Merged US may close Cuba Embassy over 'health attacks'

[dann]

From the Cyber podcast, my transcription, continued:
When asked about the definition of Havana Syndrome,

15:33--> But, but the most widely kind of agreed upon definition of what Havana Syndrome symptoms are for the cases that do seem like they are the result of this mysterious illness, is what you hear often, not from everyone, but from many people is that they hear some kind of high-pitched buzz, some loud sound. And often dogs are barking, like, in the area. And then they hear, they feel pressure in the ear, an intense pressure, and waves of anxiety begin to sweep over them.
They become disoriented and kind of frozen in place. And what we've heard from a number of people is that once they move from whatever location they were at, if they were standing in a place, if they moved into another room, if they are in the bedroom when it's happened to them, if they they moved out onto the bedroom floor, then those feelings would cease.
And so that's one reason why a lot of these people think that this may be a weapon, because it seems like it's targeting them, that it's maybe a beam of some kind. If they move out of the way of the beam, then these symptoms stop.
Those are the initial symptoms. What has happened in many of the cases of these people who have suffered this thing is that over the course of months, and sometimes often in years, their symptoms get worse, and so, kind of a brain fog sets in for many of these people, who can no longer do their jobs, who are physically impaired, whose balance has suffered, who have a hard time walking, who ...? who can't be in bright rooms.

And so over the years these symptoms have completely or, like, significantly debilitated many of these people to the point where they either had to go into early retirement or it's really hurt their careers and kind of destroyed their lives.

Yes!!!! If feels bloody awful to be scared, even by the sound of crickets, and if you don't get a proper explanation and instead are told that you have good reason to be scared, it will turn into a chronic case of MPI and ruin your life.
If I were Mark Zaid, the lawyer of many of the 'Havana Syndrome' sufferers, I would sue the doctors who persuaded my clients that they had been attacked by, first, a sonic weapon, and then later on, when the sound turned out to be crickets, by a pulsed microwave energy weapon. I think he'd have a pretty good case ...

 

[dann]

It just occurred to me that Michael Hoffer, mentioned in post 1680, is also the doctor who diagnosed Len Ber with the 'Havana Syndrome'. Len Ber is a so-called targeted individual (TI), who is neither a diplomat nor a spy and was never anywhere near the U.S. embassy in Havana. At least that's what he claims and seems to document:

I am a US Private Citizen, not a diplomat. My #directedenergy attacks all been happening domesticallly, and are still ongoing. Diagnosed by Dr Hoffer of UofM with the same diagnosis as embassy workers. Currently on the medical leave with the diagnosis of #HavanaSyndrome
Len Ber MD (on Twitter, Feb 18, 2022)

These doctors with their claims about the symptoms of 'Havana Syndrome' and diagnostic devices like the eye-movement goggles are obviously in a bit of a pickle: On the one hand, they have claimed that those symptoms show that the patients suffer from "traumatic brain injuries," and that their impaired eye tracking etc. documents this. On the other hand, other people now show up with what appears to be similar symptoms even though they were never in Havana, never worked at and embassy and were never spies (I assume).

So what are the doctors to do with these new patients? I see only two options:
1) They can either admit that the alleged symptoms of 'Havana Syndrome' turned out not to be evidence of any kind of attack with any kind of weapons, be they based on sound or electromagnetic waves.
2) Or they can insist that their diagnoses were correct, in which case they will have to recognize these new patients as suffering from the same ailment as the diplomatic or espionage 'Havana Syndrome' sufferers.

The 'syndrome' doctors seem to be adamant that their 'Havana Syndrome' diagnosis is correct, which gives all targeted individuals who feel nauseous, have balance problems, brain fog, and don't sleep well an argument to sue the government, which is what they are now doing.
And for some (not at all mysterious) reason, this hasn't put a stop to the alleged targeting. On the contrary:
Increased Targeting since Lawsuit filed (TargetedJustice, Feb 10, 2023)

 

[dann]

Today's episode of Project Brazen's podcast series:

The story is bigger than Cuba now. Cases are being reported on nearly every continent, so some investigators propose a new, strange theory. We wade into the science to see if “Havana Syndrome” is just the latest in a long pattern of attacks using microwave energy.
Guests: Beatrice Golomb, Linda Birnbaum, David Relman, Frank Figliuzzi, Charles Kupperman
The Frey Effect (Project Brazen, Feb 13, 2023 - 34 min)

Episode transcript

This is bloody awful!
1) it is claimed that 'Havana Syndrome' doesn't conform to the pattern of mass psychogenic illness (MPI). The reasons given are the same ones we've heard before: that retinal bleeding can't be caused by MPI. (So let's forget that there appears to have been only one case of that and that retinal bleeding can be caused "by several medical conditions such as hypertension, retinal vein occlusion (a blockage of a retinal vein), anemia, leukemia or diabetes." (Wikipedia).
2) The jerky eye movement, which Kate and Doug weren't aware of until they were tested with special eye-tracking goggles and told about it by a doctor, who convinced "Doug and Kate that something might be seriously wrong," even though such eye movements are actually "common in anxious (!) patients."

It is becoming more and more obvious that the narrative changes depending on the conclusion that they are trying to get to, i.e. the idea that 'Havana Syndrome' was an attack. I'm glad that we have so many descriptions of people's experience with the SOUND from before the narrative changed from the sonic attack to the pulsed microwave energy attack.

Golomb is, of course, the right person to go to for the latter, which is what David Relman and his team at the NAS did. She is presented as "exactly the right person, with the right idea, at the right moment," i.e. when the analyses of the many cricket recordings had made it impossible to insist on the idea of a sonic attack. "She’s got a pretty unique set of skills. A degree in physics. Then a switch to medicine. Postdoc work in computational neurobiology." Not to mention her dislike of MPI explanations and warnings against "new technology leading to further exposure to electromagnetic radiation," i.e. 5G (Electrosmogprevention). The right kind of expert to save Relman's attack delusion.

Cue, Relman: These early cases defied the definition of mass psychogenic illness for a whole variety of reasons. And we went through the, you know, the definitions and, and said, ‘Yeah, this just doesn’t hang together.’

It's a pity that we don't get to hear about the "whole variety of reasons." Nicky Woolf mentions that the two couples, Karen and Kevin, Kate and Doug, heard about other 'syndrome' cases before they themselves joined their ranks, so in their cases it all comes down to the retinal bleeding and the eye-tracking tests, which have other, much more mundane, explanations than pulsed electromagnetic energy attacks. (By the way, it probably can't be called mass psychogenic illness when you begin to think that something is seriously wrong with you because a doctor tells you so!)

This is David Relman's reason for dismissing MPI:

Cue, Relman: Mass psychogenic illness depends upon a communication network. And that’s how the contagion occurs. Yet when we talked to the very earliest cases in Havana, their cases were closely held.
Once Havana Syndrome is splurged all over the global media, that’s different.
But as an explanation for what happened to that core, first group? The Academy were…unconvinced.
Cue, Relman: It seemed unlikely that Case #2 could have essentially caught it from Case #1, when Case #1 had not, you know, uttered a word about it. That basic feature of mass psychogenic illness seemed to be missing.

This was also Adam Entous & Jon Lee Anderson's reason for dismissing MPI: That the first two cases in Havana allegedly never "uttered a word about it." However, this depiction of what happened doesn't ring true: 1) If "their cases were closely held," who were the people holding those cases? 2) Other people at the embassy have described how Patient Zero was actually campaigning for people in the embassy community to 'connect the dots', i.e. claim that if they felt nauseous, dizzy etc. heard cricket sound, it was because they were being attacked.

Golomb's description is interesting:

Cue, Beatrice: …the fact that there was supposed tight localization of the sound in space, so that for some people they moved a couple feet away and the sound abruptly stopped. They moved back, the sound abruptly came back, or as reported that in some cases, someone heard a sound that was pretty loud, but someone else in the immediate vicinity heard nothing.
It’s an extremely important detail. If these reports were accurate, it struck Beatrice that this sound wasn’t behaving like… well, like sound.
It wasn’t going in through the ears. Not the way a sonic weapon like an LRAD would.
The point is: sound waves are extremely difficult to contain.
Cue, Beatrice: When they covered their ears or covered their head, there was no perceived attenuation in the intensity of the sound.

We have recently discussed how sound behaves and moves around, in particular fairly high-frequency sounds, see posts 1,663 and 1,665. It just isn't true that "if these reports were accurate ... sound wasn't behaving like... well, like sound." (By the way, it's a pretty big if!) And the use of sciency words like attenuation doesn't prevent sound from being heard even when you cover your ears or your head. (Why would they cover their head?! And with what? Cotton or tin foil?)

When the sound of the Indies short-tailed cricket can be heard “from inside a diesel truck going 40 miles an hour on the highway” (see post 1,678), I am pretty sure that you can also hear it when you are using earplugs, and it may even still be loud enough to annoy you. However, there will be some "perceived attenuation in the intensity of the sound," but remember that this is the description based on Beatrice Golomb's probably biassed recollection of how 'Havana Syndrome' sufferers allegedly described their experience of the SOUND, i.e. the SOUND that others went out on the porch to record on their cell phones. Which is not at all the way pulsed microwave energy would behave.

Next week's episode will also be dealing with the Frey effect. Unfortunately, Nicky Woolf doesn't seem to have contacted Bradley Roth, who teaches physics at Oakland University and does biological physics research using theoretical and computation methods, with an emphasis on bioelectric and biomagnetic phenomena. Brad Roth is the author of this article:

Many of the papers that the report [Relman's NAS report] cites are the same as those used to buttress claims that cell phones cause cancer, a claim which is not accepted by most of the scientific community, including the National Cancer Institute [22], the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [23], and the Food and Drug Administration [24].
(...)
Which do we believe: the report by JASON or the one by the National Academies? Without further evidence (such as the detection of electromagnetic waves during an attack), I tend to agree with JASON: the Havana Syndrome is not caused by attacks using microwave weapons. To me, the National Academies report lost much of its credibility when it cited electromagnetic hypersensitivity as a real effect and when it cited the work of a 5G/Covid advocate. What were they thinking?
Two Reports About the Havana Syndrome: Which Should We Believe? (Medium, Feb 8, 2022)

Brad Roth is also the author of the book Are Electromagnetic Fields Making Me Ill? How Electricity and Magnetism Affect Our Health (Harriet Hall's review of the book at Science-Based Medicine, June 14, 2022)

 

[dann]

Notice how the argument against mass psychogenic illness (MPI) is presented in Nicky Woolf's podcast. After mentioning that one 'syndrome' sufferer, Karen knew about the alleged attacks before "her first event", her retinal bleeding is used as an argument against MPI:

OK sure: by the time she has her first event, Karen is aware something is going on. She may well have internalized the idea that she could get sick too.
But the power of suggestion has limits. Headaches, nausea, dizziness – sure, it can cause those, easy. But it can’t do what happened to Karen.
Cue, Kevin: “It looked like her retina was bleeding.”
It can’t make you bleed from the eyes.

No, retinal bleeding is not on the list of the common symptoms of MPI (Wikipedia). The three most common symptoms are "headache, dizziness or light-headedness, nausea," And retinal bleeding doesn't have to be on the list. If loud crickets sounds scare you so much that you fall off the porch and break a leg, a broken leg still wouldn't be a symptom, not even an uncommon one, of MPI. But on the list of common MPI symptoms is "anxiety or nervousness," and "episodes of anxiety can cause dramatic, temporary spikes in blood pressure," one of the things that cause retinal bleeding. By the way, "trouble with vision" actually is on the list of common MPI symptoms, but much less common than headaches, dizziness and nausea.

Immediately after Karen's retinal bleeding was mentioned, another argument against MPI follows:

And Doug and Kate Ferguson, it turns out, heard the sound long before they got told about the sickness.
Here’s Doug.
Cue, Doug: We didn’t associate the sound with any kind of attack or with any health effects, that kind of thing.
True, the recording he made was later identified as a cricket. To be honest, the whole cricket thing is super awkward.
But Doug says they also had symptoms before they knew something was going on.
Cue, Doug: …you know, some balance issues, and, and headaches – that kind of thing, nausea…

In other words, the three most common symptoms of MPI, and three symptoms that everybody has now and then, more so if they are also overworked and stressed out and anxious.
The irony is that Kate and Doug's symptoms weren't symptoms of MPI at first. Why would you start fearing that something is seriously wrong with you just because you have a headache and feel dizzy and nauseous? It's the kind of thing that may make you consider if you should take a day off from work. That's all.

But in the context of the 'Havana Syndrome' narrative, those innocuous symptoms suddenly became a sign that they were being attacked by the (cricket) sounds that they recorded on their cell phones. And proof positive was apparently delivered by the investigative doctors who allegedly told them that retinal bleeding could only be caused by a serious head trauma, and that since a recording of their eyes showed them that "tracking that dot across our field of vision was jerky," it meant that "something might be seriously wrong," to the extent that they thought that "it really became apparent that we had some more serious impairment." Topped off with the diagnosis "mild traumatic brain injuries." (Quotations from post 1,680)

 

[dann]

What's wrong with this picture?

One thing that makes the story about the 'Havana Syndrome' interesting to follow is that everybody, even every expert interviewed about it, is at least to some extent a rank amateur. Neurologists aren't physicists, physicists aren't otolaryngologists, otolaryngologists aren't MPI experts, MPI experts aren't acoustic engineers, and acoustics engineers aren't neurologists*. And yet the alleged experts often try to explain things that they obviously know absolutely nothing about, like when David Relman, epidemiologist and microbiologist, talks about sound and acoustics (see post 1,590) and only manages to reveal his own ignorance.

This forces those of us who aren't experts in a single one of the relevant scientific fields to try to make heads or tails of the whole story on our own since the alleged experts don't agree on anything. And sometimes there are these moments when things become abundantly clear. One of those moments for me was when it struck me how insane it was to present the audio recordings of crickets (and actually the audio recording of any kind of sound) as proof that the 'syndrome' was caused by a pulsed microwave attack.

I just had another one of those moments when I heard and read this excerpt about the Frey effect again:

Allan Frey, a 25-year-old biologist, is working for General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Centre, at Cornell University in upstate New York. When, one day, he gets approached by a technician who tells him he can *hear* *radar.*
I don’t know if the guy opened with this or made some polite small-talk first. “How’s the family? Got any nice weekend plans? I can hear radar!” But in any case, Frey is intrigued.
He asks the technician to take him to the array so he can try it. To his astonishment, Frey discovers when he stands in front of the dish, that he, too, can hear it.
A clicking, buzzing, hissing sound.
[Cue, clicking buzzing hissing sound]
The sound, he noted in a paper the following September, never changed direction. No matter which way he faced or how much he twisted his head around, it was still coming from what felt like either directly behind his head or inside it.
Chapter 4: The Frey Effect: transcript (THE SOUND: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, Project Brazen, Feb 13, 2023)

On the one hand, it makes it clear why Relman's National Academy of Sciences group embraced the Frey effect when it was presented to them by a proponent of electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
And on the other hand, it makes it clear why the Frey effect doesn't explain the 'symptoms' described by the 'syndrome' sufferers at all, even though sufferers and experts are doing their utmost to try to make it fit.

These episodes have sickened dozens of spies, diplomats and service members in multiple countries overseas. The symptoms vary, ranging from headaches and vertigo to what some doctors have diagnosed as traumatic brain injury. Many victims have reported hearing a piercing directional noise at the onset of symptoms. Others have suffered inexplicable, debilitating injuries that have forced them to retire early. 
Exclusive: Dozens of CIA officers accuse intel agency of soft-pedaling its ‘Havana Syndrome’ investigation (CNN, Oct 5, 2022)

Can you see what I'm getting at?!

ETA *I owe the entomologists an apology for forgetting about them! They did such an amazing job with the cricket recordings that the idea of a sonic attack is dead and gone for ever! It didn't help much since it was immediately replaced by the pulsed microwaves, but that wasn't the fault of the entomologists. That was due to the bias of Relman, Giordano, Golomb, Hoffer etc.

 

[dann]

The Frey Effect?! No way!

The first descriptions of the 'Havana Syndrome' mentioned that the sound heard by the 'syndrome' sufferers sounded like ... crickets: "loud ringing or a high-pitch chirping similar to crickets or cicadas." And we don't have to rely on their ear witness reports and try to guess what the actual sound might have been because they recorded the crickets and played the recordings for us on TV.

However, sound doesn't harm the brain, and since their doctors were adamant that the brains of their patients had been harmed by the Anomalous Health Incidents, another theory soon replaced the idea that the U.S. embassy employees in Havana had been harmed by a sonic attack: "directed energy weapons" were the way to save the idea that an attack had taken place.
And the word directed didn't appear out of nowhere:

Findings In this case series of 21 individuals exposed to directional audible and sensory phenomena, a constellation of acute and persistent signs and symptoms were identified, in the absence of an associated history of blunt head trauma.
(...)
Exposures Report of experiencing audible and sensory phenomena emanating from a distinct direction (directional phenomena) associated with an undetermined source, while serving on US government assignments in Havana, Cuba, since 2016.
(...)
Affected individuals described the sounds as directional, intensely loud, and with pure and sustained tonality. Of the patients, high-pitched sound was reported by 16 (76%), although 2 (10%) noted a low-pitched sound.
(...)
Both the sound and sensory stimuli were often described as directional in that the individuals perceived a distinct direction from which the sensation emanated (hereafter referred to as directional phenomena). Further, the directional phenomena appeared to be localized to a precise area, as individuals (n = 12, 57%) noted that after changing location, the sensation disappeared and the associated symptoms reduced.
Neurological Manifestations Among US Government Personnel Reporting Directional Audible and Sensory Phenomena in Havana, Cuba (JAMA Network, March 20, 2018)

So how does this rhyme with the idea that the AHI victims in Havana may have heard and recorded the sound of crickets, but somehow what harmed them must have been the Frey effect from microwaves? It doesn't rhyme at all, actually!

Allan Frey, a 25-year-old biologist, is working for General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Centre, at Cornell University in upstate New York. When, one day, he gets approached by a technician who tells him he can *hear* *radar.*
(...)
He asks the technician to take him to the array so he can try it. To his astonishment, Frey discovers when he stands in front of the dish, that he, too, can hear it.
A clicking, buzzing, hissing sound.
[Cue, clicking buzzing hissing sound]
The sound, he noted in a paper the following September, never changed direction. No matter which way he faced or how much he twisted his head around, it was still coming from what felt like either directly behind his head or inside it. Chapter 4: The Frey Effect: transcript (THE SOUND: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, Project Brazen, Feb 13, 2023)

Notice that the description of the Frey effect is nowhere near the description of what the spies and diplomats in Havana heard. When Frey was standing in from of the dish, the 'sound' he 'heard' wasn't "emanating from a distinct direction" or "localized to a precise area," i.e. the dish. It was "coming from what felt like either directly behind his head or inside it." And it felt like that was where it was coming from, "no matter which way he faced or how much he twisted his head around." If it chirps like a cricket ... By the way, this is not the only time 'syndrome' victims themselves were almost spot on: ""It was almost like I couldn't really process. I was sort of-- it was like a paralyzing panic attack," Troye told 60 Minutes." Olivia Troye was the "Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, ... who suffered "Havana Syndrome" symptoms on White House grounds." (CBS News, Feb 20, 2022)

 

[dann]

Spy Museum Event

The Spy Museum, 700 L'Enfant Plaza, SW Washington DC 20024, has an event on Wednesday, February 22, 2023, based on Project Brazen's podcast series:

In December 2016, a US official in Havana went to the embassy medical centre to report a debilitating and confounding illness. The symptoms included headaches; nausea; hearing loss; problems with memory and vision. And its onset was characterized by hearing… something. A buzzing, hissing, grinding…sound.

Soon, a second official came down with the same symptoms. Then a third. Then a fourth. By the time the story went public in summer 2017, dozens of US diplomats, as well as some Canadians, had come down with what was becoming known as “Havana Syndrome.” In recent years, The US agencies have failed to agree even on the basic premises. State department said it’s a “sonic device,” then rolled that back. The CIA have hinted microwave radiation might be involved. The FBI said there was no “there” there. Now they seem to be rolling that back as well.

A new investigative podcast series — THE SOUND: Mystery of Havana Syndrome—from Project Brazen and PRX, peels back the layers of one of the most bizarre mysteries of the modern age. Join International Spy Museum Historian and Curator Dr. Andrew Hammond for a live panel with Nicky Woolf, investigative journalist and host of THE SOUND; Marc Polymeropoulos, the CIA officer who suffered debilitating symptoms in Moscow; and Mark Zaid, the American attorney who says new victims are coming forward all the time.

They’ll explore the wild and wide variety of theories that have been put forward. Could it be caused by noisy crickets? Or mosquito spray? A mass delusion? Or a foreign attack?
After their conversation, you can ask Nicky, Marc and Mark for their insight into other aspects of the mystery they have come to know and understand so well. Reception to follow.

We already know that two of the three participants, Polymeropoulos and Zaid, insist that the alleged syndrome is an attack. Polymeropoulos insists that it was a Russian attack. And Woolf seems to have fallen hook, line and sinker for Golomb's ideas about pulsed microwaves (see post 1,663), so I doubt that there will be much exploration going on. It will be probably be an event that Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, Jeanne Shaheen, and the rest of the politicians behind the HAVANA Act can invite their donors to without risking anything.

If I were there, I would ask Nicky Woolf if he has made any recent discoveries since the interview in The Sunday Times; for instance that it just isn't true that retinal bleeding is "only ever seen ... when somebody has a trauma to their head, like a car accident”. See post 1,661. It would also be interesting to know if he has found out that jerky eye movements aren't the unambiguous sign of brain injury that Hoffer or Relman may have told him. See post 1,680. And maybe Woolf actually believes in electromagnetic hypersensitivity. I don't know. But he doesn't question Karen Coats and Kate Husband's claim that they suffer from it: "Both Karen and Kate told us they hadn't yet felt able to sit for an interview. The prospect of speaking for an extended period surrounded by electronic devices is really painful." See post 1,666.

Somebody should tell Polymeropoulos that mass psychogenic illness is not the same thing as faking it or "making it up." See post 1,659.

And if somebody feels the need to help Zaid, they should tell him that he might have a much better case if he gave up on the idea of an attack and focused on Diagnostic Error in Health Care (National Library of Health Care) instead.
There's a word for doctors making their patients ill by making them believe in a wrong diagnosis, but I don't remember the word. Dr. Mitchell Valdes Sosa, the director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience,, mentioned it in the Conspiracyland podcast: Bonus Episode 1: "A Cuban Doctor's Diagnosis" (Apple Podcasts, Sep 14, 2022 - 9 min.).

 

[dann]

Alex Jones's InfoWars has discovered targeted individual Len Ber:

Powerful interview also discusses Havana syndrome, DNA resonance, microwave and 'Voice of God' weapon technology, artificial intelligence, and much more!
A powerful interview featuring a Harvard and MIT-educated scientist and a victim of Havana syndrome dives deep into the topics of CIA mind control, next generation weapons, and AI, and how they’re being deployed against the population today.
(...)
Leonid “Len” Ber received his MD degree in the former USSR where he specialized and practiced as an endocrinologist. Now a US citizen, Len is one of the few US civilians to ever be officially diagnosed with Havana syndrome.
Harvard Scientist Exposes CIA Mind Control Weapons & How They’re Used Against The Public (InfoWars, Feb 14, 2023)

I'm not going to watch this one!

 

[dann]

There's a word for doctors making their patients ill by making them believe in a wrong diagnosis, but I don't remember the word. Dr. Mitchell Valdes Sosa, the director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience,, mentioned it in the Conspiracyland podcast: Bonus Episode 1: "A Cuban Doctor's Diagnosis" (Apple Podcasts, Sep 14, 2022 - 9 min.).

I think I've solved it. Due to his background, born and spent his childhood 0-11 in Chicago, Valdes Sosa speaks English much better than most Cubans, but he used a Spanish pronunciation of the word iatrogenic, and my impaired hearing made it even more difficult to figure out what he was saying: Iatrogenesis (Wikipedia)

My transcription:

- What I'm saying is: Each of the arguments I've laid out, let's look at them. And if I'm shown they're wrong, I'm willing to change my opinion.

- But for now, Valdes Sosa's opinion is clear.

- The story has different pieces. That there's a new syndrome, that there's brain damage, that some sort of energy source caused this, that it was a deliberate attack.
Take each of these pieces of the story, right, the ones that gave a lot of traction in the media, because it's very spectacular. If you look at each of the pieces of the story, there's no evidence for any of it. Not a drop of real evidence.

- So you think it's a myth?

- I think it's a myth. I mean, I think that what's a myth is the whole explanation, the whole story. There are people that are ill. There are people who do not feel well. There are people that maybe had gotten worse, their symptoms had gotten worse, as soon as they started believing that they were attacked by a mysterious weapon, that nobody knew nothing about it. You're told by authorities, right, by your government, by some doctors: 'Oh, you have brain damage, and you have brain damage because of a very mysterious weapon', you get worried. You get tremendously worried. And if you have any symptoms, it will blow up.

- And then Valdes Sosa offered up his own diagnosis for what't behind Havana Syndrome, using a medical term I hadn't heard before:

- So I think there's been ... what's it called ... iatrogenic damage.

- What?

- Iatrogenic! This is when the medical establishment, at some point, the medical establishment harms the patient with the information they give them, right? And this happens. If you misdiagnose somebody, that person can become anxious, and can become worried. And I think that the whole explanation has not helped. This whole explanation that has not got any basis in real facts has done more harm than good.

- What's the word?

- Iatrogenic.

- I never heard that before, but ...

- I studied medicine and it was drilled into us: Be careful what you tell your patients because you can harm them if you alarm them, you know, if you give them a misdiagnosis.
Bonus Episode 1: "A Cuban Doctor's Diagnosis" (Apple Podcasts, Sep 14, 2022 - 9 min.)

If doctors actually said to Karen Coats, when she had retinal bleeding, that they'd “only ever seen this when somebody has a trauma to their head, like a car accident” (see post 1,661), then I think that they are to blame for her current EHS. And if they told Kate and Dough or even implied that jerky eye movements (see post 1,680) was a sign of "mild traumatic brain injuries," plausibly caused by a directed pulsed microwave energy weapon, I think that they could sue for punitive damages, too.

But I am not a lawyer ...

 

[dann]

Nicky Woolf is interviewed by Ash Sarkar from Novara Media on YouTube, Feb 12, 2023:

From covering mass shootings as US Correspondent for The Guardian to investigating QAnon for a year for the podcast 'Finding Q' - Nicky Woolf has been plumbing the grimmer depths of the American psyche for a long time.
He joins Ash to discuss the mysterious ‘Havana Syndrome’, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Making Nazis Afraid Again.
What The Hell is 'Havana Syndrome'?

The interview is long, 1:11:47, but only 15-20 minutes are about 'Havana Syndrome', beginning at 41:27.

As it became clear already in the article in The Sunday Times (see post 1,660) and even more so in the subsequent podcasts, he has bought into the idea that the 'syndrome' can't have been a case of mass psychogenic illness (MPI). He repeats the argument that retinal bleeding can't have been caused by MPI and that the first four cases (all CIA agents) didn't communicate about it, allegedly, i.e. the argument that Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson also used to dismiss MPI.

Unfortutately, Nicky Woolf knows too little about how sound behaves to be able to see that what the 'Havana Syndrome' sufferers described actually was nothing but crickets and that the cricket sound behaved exactly the way you would expect it to do (even to the extent of being recordable, unlike microwaves!). And he also doesn't know enough about how the alleged pulsed microwave weapon would behave to understand that it doesn't correspond to the experiences that its 'victims' claim to have had.
For some reason, he also seems to believe that not only what happened in Havana but also what happened in Vienna was an attack even though this appeared to be dismissed by the CIA interim report.

Golomb, Relman and Giordano have managed to persuade him that the whole thing must have been caused by their imaginary Russian zap gun, and he doesn't seem to have felt the need to seek out experts in the fields of neurology and microwaves that weren't part of the State Department's NAS investigation.

 

[dann]

Abigail Spanberger spent almost a decade as a CIA operations officer. Now, she’s a third-term Democratic congresswoman from Virginia who was just named to one of two committees that oversees the work of America's spy agencies.
(...)
She intends to push for more support for current and former officers who have reported illnesses consistent with a possible directed energy attack, in what's broadly become known as "Havana syndrome." The CIA last year deemed it unlikely that Russia or another adversary mounted a campaign to attack American officials with microwaves or other energy. Investigations are ongoing, as are stepped-up efforts to identify and compensate people who have reported cases.
After serving in CIA, lawmaker now has role overseeing it (U.S. News, Feb 17, 2022)

I don't think any investigations are actually still ongoing at this point.

 

[dann]

From an interview with Rosa Miriam Elizalde:

Der sozialistische Staat Kuba ist seit seiner Gründung einem hybriden Krieg der USA ausgesetzt. Welche Rolle spielen die Medien dabei?
Eine Ebene des Krieges der USA gegen Kuba sind die wirtschaftlichen und finanziellen Sanktionen. Aber es gibt auch einen nicht weniger ernsten Krieg, der sich im medialen Bereich, auf kultureller oder symbolischer Ebene abspielt. Diese Ebene zielt auf die Medien ab, benutzt sie und bringt sie in Stellung, um die Kubanische Revolution zu zerstören.

Das ließ sich bei der Verschärfung der Sanktionen gegen Kuba durch die Trump-Administration exemplarisch verfolgen. Der Beginn fand 2017 auf symbolischer, auf medialer Ebene statt: Berichte, die US-Diplomaten in Havanna seien mit Schallwaffen angegriffen worden. Diese angeblichen Schallattacken auf die US-Botschaft waren ein Fake, zielten aber vor allem auf die Vorurteile des US-amerikanischen Publikums ab. Sie wirkten auf dessen Bewusstsein ein, um die Wahrnehmung zu verändern. Kuba wurde der Bevölkerung als ein angreifender, aggressiver Staat dargestellt, um die schwerwiegenden Sanktionen zu rechtfertigen, die ab demselben Jahr erfolgten. Verschiedene Recherchen haben bereits bestätigt – und US-Politiker selbst eingeräumt –, dass es keine Beweise für einen Schallangriff gab. Es war die Art und Weise, den Wirtschaftskrieg gegen Kuba vorzubereiten, zu rechtfertigen und dann zu verschärfen. Heute erinnert sich kaum jemand an diese Geschichte, obwohl sie erst etwa fünf Jahre her ist.
DIGITALER KOLONIALISMUS: »Krieg wird nicht nur mit Waffen oder Sanktionen geführt« (junge Welt, Feb 18, 2023)

Since the beginning, the socialist state Cuba has been exposed to a hybrid war by the USA. Which role does the media play in that context?
One level of the US war against Cuba is the economic and financial sanctions. But a war that is no less serious is taking place in the media, on a cultural or symbolic level. This level targets the media, uses and positions it to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

This is apparent when we look at the the Trump administration's tightening of sanctions against Cuba. It began in 2017 on a symbolic, on a media level: reports that US diplomats in Havana had been attacked with sonic weapons. These alleged sonic attacks on the US embassy were a fake, primarily meant to influence a prejudiced US audience. They acted on the consciousness of the American public in order to change its perception. Cuba was presented to the people of the USA as an attacking, aggressive nation to justify the severe sanctions that began that same year. Various investigations have already confirmed – and US politicians themselves have admitted – that there was no evidence of a sonic attack. It was a way to prepare, justify and then escalate the economic war against Cuba. Today hardly anyone remembers this story, although it was only about five years ago.
DIGITAL COLONIALISM: "War isn't waged with weapons and sanctions alone" (junge Welt, Feb 18, 2023)

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Since the beginning, the socialist state Cuba has been exposed to a hybrid war by the USA. Which role does the media play in that context?... This level targets the media, uses and positions it to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

This is apparent when we look at the the Trump administration's tightening of sanctions against Cuba. It began in 2017 on a symbolic, on a media level: reports that US diplomats in Havana had been attacked with sonic weapons. These alleged sonic attacks on the US embassy were a fake, primarily meant to influence a prejudiced US audience. They acted on the consciousness of the American public

What evidence do we have that it was deliberate?

 

[dann]

I think that the vast majority of 'Havana Syndrome' sufferers were genuinely scared, first by the crickets, then by their doctors, and finally by the government's warnings. And some of them, like Karen Coats and Kate Husband, are still scared at this point even of being "surrounded by electronic devices." See post 1,677. That electromagnetic hypersensitivity is caused by delusional thinking doesn't make the fear caused by it any less real. I don't think Karen Coats and Kate Husband are 'crisis actors' or "making it up," as Mark Polymeropoulos puts it. See post 1,659.
But I also don't think that they suffer from a "combat injury."
And they weren't the ones who sent out the "reports that US diplomats in Havana had been attacked with sonic weapons."

I am much more skeptical when it comes to the very first group of CIA operatives in Cuba, Patient Zero and his friends, Patients 1, 2 and maybe 3, whom we are now supposed to believe (and whom Nicky Woolf, Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson do believe) when they claim that they never mentioned anything to each other until they just happened to get together and mention independently of one another that they had heard THE SOUND and now had 'syndrome' symptoms from being attacked with a sonic weapon - and remember that we are still talking about the sound of crickets:

But from the outset, some Havana embassy officials privately expressed concerns to members of Congress that the matter was being exaggerated by a small group of CIA officers who were experiencing symptoms and opposed better relations with Cuba.
Top U.S. officials cast fresh doubt on sensational 'Havana syndrome' claims (yahoo!news, Sep 14, 2022)

Their story is the one that is now used by David Relman to dismiss mass psychogenic illness as the (obvious!) explanation for 'Havana Syndrome'.
As I have argued for the last couple of weeks and shown with references to primarily Wikipedia, the other arguments are neither here nor there: retinal bleeding in one case, jerky eye movements in others, wrong ideas about the behavior of sound and the Frey effect. (And we do know unambiguously that their recordings weren't of the latter but of crickets!)

By the way, I can recommend the yahoo!news article if you didn't read it. For some reason, the media wasn't nearly as interested in the Conspiracyland podcasts as in the two new ones from VICE and Project Brazen. It makes one wonder why, doesn't it?!

 

[dann]

What evidence do we have that it was deliberate?

I mentioned the third episode of Conspiracyland's podcast series about the 'Havana Syndrome' on Sep 18, 2022, in the post 1,602, It's Official: The Cricket Story Is Stone Cold Dead! However, I focussed on what Mark Zaid, the lawyer of many of the 'HS' sufferers, said about the cricket recordings at a point in time, late 2022, when he had discovered how harmful those recordings were to his clients' cases. I meant to return to the podcast, but I went to Cuba a few days later, and when I returned, I had problems with my WiFi connection, which I didn't get fixed until late December, and in the meantime I forgot about it.

This episode recounts how senior U.S. officials became increasingly dubious about sensational claims about Havana Syndrome pointing to the lack of any hard evidence that a secret microwave weapon even exists.
Episode 3: "It’s Not What We Thought It Was" (Conspiracyland on Apple Podcasts, Sep 16, 2022 - 38 min.)

The introduction to the episode mentions two interesting things: 1) the story about an earlier episode of a potential outbreak of mass psychogenic illness which was nipped in the bud instead of encouraged by the State Department and other agencies, and 2) what a senior U.S. official thinks was done deliberately to "disrupt relations with Cuba".

My transcription - as always, remember that my hearing isn't very good. I think that the first name of the interviewee is Fulton, i.e. Fulton Armstrong:

- When I was in Havana, there was a syndrome. We could call it the Cubalse (?) syndrome.

Fulton (?) Armstrong is a former CIA analyst who served in Cuba in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.
At the time, of course, there was no U.S. embassy in Havana, so he and his small ..conclusion ... of diplomats and intelligence officers worked in the U.S. interest section in the Swiss embassy. While there, some of his colleagues came to believe their food supply was contaminated. - We were required by U.S. regulations to purchase food only in the government-operated diplomatic stores. And it's true that sometimes the food had sort of a stink to it. And we called it "sabor Cubalse", the flavour, the taste of Cubalse, which was the company that ran these grocery stores. A conspiracy theory seemed, to quote, 'that there was a nefarious plot by Cuban intelligence to harm U.S. officials, to make them sick or possibly even worse'. - Back then the interest section were convinced that the Cubans were poisoning us. People were suffering from ... symptoms. And reporting these symptoms and tracking them. This was around also the same time that some of our children at the international school came down with mysterious stomach disorders. And it was 'Oh, the Cubans are poisoning us'. For the children, it turned out to be (?). One or two pills and they were back on their feet and off the toilet. As for the smelly food at the Cubalse grocery stores, the idea that it might be deliberate food poisoning seemed to get traction by the mere suggestion that it might be happening. - We had to convince people that 'No, they're not trying to poison us'. We had to send samples of all kinds of different foods in all different states, frozen and unfrozen and stuff, to approved labs, to approved hydro-sanitary (?) processing the U.S. government at the time. And this lab report would come back: 'No, this is safe. There are no untoward substances in it,' etc. And within a week, the symptoms went away. When you're in a closed situation, especially one where you are looking in ... these things can gather a lot of momentum.

In his 30-year-long career in the intelligence community, Armstrong lived through a lot of false claims made by U.S. officials, usually for political and ... reasons.
There was, most notoriously, the debacle over the Bush adminstration's ... about Iraqi WMD, ... amplified in some quarters of the U.S. news media.

And Armstrong himself became a target when then undersecretary of state John Bolton, later one of Donald Trump's foreign national security advisers, tried to get him fired as a national intelligence officer for Latin America.
The reason: Armstrong had dissented from Bolton's dubious claims that the Cubans had developed their own biological weapons programme.
And today Armstrong sees a parallel between those episodes and the more recent claims by some in the government and Congress that a super secret microwave weapon was responsible for the range of debilitating health effects suffered by U.S intelligence officers and diplomats, commonly known as 'Havana Syndrome'.

- That the name Havana is still tied to it is obviously a political endeavor perpetrated by people who want to keep Havana in the doghouse for something for which it had no role, and couldn't possibly have had any role because, as we've discussed, ... there's no such weapon, there was no such operation, there is no evidence of any of these bizarre scenarios that people have been ...No one is ever going to say, 'These people's symptoms were exaggerated, fabricated'. No one would ever say that. That would be rude, it would be unscientific, it would be unanalytical, it would be wrong. To say that people were never hurt.
But there are a lot of situations in which you could have a variety of different causes, where you you could have a coincidence of different causes, that somebody would have symptoms. Okay?

So the explanation that you are referring to is the idea that this was an attack by a foreign power against American diplomats? - From day one that's what the U.S. government's allegation was, for which there's not a shred of evidence.
You are saying it's a hoax?

- Hoax sounds like somebody, including the victims, the people suffering from those symptoms, had cooked it up. I'm not sure that's the case. But when it came up to Washington, it certainly looks like someone saw, 'Hey here's a really good opportunity.' By which he means, a really good opportunity to disrupt relations with Cuba. Armstrong has been saying all this about Havana Syndrome almost from the start. Until recently he was something of an outlier on the issue. His arguments tended to be dismissed, in part because he was seen as somebody who was a bit too sympathetic to the Cubans. But it turns out, Armstrong may have been on to something all along.

I'm Michael Isikoff, the host of Conspiracyland.

The more I dug into this issue, the more evidence that's come out, the more it has become clear that there are reasons to be doubtful to say the least about much that has been reported about 'Havana Syndrome'.
Is there really a super-secret weapon that has been inflicting harm on U.S. officials that nobody has ever seen and which the finest scientists in the Pentagon are unable to replicate?
Could such a weapon really have been fired at diplomats and intelligence officers all over the world? Without anybody noticing anything? Phantom attacks from a phantom weapon? Even as media reports have gotten ever more sensational with wild claims just this year about presumed foreign agents zapping officials on the grounds of the White House or inside their homes in Washington D.C., I've learned that most intelligence officials have only grown more skeptical that any hostile attack has taken place at all. The real story of 'Havana Syndrome', as it turns out, may be very different from what you've been told and heard until now.
A case study, as it were, of how conspiracy theories still get traction among otherwise sober-minded people
This is episode 3, It's not what we thought it was.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

My transcription - as always, remember that my hearing isn't very good. I think that the first name of the interviewee is Fulton, i.e. Fulton Armstrong:

While there, some of his colleagues came to believe their food supply was contaminated.

- We were required by U.S. regulations to purchase food only in the government-operated diplomatic stores. And it's true that sometimes the food had sort of a stink to it. And we called it "sabor Cubalse", the flavour, the taste of Cubalse, which was the company that ran these grocery stores.

A conspiracy theory seemed, to quote, 'that there was a nefarious plot by Cuban intelligence to harm U.S. officials, to make them sick or possibly even worse'.

The picture is getting clearer now, and it's exactly what I suspected. There was no deliberate fakery, just people put in a stressful situation that they couldn't get out of, their heads filled with spy stories and feelings of animosity (real and/or imagined) from the Cubans. It wasn't their fault. For all they knew their food could have poisoned, and they could have been subjected to a sonic weapon. They were primed to expect such things, so any symptoms no matter how minor would be interpreted as an attack.

Food tasting slightly off, unusual sounds, odd symptoms with no apparent cause. The reactions are instinctive behavior that could save your life if there really was something threatening it. We can't blame them for acting 'irrationally' under stress. But we can blame 60 years of treating Cuba as an enemy.

 

[dann]

You shouldn't ignore the specifics of the different categories of 'syndrome' sufferers:

On the one hand, you have people like Karen and Kevin, Kate and Doug. From what I understand, they weren't CIA operatives and had no reason to assume that anybody might want to harm them.

And on the other hand, you have the guys I mentioned in post 1,694:

But from the outset, some Havana embassy officials privately expressed concerns to members of Congress that the matter was being exaggerated by a small group of CIA officers who were experiencing symptoms and opposed better relations with Cuba.
Top U.S. officials cast fresh doubt on sensational 'Havana syndrome' claims (yahoo!news, Sep 14, 2022)

The latter appear to have been the ones who got the whole thing rolling in the first place, who didn't merely get scared by crickets and come down with some kind of symptoms that the others would then inadvertently emulate like in a classic version of mass psychogenic illness, but who actively and deliberately spread the idea that the Cubans were out to get them, all of them, and told the others at the U.S. embassy and their Canadian colleagues what they had to look out for, i.e. the cricket sounds.

It occurs to me that they may also have been the kind of people for whom succumbing to something as bloody banal as stress would be seen as downright emasculating. I assume this may also have been the case with Polymeropoulos who loves to pose as a bad-ass warrior (BBC; scroll down to "Other incidents reported beyond Cuba") and insists that "the Agency" should treat his ailment "as a combat injury" (post 1,659). And he appears to have managed to make the Agency do so.

But no matter what kind of susceptibility to MPI the different affected groups may have had, nothing much would have come out of it if it hadn't been for the people in Washington who saw the whole thing as "a really good opportunity to disrupt relations with Cuba" and then turned the 'syndrome' into a worldwide phenomenon with more than 1,000 cases.

 

[dann]

This week's episode of Project Brazen's podcast has been released.

Episode 5 of THE SOUND, the MythBusters version:

We head to the UK to build a microwave device that could be the key to the mystery. And we take a deep-dive into the American military industrial complex to see what the future of warfare and weaponry looks like. Is Havana Syndrome just the beginning of something much scarier?
Guests: Kyle Major, James Giordano
The Great British Nuke Off (THE SOUND, Feb 20, 2023)

Transcript (I really appreciate not having to rely on my impaired hearing!)

MythBusters is a TV series and not a podcast for a reason! But Nicky Woolf and his friend Kyle, "a physicist specializing in something called “quantum opto-mechanics," succeed in making the (failed) experiment interesting. And it's a good idea. I don't remember if it was in a comment about the podcast series from Project Brazen or VICE, but a few weeks ago, I proposed that something like this should be done.

But I'm not quite happy with the conclusion of today's podcast, which I'll get back to in more detail later.

 

[dann]

I'll try to make it short:
In the first part of today's podcast, Nicky and Kyle are trying "to build something that will use sound or electromagnetic radiation to direct at something quite far away," in order to find out if it's feasible.
Kyle dismisses the idea of doing it with sound because "It just requires so much energy to use sound waves in this way."
Nicky: "In theory, microwave radiation seems to match up with what Karen Coats (and most of the other victims) describe – a tightly located beam in which they heard the sound."

Now, here's what I have a hard time understanding: Why are they still talking about sound at all? At this point, it is obvious that sound has been dismissed as having anything to do with the suffering of the 'syndrome' victims. Remember what the their lawyer said:
"Zaid: They really did hear those sounds because they really did hear crickets, you know, at the time something was happening to them. But the crickets have nothing to do with, you know, whatever this is." (post 1,602)

Remember that the first choice of hypothetical cause was a sonic attack because of that sound. But since sound can't harm people's brains, they went for the second choice of imaginary weapon which was microwaves because some 'syndrome' sufferers claimed to have been able to step in and out of a beam of sound. The utterly crazy thing is that even though they switched to microwaves as a way to cling on the idea of an attack, they nevertheless insisted that it had to do with the Frey effect because the Frey effect produces a sound in people's heads, but they have already given up on the sound, which has been explained as coming from crickets, so why insist on the Frey effect at all?!

Zaid seems to be aware of the contradiction when he says, "whatever they were experiencing, they happened to also hear crickets."
If the sound of crickets is merely coincidental to the alleged attacks, the Frey effect isn't needed anymore. In principle, Zaid is saying that correlation is not causation. And yet, the whole idea of microwaves is due to the way the HS sufferers described their experience with "a tightly located beam in which they heard the sound," which at this point is supposed to be entirely coincidental!
It makes no kind of sense!

But back to Nicky and Kyle's microwave experiment, which doesn't attempt to emulate any Frey effect but to boil an egg at a distance:

We’ve got a little table set up directly in front of the device, on which we’ve put a selection of targets that we hope will react to the microwaves.
Nicky: …we have. A jam donut in a porcelain bowl … We’ve got an egg in a cup to to see if we can cook that and we’ll crack it open at the end of the experiment.

Long story short: They manage to get readings on an RF detector held in front of the device, but nothing else happens, and when they turn up the power, "It’s fried." The device, not the donut or the egg.

In the second half of the episode, they read up on existing microwave RF weapons. One "fires a beam of directed RF radiation that heats your skin like leftover pizza." There's a "very high frequency radio beam that penetrates the skin to a depth of one 64th of an inch, which is just deep enough to hit the nerves, and it creates this instant sensation of heat …And the second you do get out of the way, the pain goes away …" Then there's one that "can actually disable a drone in the sky." In fact, one of the arguments against the idea of a microwave weapon having been used to cause the 'syndrome' is that their cellphones and other electronic devices were never affected by the "tightly located beam in which they heard the sound."

But the mentioned effects are nothing like what the spies and diplomats in Havana described, so Nicky and Kyle end up asking Giordano: "Uh, just to get straight to the point of it, I guess, does the US have devices that can do this?" And after what appears to be some hesitation, Giordano says, "Yes."

They don't get anywhere with their questions to authorities and arms dealers, but they manage to find a patent for an RF weapon:
“The present invention … utilizes beamed electromagnetic RF energy…to interrupt the normal process of human hearing, equilibrium and other senses to produce complete disorientation and confusion.”

Nicky Woolf's conclusion:
"What all of this has convinced me of… is that there are devices out there that can do this. That can do what was reported in Havana and elsewhere.

So let's see what was reported:
"a tightly located beam in which they heard the sound."
Being able to step in and out of the sound (= tight beam)
Directed at people's beds; in one case both the parents' bed and their children's beds, apparently at the same time, so either several beams directed at several locations indoors or not so tightly located after all.
Sound (if not entirely coincidental) and pressure but no heating of the skin, which is what one actually existing RF weapon does.
And not affecting cellphones or other electronic devices, which is what another microwave weapon does.
And since it has figured so prominently in the podcast series so far: retinal bleeding, jerky eye movements and electromagnetic hypersensitivity!

Nicky Woolf is convinced of the existence of a directed pulsed microwave weapon that can cause all this. I'm not!

It appears as if we will leave the invisible undetected weapon behind next week and go directly to the culprit: "This, this looks like the Russians, it sounds like the Russians, it seems like something they would do…"
So the Russians ... in Havana and elsewhere ... with a ray (?) gun.

 

[dann]

I don't know how, but I never saw this two-year-old article until now when I was looking for something else on the Science-Based Medicine site:
Did Microwaves Harm US Employees at Its Embassy in Havana? (March 26, 2021)
I guess Google isn't very fond of science-based medicine.
The chapter about Microwaves on the brain is particularly interesting.