Havana Syndrome definitely (maybe) not caused by brain-scrambling energy weapons Havana Syndrome – the inexplicable illness experienced by some US intelligence and diplomatic personnel – is almost certainly not caused by energy weapons, according to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It has, rather, attributed the malady to pre-existing mental health challenges exacerbated by …
"it's not logical to believe in extrasolar aliens. That's why the whole idea has become the domain of cranks."
I think the domain was already inhabited mostly by cranks before, even without some of the data we have today. After all, there's still a reasonable chance that there's life of some form on a planet somewhere, which doesn't have to be as habitable as ours is. What's much harder to believe is that the life that might exist is constantly coming to visit us in the form of whatever the science fiction portrayal of aliens has recently been, leaving no evidence except the clear memories of someone who changes their tune from time to time when media attention is lacking.
Despite having pointed the finger away from several potential sources over the years, and having a long list of credible accounts and people with confirmed and significant heath problems, there is nothing to see here. Please return to your foreign posts regardless of your safety concerns. Thank you, the US government.
If this report was intended to dispel concerns over it, it is accomplishing the opposite effect. Carefully guarded terms framed to sidestep identifying any actual terms, all tailored to dispel parts of the suspicions without ever identifying the source of any of the know cases. Also positing things in terms that there is one and not multiple sources of these effects and while stridently claiming it totally almost certainly probably wasn't a foreign adversary conducting an attack, also helpfully ducking the question of what caused the incidents in the first place.
I can see a few of these cases being fraud, hypochondriacs or attention seekers, but many other cases were reasonably reliable career staff that are harder to brush off. Too many had verifiable injuries. The reports in Cuba were leaning to organophosphate poisoning at one point, which wouldn't have line of sight issues. During a time when Russia was sending kill squads all over europe with a collection of rather nasty nerve agents. Or the maybe US embassy was spraying for tropical pests and not disclosing the ingredients list.
No idea what actually happened, or the method used, but the careful phrasing leaves them a lot of wiggle room. That's not the kind of report that builds trust.
The detainees you think are connected aren't there. The embassy is in Havana. The detainees are in Guantánamo Bay naval base. A very basic knowledge of Cuban geography would inform you that these places are far apart.
The report is vague because people don't like to hear that their symptoms are psychosomatic. Nobody wants to hear that and many will reject it if it's said, but it happens and many attempts to prove what happened has suggested it as a predominant cause. Individual problems that affect one person can spread to people nearby if they can convince themselves that they're under attack, and being in a country with the loosest of diplomatic ties while charged with somehow improving that can bring on the stress that makes that easy.
"dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety" - "tinnitus, visual problems, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties"
Textbook migraine symptoms.
Speaking as someone who gets combinations of the above 3-4 times a month, they have my sympathy, but it doesn't scream "conspiracy" to me.
Embassies have always housed radio equipment, they use it to communicate back to their country. Although modern communications have largely made this redundant the capability would be important in places like Cuba which are not only regarded as hostile but lack the reliable communications infrastructure needed to replace radio. When I heard about this syndrome I thought immediately "poorly maintained microwave equipment" -- probably leaky joints in waveguides**. We tend to think of the US and its government as super-capable, always having the latest state of the art kit in perfect condition, but its more likely that equipment will be older and that the screening process for staff (especially technical staff) will leave them in short supply so the idea of a leaky satellite terminal isn't that far fetched.
Everything will be highly classified and obviously once problems have been identified they'll be quietly fixed so expect the syndrome to just go away.
**Tricky things. To the uninitiated they look like plumbing but they're not, the power is transferred in the inside walls, not the middle as that you'd expect. Sections are joined by bolting flanges together and its there that you can get leaks because the gasket's not perfect or the bolts weren't tightened quite right.
I would have thought that they would have looked very carefully for any RF signals that might conceivably be an issue. They probably do that regularly at the embassy to look for RF bugs - I am reminded of the "Great Seal" bug that did require that it be radiated with a strong continuous wave RF signal to work.
Its a threat because it still exists and anyway we need those Florida votes.
The general lack of understanding of world geography makes it possible to both conduct ongoing economic war with a country (for 60 years and more) and also pay rent on a sizable chunk that is a major military base. Guantanamo is not a defendable island, its got sqiare boundaries, and it relies on Cuba proper for things like fresh water supplies -- there's farms and communities just beyond the fence line.
Just don't enter the access road by mistake, at best you'll spend hours with a machine gun pointed at you while their security guards check your paperwork, your cars, your belongings and with whoever is in charge that you're not a terrorist of sorts... yeah... not the stress-relieving days of vacations one hopes for
It was a threat because it was allied with the USSR, who was known to park nuclear warheads there. But, that was then. Now, I doubt Russia could get a warship all the way there in one go.
I never was a fan of Obama, but always thought that his attempt to normalize relations with Cuba was a step in the right direction. I wish we'd have continued that initiative.
... concluded that "it is 'very unlikely' a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported anomalous health incidents." (p/) It's worth noting that the term "very unlikely" – when used in this context by the National Intelligence Council – is a technical term that means there's roughly an 80 percent chance it was something else.
So does that mean it was 20 percent likely the USA side caused it?
I think the term "foreign adversary" is more telling - it basically lays it out as a "foreign ally", presumably doing it to the detainees per request - and there's just some collateral. Grunts are just guinea pigs to the US military anyways, but without all the paperwork you need for guinea pigs.
This reminds me of the stories in the US about cops touching a bit of fentanyl and immediately having a life-threatening reaction. (Fentanyl cannot be absorbed through the skin.)
We're really reluctant to admit that people, even big strong police officers and Very Serious foreign diplomats, can have panic attacks. Panic attacks can feel very real and very life-threatening when you're having one. And panic attacks can be psychologically contagious once people get into their heads that something is dangerous.
The very existence of Fentanyl patches as approved methods of prescribing Fentanyl to patients (check your local pharmacopeia) would strongly rebut your assertion that Fentanyl can't be absorbed through the skin. A quick check shows more than 9 brands prescribable in the NHS. Unlike some transdermal drug formulations Fentanyl patches do not contain active excipients such as DMSO intended to ease the transdermal transport of the drug, indicating that Fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin without any special preparation to make it amenable to transdermal transport.
Fentanyl is a very powerful drug and effective therapeutic doses are very small - those patches are designed to deliver between 12 and 100 micrograms per hour. A lethal dose for humans is estimated at 2 milligrams.
Those two paragraphs taken together would suggest that transdermal poisoning with Fentanyl is a real and genuine risk if you start ferreting through something that might contain loose Fentanyl without adequate barrier protection. However, in situations where loose Fentanyl is about inhalation and accidental ingestion would represent higher and more immediate risks than transdermal absorption.
That doesn't however rebut your suggestion that there are a lot of big girl's blouses among the US corpus of police.
Fentanyl patches work because they mix the fentanyl with something (usually an alcohol) that can penetrate the skin, and even then it takes many minutes to deliver a dose. Dry fentanyl powder (which is what police usually encounter) cannot be absorbed transdermally. If it were that easy to absorb a large dose people wouldn't be injecting or snorting it.
In some cases officers have had reactions after touching things that turned out to not be fentanyl, and the reactions they have are generally not consistent with a drug overdose. This is at best a panic attack and at worst an attempt to create an assault charge to make a stronger case against a defendant.
While I don't expect you to take a Buzzfeed article at face value, this one has a lot of relevant links that talk about the issue. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lindseyellefson/fentanyl-accidental-exposure-police
Canada investigated the problem and fairly quickly found it was due to excessive use of pesticides during the zika virus outbreak in the Caribbean at the time. A US contractor from Florida was used to fumigate the embassies and staff housing with organo-phosphate pesticides.
Due to the panic over zika at the time (the virus was causing serious birth defects), the fumigation was carried out much more frequently than normally recommended. The result of this was that people were exposed to toxic levels of pesticides.
Blood samples of Canadian diplomats found above normal levels of organo-phosphate pesticides. The symptoms associated with this are consistent with these associated with so-called "Havana Syndrome", including hearing sounds that aren't there and the rest. Examination of the patients also found nervous system damage consistent with pesticide poisoning. Organo-phosphates affect the nervous system (some types of organo-phosphates are used as military nerve gas), so effects on the brain are entirely to be expected.
The US government were aware of the Canadian medical investigation but chose to ignore it. Hypothetically this may have been due to concerns about the finger of blame (and lawsuits) coming back on the US officials who approved the use of excessive amounts of pesticides.
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