This short video (+ transcript!) is interesting for a couple of reasons:
It is a mystery that has challenged the U.S.’s intelligence community for years. The unexplained illness known as Havana Syndrome, named after the city where diplomats and intelligence officials first suffered from dizziness, cognitive difficulties and even memory loss. Wednesday, the intelligence community assessed it was likely not the work of a foreign adversary. Nick Schifrin reports.
‘Very unlikely’ foreign adversary caused Havana Syndrome, U.S. intelligence says (PBS Newshour, March 1, 2023 - 6:20)
It is quite good as a very short video summarizing the new report and its implications. For instance here about the alleged weapons:
As for the weapon, previous assessments that the intelligence community has considered said that directed energy might have caused these symptoms. The intelligence official told us — quote — "Those were all washed out." There was no evidence, this official said, that any adversary overcame some of the challenges to create some kind of microwave, for example, that would have, this official said, had to have gone through concrete or had line of sight to some of these victims.
This has been obvious almost since the beginning. Remember the story about a whole family having been 'attacked': the parents in the bedroom and the two kids in their beds, the father noticing a sound like rushing water when he bends over the beds of his sons. Their apartment or hotel suite would have had to be surrounded by ray-gun shooters, all targeting individual members of the family, which would have required that they either
"had line of sight" to each individual or that their rooms came pre-equipped with concealed directed microwave ray guns pointed at the head ends of all the beds.
However, one head of an expert panel disagrees, and it's not a big surprise who that head is:
But I just spoke with the head of the intelligence community experts panel, David Relman, and he disagreed. He said that the panel found that a device could have been portable, concealable, and there could have been more than one mechanism used.
And he said, look, the U.S. simply doesn't know enough about directed energy to know for certain whether it could have been used or not in this case.
It is clear that Relman is aware that no such weapon exists, i.e. one that could target several 'victims' simultaneously. It is also clear that he knows that no such weapon has ever been found, but instead of acknowledging that this makes it very unlikely that any attack ever took place, he starts fabulating: It wasn't found because it was
concealable. It wasn't found later because it was
portable, and when it is obvious that no such weapon could have targeted four members of a family at the same time, then it was because
"more than one mechanism [was] used."
David Relman is flailing about because he doesn't want to give up his minority opinion based on nothing but his own bias. Do you remember this from his preface to the NAS report?
The committee is left with a number of concerns. First, even though it was not in a position to assess or comment on how these DOS cases arose, such as a possible source of directed, pulsed RF energy and the exact circumstances of the putative exposures,
the mere consideration of such a scenario raises grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others, as if the U.S. government does not have its hands full already with naturally occurring threats.
An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies (NASEM)
David Relman is nothing but a
paranoid nationalist, scaring himself and others with the delusions he comes up with when he
imagines what kind of enemies may be out there threatening the USA.
(By the way, this just occurred to me: I didn't notice it when I first looked at the NAS report when it was published: Why the **** does the preface end with references to these two Relman papers from 2002 about
Surveillance for unexplained deaths and critical illnesses due to possibly infectious causes, United States, 1995-1998 and
Broad-range bacterial detection and the analysis of unexplained death and critical illness. Why does he refer to those papers? They have nothing whatsoever to do with
"directed, pulsed RF energy" or the
"putative exposures" to it. I don't know if the purpose of the references is to prove that he is an expert in
something, but that something has got nothing to do with microwaves, or if he is just fond of throwing around references to his work.
The papers show that Relman might be good to have around if somebody has died and it's important of find out if the death might be due to a bacterial infection. If you suspect that you may have been hit by a zap gun, it is obvious that Davis Relman is not the guy to go to. Go see him if you have a sore throat and don't know if it's due to a virus or strep!)
As for Relman's idea that
"the U.S. simply doesn't know enough about directed energy to know for certain whether it could have been used or not in this case." I love it when these advocates of the attack delusion contradict each other, and here's lawyer Mark Zaid in the same short video contradicting Relman:
There is absolutely no doubt that our foreign adversaries are very capable of doing this. In fact, the technology, frankly, was created by the United States, for the most, part back five, six decades ago.
I have objections to a couple of points made by the video, and I have seen other news outlets make the same mistakes:
Geoff Bennett:
Wow.
So, if we're to take this assessment at face value, if not a foreign adversary with a weapon, what then explains the symptoms that these people have come forward with, 1,500 reports across 96 countries?
Nick Schifrin:
Yes, it's a great question, for which the intelligence community does not have a great answer.
He goes on to say that
"the officials who we spoke to briefed on a couple of possibilities for what the victims suffered from." But the officials actually mentioned a couple of the things that had caused some of the different ailments: environmental circumstances like a malfunctioning air conditioner, preexisting medical conditions, conventional illness and media attention. They are not
possibilities, they are
actual causes.
It think the problem is that all of these different ailments have been jumbled into one category, 'Havana Syndrome', and now the media is looking for only one explanation for these very different illnesses with very different symptoms and causes. And the attack idiots deliver: No matter what the symptoms are, the cause is directed microwaves! (We are familiar with this strategy from quacks!)
The team of intelligence agencies have now done a proper job of investigating the various cases and come up with the answer, at long last: It's no only a bit more complicated. Not only is it more than one disease, but it definitely isn't the one all encompassing disease that it was supposed to be!
In the meantime, all the 'syndrome' sufferers with their diverse symptoms insist that one thing, one thing only, caused those diverse symptoms: a microwave attack.
Another problem: It is obvious that the 'victims' don't understand what the authorities are saying, but as it turns out the media also doesn't understand it:
Ned Price, State Department Spokesman:
The findings that the intelligence community has spoken to today in no way call into question the experiences, the symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported in recent years.
This needs to be explained much better than it's being done right now: What exactly does it mean when they say that the experiences and the symptoms are
real? (or 'in no way called into question'.) The 'syndrome' sufferers hear this as: 'I know that I am a victim of a microwave attack. That's what I
experienced. And now the authorities are telling me that what I experienced was real, that my symptoms are real, and yet they claim that there is no microwave weapon and no attacker. What is that supposed to mean? How does it
not mean that I'm plain old crazy?'
It needs to be spelled out what mass psychogenic illness is. To the 'syndrome' sufferers as well as to the media.
And then there's the
outright lie being spread by both the 'victims' and the media: that there was no
coordination:
But that has not ameliorated what the victims felt. I talked to multiple former officials today who made the same point; 26 Americans and Canadians in Havana at the same time felt symptoms, and there were no preexisting medical conditions among them, nor was there coordination between them when they suffered, these victims.
This appears to have become the major argument against it being a case of mass psychogenic illness, but thanks to the two recent podcasts we know that it isn't true. Most or maybe almost all of the 26 cases may have had
headaches, dizziness and nausea at the same time. It wouldn't be surprising. We have all had a couple of those symptoms from time to time, especially when we are under a lot of stress. But the symptoms that became known as the 'Havana Syndrome' didn't get a common denominator, a frame of reference shared by the U.S. embassy employees in Havana, until Patient Zero ('Adam', 'Tony', whatever) played his cricket recordings at the embassy's New Year's Eve party on Dec 31, 2016, telling people that it was a sonic attack and which symptoms to look out for. That is all the coordination required to set it off.
All the
coordination it took was to combine this story with the symptoms that they had already had (or would have the next morning). That's what mass psychogenic illness is.
