https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/us/politics/havana-syndro....
"New Studies Find No Evidence of Brain Injury in Havana Syndrome Cases"
This story is from two weeks ago. So which is it?
"New Studies Find No Evidence of Brain Injury in Havana Syndrome Cases"
This story is from two weeks ago. So which is it?
> Dr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said.
If anybody finds any factual claims about this device and this supposed syndrome, buried in the innuendo, please post it. But the boldfaced faux-abstract at the top doesn't indicate any new information at all.
Yet somehow this was not known beforehand for years and somehow only became "apparent" when Russia became the public enemy.
> The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.
This article makes it sound like military industrial complex fat cats don't get their pockets filled with tax money fast enough, so plebs need some pushing.
Retroactively changing the past to accommodate the present day narrative is a common political trick, similarly to how Radio Free Europe's reports on Ukrainian ultranationalists challenging the monopoly on violence had suddenly become "Russian propaganda".
Another tiny step closer to the hot phase of WWIII, I guess.
These are both possibilities. The article outlines "new evidence — in the form of intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, and call metadata, along with eyewitness testimony". They don't claim to have the device itself, or direct information about it.
Next, there are some studies that find differences, and some that don't find differences between the affected and a control group. If the studies look at different markers, that is consistent with non-obvious differences being there. The absence of evidence sometimes is evidence of absence, but not always.
I think the proper response for now is to suspend judgment.
Amplifying this by the seriousness of 3 letter US agencies and whatnot and you get people medically retired. (And this is ongoing long enough that probably even some Russian agency has sent there someone to check, and then it got picked up by intelligence leaks. Or they leaked it to fuck with them.)
(And of course psychosomatic things need treatment too, and the investigations are warranted, it's not like US chanceries are the safest places in the world.)
So most likely is that there are a few true positives, and the vast majority of them are false positives. (And of course good luck telling this to anyone who works next to someone who just met a GRU operative, or works in a high-stress job and regularly feels that there are people out to get them.)
> Once back in the United States, Taylor was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury.
>Taylor remembers confronting a tall, muscular man with a military bearing acting suspiciously across the road from the consulate residential complex. After a brief exchange with Taylor, the man responded with a strong Russian accent, shutting down the encounter and running off.
>Taylor did not hesitate in confirming that Gordienko was the suspect skulking around outside U.S. consulate housing.
Gordienko being "Egor Gordienko named as senior member of cell of Russian agents who tried to kill former Russian spy in Salisbury" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/25/fourth-russian-a...
Doesn't sound like a random headache to me.
(2022 CIA: Foreign involvement was ruled out in 976 cases of the 1,000 reviewed, and ... In March 2024, the National Institutes of Health published two medical studies evaluating people reporting Havana syndrome symptoms, and found no evidence of brain injury, irregular blood biomarkers, or vocational impairment)
Things like Ménière’s disease are a PITA to image, but it’s possible.