dunno if this is true but would be interesting to find out.
The connection between these events is tenuous at best.
https://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Radiation-5HZ-3500MHz...
That said, State Dept and the intelligence community should've been all over this. When this happened in Cuba, everyone should've been on high alert. When it happened again after, people should've snapped into action.
It's possible that the powers that be didn't take it seriously but now there's no excuse for Biden admin not to act. Clearly the perpetrator is emboldened and will persist until they experience serious consequences.
And at the very least, those affected by this should be getting workers comp and full support to deal with the effects.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/encry...
IF you're wondering how whoever was running attacks like this would get the data to follow people home with attacks like this, in places where there aren't any sensors, look at these hearings from 2014.
Noone was fired, noone even lost their pension over that.
I worked at State Department during the Obama era and into the Trump era. I am well aware that the Obama administration did not impose adequate consequences for prior acts of espionage and aggression such as the Cozy Bear hack on State Dept or Mikhail Lesin getting bludgeoned to death in DC. There also wasn't adequate pushback against propaganda efforts.
The OPM hack is widely attributed to China and is probably the most devastating breach in recent memory. Who knows what the real world consequences of that have been thus far.
Either way ny point is that right now, today, there is no excuse not to act. Unless maybe they still haven't figured out what is happening and who is responsible.
Oh, and willing to talk. He only talked to me, his son, about a friend of his who he thought was killed by the Russians twice over a forty-year period.
But anyway, I suspect based on that that it's happened plenty of times before without retaliation.
>Either way ny point is that right now, today, there is no excuse not to act. Unless maybe they still haven't figured out what is happening and who is responsible.
I doubt we can; I think the OPM hack has lead on to further intelligence failures, to the point where we can't tell what's going on, can't count on the three letter agencies to tell us the truth about stuff, and can't effectively defend ourselves as a result.
I think that's part of why the allegedly natural virus hit us so hard. One failure leads to the next.
Any radio beam which was strong enough to affect human tissue would drive a basic EM detector crazy.
A suitable detector would be a simple wire dipole, a schottky diode and a meter. Any radio hobbyist could make you one in a few minutes.
Plus such a strong field would drive most domestic electronics equipment crazy due to our crappy RF immunity regulations..
Also, I don't understand the point of using this weapon. It seems like it causes debilitating issues, sometimes years later, but it's intermittently used on relatively low level personnel? What's the point? Make Americans afraid to work in Russia and Cuba?
I also wonder if we have a similar weapon and if there is retaliatory microwaving going on. e.g. You microwaved our bug checkers, now we're going to microwave your <Russian equivalent>.
As someone else pointed out it might be a side effect to something else.
If you have enough resources to start targeting low to mid level staff, then you have to have a lot of practical devices which are mobile.
While it's plausible the US has in fact recovered a whole bunch of them and kept it secret...why? The microwave attack rumor is common which means everyone is looking into whether it can be done. Announcing you found the device and not showing pictures even - but instead nothing. No detectors either and as noted above detecting RF would be extremely cheap - deploy a couple of devices and you've got a direction finder telling you exactly where it's coming from.
Havana syndrome could be a lot of things: the US is a big place, and decades ago food safety standards and additives were very different - MRE composition or catered food service would have had regional characteristics, but so would just random events happening randomly - on a long enough timescale you'd get a cluster of health issues from the people you sent through one part of the world but not another. Once you're into talking about multi-decadal outcomes this gets even fuzzier.
For example, I don't think CIA operatives could easily snatch a car full of FSB agents on the streets of Moscow, confiscate their equipment, and get away with it. The same for Havana. (If they had a way to detect the attacks, they might try, but the point is even then it wouldn't be easy. AFAIK, operatives generally do not attack each other directly on foreign soil.)
We obviously don’t have enough information to really know what’s going on here but I do thinking some possibilities that don’t make very much sense can be excluded.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-bidens-tale-of-rus...
Since the reported attacks generally happen within a radius of US locations requiring physical security - and apparently not in any other location.
It's otherwise difficult to explain why the USA would be the singular target of these alleged attacks, for a period stretching across decades.
When you start paying attention to these stories, it becomes clear that these secrets are kept first and foremost from the general public of the native countries, mostly for both public image and non-accountability privilege. It makes no sense to deny something that has been known to secret services of every developed country otherwise. It's quite ironic that before Snowden, military insurgents trained by this or that superpower, and mafia bosses who hired ex-special-agents had a more clear picture on, say, phone surveillance than law-abiding citizens.
Wouldn't you want to deter spies from a fairly terrifying hostile power?
It's unclear if they did it (evidence seems thin) but the motive is definitely there, just as the motive for the Latin American "cancer gun" was definitely there:
Exactly not the kind of people who should be allowed to investigate anything. Not even who framed Roger Rabbit much less a claim of international warfare committed with a secret ray gun.
Regardless of what has been injuring people, it is quite clear that the US has blamed what happened on Cuba and took decisive political actions, without evidence to support Cuba’s involvement. It is par for the course with how they’ve treated Cuba in the past.
An important reminder to anyone who thinks that putting themselves in harm's way to do jobs for the US spying apparatus is a good idea. They won't even care for you when you get injured on the job, sacrificing yourself for their cause.
If the RF field is strong enough to affect human tissue, then a crude broadband RF detector would do the job.
Something as simple as a wire dipole and a schottky diode with a meter.
Plus in such a strong field, most of your domestic electronics equipment would be going crazy. Just like a mobile phone near a blue tooth speaker.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Montezuma%27s%20r...
Is it possible that Cuba is trying to block the spectrum so they can't use this technique?
How do you think radio comms work on a warship equipped with high power radars?
Or even on a domestic airliner?
And of course if it were happening, the communications techs would be well aware of it.
The “microwave attack” story came out in mid-2017 when Trump was in office. Travel restrictions came back and foreign relations languished. It’s trivially easy to blame a nation state for an attack, and then use it as excuse to end political support, agreements, or funding.
Cuba has been the repeated target of bullying by the United States for the better half of the last century, despite no recent transgressions other than most-likely-fabricated ones such as these “microwave attacks.”
2) The US isn’t the only country claiming this is happening.
3) It is still happening, now, in 2021.
Although the attacks were hearsay, immediate political actions were taken against Cuban diplomats who were likely working to lift the embargo:
> In August 2017, the United States expelled two Cuban diplomats in response to the illnesses.
Despite zero evidence, Cuba was rapidly blamed in gross political fashion:
> In October 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump said that "I do believe Cuba's responsible. I do believe that", going on to say "And it's a very unusual attack, as you know. But I do believe Cuba is responsible."
Why would Cuba jeopardize its warming relationship with the US? This is textbook propaganda.
You are alleging a massive intergovernmental conspiracy, created up by Trump just so he can have some cover to strengthen restrictions on Cuba? No, the US doesn’t need a conspiracy to do that, they can just do it unilaterally.
There are dozens of families that have been affected by these attacks, with varying levels of government experience, from multiple countries, investigated by multiple governments, independent panels, contractors and health professionals. It would take conspiracy on a massive scale to get everyone on the same page… all to do something that can be done without conspiracy and at the snap of a finger. That is hilariously ridiculous, not a single chance that is the case.
Holding a security clearance and being the under the constant threat of fine and imprisonment for unauthorized disclosure makes keeping national secrets trivial. Many ambassadors and politicians are required to hold security clearances.
Let's not distill away the complexity of the situation.
Why is the US still vehemently opposed to Cuba, or improving its relationship with Cuba?
Even North Korea has better standing with the US than Cuba, but it makes little sense.
In my view, it is hard to label the immense prosperity-inducing capacity of United States foreign investment as bad-faith or unfair dealing. Cuba's government has spent years working on projects to attract spend-happy American tourists. Elsewhere in the region, entire countries base their economies around remittances from the USA. The US government could crack down on remittances and illegal immigration far more than already happens, but it does not, and millions of people in the region benefit as a result.
Respectfully, it takes a great deal of time, study, and travel to learn the dynamics involved in a region before you can say with confidence that Influence A is good and Influence B is bad. People who lean left in the US should understand that 'socialist' isn't a catch-all phrase; it means something different when you're voting for Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Caucuses than it does when you're bartering with your uncle for soap in Camaguey. I have been all over Latin America and I personally still don't consider myself to know all there is to know about the region. What I do know is that the "USA bad" narrative tends rarely to be accompanied with a discussion of the counterfactual universe where American influence is hypothetically absent from the region.
There was a statement that Cuba's only "transgression" was a desire to not be a US puppet state. That is a false claim.
Ignoring the language of "vehement" this and "opposed" that, I believe that my prior comment addressed your question. The present regime in Cuba is a direct descendent of the 26th of July Movement that orchestrated the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s. Cuba continues to be governed by the same faction and ideology that governed the island for four decades of the USSR's existence.
My question is what he USSR and Cuba would have ended up looking like without the insanely disruptive actions by the US. The USSR would have likely been an entirely different society if they were not compelled to spend such an enormous amount of their GDP on weapons and defense and Cuba would likewise have developed quite differently without dealing with the embargo.
https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2019/10/18/boliv...
Separately, you can also read about the Cuban antecedents to Che's fatal incursion into Bolivia, and his team's lack of regard for the linguistic differences across regions in that country. There are seven decades worth of Cuban involvement in anti-American activity all over Latin America. I invite you to read about it from time to time when you are bored and curious.
Whether you support one side, the other, or neither, it's obvious that Cuba's "transgressions" are not a single-element list. That's what the parent comment says and it's 100% false.
I find it unreasonable that you suggest the USSR's massive stockpiling of weapons was not due to their own actions and strategy, but somehow the US's fault. How can you be circumspect when you suggest that two can tango but only one does the dancing?
> I find it unreasonable that you suggest the USSR's massive stockpiling of weapons was not due to their own actions and strategy, but somehow the US's fault. How can you be circumspect when you suggest that two can tango but only one does the dancing?
Well, there were socialist countries and experiments that were more democratic and did not enter in an arms race. They were wiped out. Russian Revolution was after the massacre in the Paris Commune, so they knew what to expect and prepared accordingly, even before the cold war. But the USA always reinforced this, presenting plenty of examples of how it deals with socialist sympathies in less powerful countries.
This news confirms that govt agencies are taking the microwave theory seriously as a confirmed explanation for these conditions. It's reasonable to agree with the conclusion at this point.
There is literally no reason to believe public communications from a spy agency against their enemies (note: that does not mean that they can't be true, it just means that the truth of them is never the reason why the communication is put out).
What reason would the USIC have for lying about this? It seems unlikely that we would ever retaliate in kind, especially not after bringing attention to these incidents.
The good part about releasing information about exploits and such is that they can be easily verified to exist, so there is no need to trust the spy agency. Any claims they make about the source of those exploits is not easily verifiable, and since you can't trust them, should be ignored.
What's the significance of attribution of exploit source?
You claim this based on what? Kaspersky has recently found what they claim is (another) massively complex US malware in the wild.
> What's the significance of attribution of exploit source?
As in my example above, people always look for the source of an exploit and claim various actors created them. This creates certain reputations for these actors, just as in the claim from Kaspersky above (which may or may not itself be true - Kaspersky is a private company, but it is also known to work with the Russian government, which is clearly antagonistic to the US).
Noone can bullsht too often; attribution for hacks/tools as disinfo has limited utility value. And, again, attributing brain injuries to REW's as disinfo wouldn't help and they know that.
I still don't believe the US would decide to lie about this matter.
There's an entire industry revolving around blaming geopolitical enemies of wrongdoing without evidence, where the intelligence community plays a key part. This is done in order to control the narrative, steer the public perception and to keep a semblance of adherence to international law, in order to justify unilateral political, economic or military hostility. The reality is always more nuanced, and it's definitely a safe bet to not believe whatever empty accusations they come out with.
Controlling the narrative like they do, the cumulative effect of it is that they are able to convince the public of quite crazy assertions, which would be rightly treated as conspiracy theories had they come from some other source. These crazy assertions of course requires equally crazy political reactions. E.g. people genuinely believe that most US geopolitical enemies are literally rogue, bandit states, requiring draconic policing by the US. It's a children's view of the world, leading people to look the other way when it harms innocents.
The intelligence community has a looong history of doing this. It's a central part of the playbook which is readily admitted in more casual contexts.
There have been instances of false-flag operations, most notably the Gulf of Tonkin incident which served as pretext for an escalation of the Vietnam war. But it doesn't have to be to serve its purpose.
There's definitely evidence unless the govt is completely fabricating the existence of these injuries (which is unlikely).
Evidence comes in many forms. There doesn't appear to be evidence in the form of a recovered weapon or technical recording/logging of an attack as it happened, at least nothing that has been disclosed.
However, the injuries are real and ongoing. It took a long time for consensus agreement that these events were malicious targeting by hostile govts against our diplomats, using remote energy weapons. Even just with the evidence made public, it's the most plausible explanation.
It's not the most plausible explanation, but it is the most convenient one. It shifts the blame and reinforces the narrative. They don't even have a coherent idea regarding how such a weapon would work in practice, it's pure speculation.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/us-intelligence-g...
Consider the last paraphraph of the article:
> "Most importantly, if and when more evidence is gathered, Putin, Nikolai Patrushev, and their officers must be held to account."
This is not "news", it is war propaganda. Besides, it's immensely hypocritical. When was American government and intelligence officials ever held to account for orchestrating and instigating violent aggression abroad?
Perhaps what they said happens to be absolutely true. Perhaps they have withdrawn their diplomats for fear of other attacks (e.g. poisoning, as Canadian authorities have apparently claimed). Perhaps they have withdrawn their diplomats in order to create some impression that they are in danger. Perhaps they have withdrawn their diplomats because they intend to do something that they think could put them in danger.
There are myriad possibilities, but until we get a chance to see classified reports or we get some independent reports about what is going on, we shouldn't speculate based on nothing more than the claims of spy agencies.
Edit to add: if the story would have been "Cuban intelligence agency reports how US diplomats faked symptoms to claim they were being attacked", would you believe this claim? Even as a Cuban? I for one would not - and just as I wouldn't believe this claim, I will also not believe the opposite claim from US intelligence.
In this case, their motive is obviously to create an image of Cuba as a devious enemy of the United States who is willing to hurt low level officers in chronic ways, a dishonorable enemy.
This probably comes in the context of generally improving relationships with Cuba on almost the entire American continent, while the USA is still maintaining its illegal embargoes.
Now, is it possible that they chose to use a true story to advance this narrative? Yes, it is, absolutely. But if they want to spread this message and don't have a true story they are willing to share, nothing would stop them from sharing a false one instead.
Like maybe google "microwave attacks snopes" or something: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-sonic-weapons-explain-t... (Written in 2017(!) but hey just lets just warm up the story again and again).
I am sorry for being snarky but between having to explain grown ass adults why they should wear masks during a pandemic I am tired for arguing against all the misinformation.
The average person has no idea how microwaves work so they are basically magic and easily to make some scary story up. Why change the time tested cold war approach of just throwing ridiculous lies against any perceived enemy of the US of A and see what sticks. If it doesn't stick the first time, just repeat and repeat it. The more often people hear it the more believable it seems.
Fact is that if this is real, it is the work of a sophisticated adversary that may have found a novel way to attack people. Even going back to the 60's there was stuff done in spycraft that would seem implausible to most people even today.
A relevant example is the use of microwaves to activate a passive antenna through walls to eaves drop on conversations (look up "The Thing Listening Device). Again this was done many decades ago. Not too far fetched to consider that maybe Russia intelligence services found a way to weaponized microwaves.
I can not disprove that there is a magic man in the sky. Or a teapot revolving around the sun. [1]
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim not the other way round. Yes, lack of evidence is enough to reject it. Not to mention that the claim goes against established scientific knowledge and therefore would need some serious evidence for it to be taken serious.
> Even going back to the 60's there was stuff done in spycraft that would seem implausible to most people even today.
There is lot's of things we do not know but that does not make a good argument for the existence of something.
> A relevant example is the use of microwaves to activate a passive antenna through walls to eaves drop on conversations (look up "The Thing Listening Device). Again this was done many decades ago. Not too far fetched to consider that maybe Russia intelligence services found a way to weaponized microwaves.
Not really, there is no clear quantitative development patch from The Thing Listening Device to the Havana style microwave attack.
Now we know the hypotheses requiring the fewest assumptions to be more likely true. [2] So what is more likely?
The whole Havana Syndrome is fabricated propaganda that is typical and in line of many similar cases of proven lies?
Or that Cuba has some advanced secret technology that even the US has no access to and that they are using on US diplomatic personal without any good motivation. In fact it will hurt their reputation. So we need to also claim that they are irrationally evil.
This is a pseudo-skeptical[1] finger in the ear reaction.
There's nothing in your posts here that tells me that you've reviewed the evidence that's been put forth[2] and rejected it, and it seems Snopes hasn't either.
All I see is a total a priori dismissal which is not good practice for either a skeptic or a scientist.
Here's what would've told me that this is a good faith exercise (by either you or Snopes): You show that you understand what the claimed evidence is, you present it in the most generous and strong terms, then you explain why it's wrong.
I have debated that topic multiple times during different years. Yes, I am not fully up to date with the newest version
I you were a police man and some guy came up and claimed to be a victim of a crime and you find out the details don't add up, well that happens. Now if he came back next year with a slightly different story about the same crime, yeah that is fishy. If he constantly keeps changing his implausible story you would at some tell him to get lost for wasting police time.
So the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine keeps changing their story? Do you have evidence for this?
But we are now in the situation that media in Europe are lying every day about the constant violence used by the police in Paris (and Brussels, and Madrid, and ...) against COVID-protestors. For example, just from today:
https://twitter.com/KevinTONON_/status/1388575836387880965
(Paris is usually much worse btw)
So you cannot trust these messages. Your argument is essentially an appeal to an authority. It is critically dependent on the authority not lying, and not leaving out critical information, and since you have no ability to figure out what they would lie about (and the State Dept has lied about their own people getting hurt and the causes many times).
That doesn't mean other sources are believable or not. The sources of these conspiracies do mean
1) people who were here were hurt.
2) the state department is not helping them.
3) the purpose of these denial messages is, at least in part, to justify 2).
I'm willing to bet that you at the very least think 2) is not true. So your careful fact checking has in fact lead you astray as well, because authorities, just like anyone else, serve their own interests.
> https://twitter.com/KevinTONON_/status/1388575836387880965
I don't know if it was correct for the police to get those people away, but from the video the police
1. didn't use force until someone started kicking against them etc
2. when people continued moving away police immediately left them alone
I was expecting police to run after someone who hadn't done anything or something but this looks like a quite ordinary example of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".
You don't kick after a police officer (or anyone else for that matter) and act surprised when you get a beating.
That said I agree with much of the rest.
Governments do lie and there have been many real conspiracies. I don't exactly see how that is a problem with what I wrote. Sure sometimes you have to more research than just look up snopes but the real conspiracies mostly have some realistic motivations and reasons behind them to explain them. Critical thinking can get you far.
> While you need uranium to find the correct values, uranium + an old tv can tell you exactly what's being lied about and what the correct values are. Any experimental physicist leans how to do this).
Exactly, applying the scientific method to find out the truth works.
> But we are now in the situation that media in Europe are lying every day about the constant violence used by the police in Paris (and Brussels, and Madrid, and ...) against COVID-protestors. For example, just from today:
Any measures fighting a pandemic are by nature authoritarian. That can not be helped and doesn't invalidate the measures.
Covid-19 is just the beginning. The more our world is globalized the more often will we have to deal with new viruses and the like. If we don't find a way to effectively contain these challenges we are looking at a world that I don't find particular worth living in. So you are barking up the wrong tree here.
> 1) people who were here were hurt.
Even this is not proven. The symptoms are very unspecific and might not be related to their work.
> 2) the state department is not helping them.
Maybe because of my answer to 1.
> 3) the purpose of these denial messages is, at least in part, to justify 2).
Again the whole arguments fails apart of as the 1st point is not proven.
Your central thesis is an appeal to authority ... and the authority you pick is one that never really tells the truth, has interests at stake here, and has historically lied with rather large consequences. Nor have they ever even apologised or even admitted wrongdoing. What I'm saying is: pick another authority.
> Exactly, applying the scientific method to find out the truth works.
That seems like an excellent proposal for another authority to go to. A well-cited academic that would at least lose credibility if they lied, for example.
> Any measures fighting a pandemic are by nature authoritarian. That can not be helped and doesn't invalidate the measures.
The measures are authoritarian wild guesses. With, of course, a healthy dose of denying there was anything wrong with past measures and complete refusal to help with the massive damage they are causing or accepting anything remotely resembling responsibility. And half the measures are pandering to special interest groups of course.
None of it justifies feeding people wrong information. And let's not joke here. The government is feeding information, and hiding other information, just like all the other groups are. For instance, they are massively downplaying that the big source of infections was hospitals. We all know why: they're afraid of being called to account for ancient ventilation systems in particularly infectious hospitals. They're afraid of the current systems (of having all publicly insured patients share rooms, EVEN when caring for infectious patients) might be in need of redesign. And the second source of infections is restaurants. That is being downplayed everywhere they reopen them.
And of course, they're especially afraid of the knowledge that we don't know all that much about how it spreads coming out. That it will become public knowledge that most measures are just wild guesses. I understand that, it won't make negotiation about measures easier. It's still wrong.
Here is some real info: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/transmissi...
What is being lied about, and what is its truth?