CIA officer from bin Laden hunt to lead Havana Syndrome probe as cases rise | Hacker News Reader

CIA officer from bin Laden hunt to lead Havana Syndrome probe as cases rise

arstechnica.com

21 pointsBender23 comments

What baffles me is this: what's the endgame here? If you're a spy, and you assassinate someone, that has clear benefits. Same with bribery, blackmail, etc. What does making someone briefly ill and possibly giving them minor brain damage accomplish? Are they hoping to scare diplomats away from these regions? That seems unlikely to work.

supposedly, they are practicing on diplomats. the endgame is that it can be used on anyone given relative proximity. any head of state, commander of army, anyone labeled as enemy

You can practice on anyone, you don't need to target diplomats, and it's not clear what that would gain.

Imagine any protracted conflict, if you can give the other leadership group minor brain damage, you'll more likely be able to out maneuver them.

Why does Russia keep poisoning dissidents? They could clearly assassinate or disappear the targets instead.

I think Russia does it to send a clear message it was them, to dissuade others from going against the state.

idk if this article mentions this, but the article I read in the WSJ made mention of a victim who was forced into early retirement.

An order of magnitude more staff in any US embassy are spies than diplomats. If this whole thing isn't a mass-hysteria, then the idea would clearly be to scare the spies away, rather than the diplomats.

>minor brain damage

Any brain damage is much more impactful than you think.

If I could guess it would be grey zone tactics to affect the most amount of people and inhibit their work. If you attack everyone there is less information pertaining to motive than a single target can get you.

I think it is a broad stroke attack that should not occur.

>Any brain damage is much more impactful than you think.

True. I guess the endgame may be "dumbing down" the "intelligence agency".

I doubt they are doing it to dumb down the agency. Any time you trigger a disruption or emergency protocol the entire operation is more vulnerable.

Lets think for a moment: if there's actually a team of spies using this technology it could be a production level tech, or prototypes with somewhat strong science behind it.

Then they would know much more about what exactly are they doing with people's brains. Wait for it..

What if all these cases are just the failures? The actual damaged brains are others, and the damage is much more specific, like in high energy based strong psychological conditioning, making those other - invisible, not detected yet - targets, think and pursuit goals projected to them by the adversary forces.

It is also possible that the investigation team is suspect as well. Both Cuba and Austria are Russian area of influence strongholds.

This should be interesting, good ol' science with scientific method based conclusions and stuff, clear cause + effects, fully empirical & non-speculative, like most non-scientist people like to have in official documents.

"Houston Methodist Neurological Institute researchers from the department of neurosurgery shrunk a deadly glioblastoma tumor by more than a third using a helmet generating a noninvasive oscillating magnetic field..."

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-07/hm-imd072221...

Shouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a microwave/RF detector in these embassies? I haven't seen word of any attempts to do so in the Wikipedia article on this nor in the articles I've come across.

For those not into Area 51 weapons (What's Russia's equivalent?), it's worth thinking about all those articles about being poor and poverty and the effects on the brain.

And how that relates to general stress and even things like a global lockdown.

That's not to say there's evidence of physical brain damage here, there's not, you can read the sources for yourself. But brains can go strange at times.

The people impacted include US Diplomats, so I'm not sure being poor and living in poverty is an easy explanation here.

I watched Andrea Mitchell and Sen Marco Rubio discuss this today. I didn't realize it was happening outside Cuba and even within the US (If what I heard is accurate)

There is no evidence of it ever happening, there are people with unexplained symptoms outside of Havana.

Doing it to the US is ballsy, but I bet you could have gotten away with this for quite some time against less major actors. In fact I question why someone would use this against just US diplomats in such a low stakes situation. I would have saved this weapon for when it would have made a difference.

Is it Jessica Chastain?

Why can't they use Palantir software to solve this, just like they used Palantir to "solve" Bin Laden?

Imagine the the US .gov recognizes they must drawdown their foreign presence because Rome is burning.

False flag against own personal that requires the broad and full repatriation (retreat) of all assets.

Has anyone looked in the basement of nearby US run facilities?

/Conspiracy

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