Merged US may close Cuba Embassy over 'health attacks'

[dann]

Interview with Mark Zaid, the lawyer of "over two dozen clients from multiple agencies: CIA, DIA, NSA, State, Commerce, USAID, FBI, ODNI."

Has that side-messaging also suggested that this is not a psychogenic illness? Or is that still being discussed as a possibility?
I think there’s no doubt still some within the government who believe that it’s psychosomatic but it’s a minority view, because it’s virtually impossible to attribute a large number of these cases to psychosomatic, particularly because individuals had no idea what was happening to the other people.

Where it’s potentially psychosomatic is as the case became more public. But anecdotally, the large number of cases that I’m aware of — dozens and dozens, if not more — they had no idea that this was a thing, when they first reported that they encountered something.
The ‘Havana Syndrome’ report hasn’t convinced everyone (Politico, March 2, 2023)

I can see why they would want to tell the story about "dozens and dozens" of people at the U.S. embassy having "had no idea that this was a thing, when they first reported that they encountered something." They are eager to keep alive the attack idea by claiming that it couldn't possibly have been mass psychogenic illness, but it just isn't true.

As mentioned several times since Feb 22, 2023, in post 1,701, on Dec 31, 2016, Patient Zero ('Tony', 'Adam') plays his recording of cricket sounds at the New Year's Eve party at the U.S. embassy in Havana. In post 1,701, I only summarized what happened in Havana according to Entous and Anderson. Now I've transcribed the crucial bit of information we get from the interview with Entous and Anderson.

The story of how it all began in 2016 was that a new CIA station chief arrived in the summer of 2016 and was being harassed almost from the start. He soon began to have 'syndrome' symptoms. We went to see the embassy doctor. Then in December, he is sent back to the States to be medically examined. 'Tony', CIA case officer, allegedly doesn't know about his colleague's condition. He also experiences an 'attack', excruciating pain etc., but when he goes to the middle of the house, it (the sound?) stops. The next day he goes to see the medic, who says that something similar happened to him (cricket sounds, I assume), so they both go to the security officer, who says that he has also had a similar experience (cricket season?), and then they tell ambassador DeLaurentis. So at least these four are in the know at this point, and I think that there are probably many more.

In spite of the excruciating experience, 'Tony' goes back to his house to record THE SOUND.
My transcript:

27:12 --> And he records it and he actually brings the recording, this is around Christmas time, New Year's. He actually goes to a New Year's party at the embassy. And he brings the recording and plays it for some of his colleagues to see if that is also what they heard, right?!
The ‘Havana Syndrome’ with Jon Lee Anderson and Adam Entous (Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast, Apple Podcasts, Feb 21, 2023 - 54:21 min.)

So after that New Year's Eve, it just isn't true that people didn't know about this. And when Entous and Anderson say that 'Tony' played the tape "to see if that is also what they heard," it sounds as if he must have discussed this with people at the embassy before Dec 31, i.e. that he brings the cricket recording to confirm what they have already discussed, that they had all heard the same sound.

 

[dann]

The Politico interview with Mark Zaid above links to a Twitter thread from Ben Rhodes, who was involved with Obama's rapprochement policy:

One elephant in the room here given how murky this has always been is whether the Trump Administration used "Havana syndrome" to rollback the opening to Cuba knowing that there wasn't evidence of the Cuban government being responsible.

John Hudson
Scoop: A long-awaited report by the US intel community concludes ‘Havana Syndrome’ was not caused by an energy weapon or foreign adversary, shattering a widespread theory that a secret device debilitated scores of spies & diplomats. By @shaneharris & me https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...1/havana-syndrome-intelligence-report-weapon/

Ben Rhodes (on Twitter, March 1, 2023)

In any event, the U.S. clinging to the last vestiges of a failed hardline Cuba policy which has fueled a humanitarian and migration crisis, done nothing to advance human rights, while alienating us in Latin America and the global south looks even more nonsensical today.

Spoiler alert: a failed hardline policy doesn't help Democrats win in Florida either, so there's no political or policy rationale for it. There's a huge opportunity to help Cubans by improving their lives and growing their private sector.

That requires lifting sanctions, allowing Americans to travel (it's crazy Americans can't travel 90 miles to Cuba but can go pretty much anywhere else), and removing Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list

Cuba is not a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Trump/Pompeo stuck them on that list on their way out the door despite the fact that Cuba does not in any way sponsor terrorism (other nations that do are not on that list btw)

Taking a hardline has made life worse - not better - for Cubans, including activists and entrepreneurs. The humanitarian crisis in Cuba has fueled massive migration as well. It is time for this policy to go back to the opening that was making things better in 2015-16.

 

[dann]

This story has been a year-long rollercoaster ride of reporting - and I'm so excited to say: the first episode has dropped today!
I can't wait for you guys to listen, it's been a heck of a journey.
https://pca.st/ccxybxgw
Nicky Woolf (on Twitter, Jan 23, 2023)

For the Cubans, this story has been a 6-year-long rollercoaster of exacerbations of the US-blockade, which was excused by referring to the alleged attacks.
Nicky, you should consider what you can do to make up for your recent contributions to the lie!
https://www.plenglish.com/news/2023/03/02/cuba-denounced-damage-caused-by-extreme-us-measures/
DannSim (on Twitter, March 4, 2023)

I wouldn't normally make this kind of appeal to people who have helped spread the lie about the 'Havana Syndrome', but in the case of Nicky Woolf, I don't think he was deliberately lying. I think he was taken in by the stories of the 'syndrome' sufferers, which was then backed up by unreliable experts like David Relman and Beatrice Golomb. Nicky Woolf's (and the whole team's) research should have been more thorough. Many details in the story weren't properly fact checked. But when the victims' story is backed up by what at first sight appears to be people representing scientific objectivity, it isn't easy for somebody who is not an expert to go up against them.

Those alleged experts, not the 'syndrome' sufferers, are the ones that I would like to see the Project Brazen team confront - preferably backed up by real experts like the 'Bobs' Baloh & Bartholomew and Bradley Roth. R. Douglas Fields is another expert worth consulting. It has been a very long time since we last heard from him.

 

[dann]

Of the two people behind the VICE podcast series, Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson, Entous appeared to be more skeptical of the 'attack' idea than Anderson, and he doesn't seem to have any reservations about the recently released ODNI report.
Foreign Adversaries ‘Very Unlikely’ to Blame for Havana Syndrome, Intelligence Review Finds (NYT, By Julian E. Barnes and Adam Entous, March 1, 2023)
So far, I haven't seen anything from Jon Lee Anderson about the new report.

 

[dann]

4. The origins of the 'illness' don't remain unknown. Even Marco Rubio seems to have understood this at long last. He just doesn't like what he has been told.

My bad! Marco Rubio stubbornly refuses to understand anything.

Rubio says just because intelligence agencies cannot conclusively link the headaches, dizziness, tinnitus and other symptoms associated with “Havana syndrome” to any cutting-edge weapon possessed by foreign agents that doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility.
“Something happened here and just because you don’t have all the answers, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. I will not accept that all these reported cases are just coincidences and I will continue to work on this issue until we receive real explanations,” he said.
Rubio rejects intelligence finding that ‘Havana syndrome’ not linked to foreign adversary (The Hill, March 4, 2023)

Real explanations?! YOU CAN'T HANDLE REAL EXPLANATIONS!
Nobody claims that nothing happened there, nobody claims that the reported cases were just coincidences.
The real explanation is crickets + anxiety. Get used to it, *******!


ETA: This is what Rubio and others like him choose to ignore:

“The available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of a foreign adversary,” said one senior official. “We have a lot of evidence that points the other way.”
(...)
Moreover, the senior official noted that there was increasing evidence that “pointed away” from the idea of hostile foreign involvement.
(...)
Although the Russian Federation has long been viewed as the most likely perpetrator — based on indications that the Russians had been studying the effects of microwaves on the human brain — U.S. officials could find no sign that it actually possessed such a weapon.
U.S. intel officials: 'Very unlikely' that foreign adversary caused Havana syndrome (Yahoo!News, by Michael Isikoff, March 1, 2023)

Michael Isikoff is the guy behind one of the best recent podcast series, the one that got it right: Conspiracyland: The Strange Story of Havana Syndrome (Apple Podcasts)

 

[dann]

The Targeted Individuals are in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, they are angry at guys like Polymeropoulos because they want their own symptoms to be recognized as 'Havana Syndrome', too, but on the other hand, they think that recognition of the 'syndrome' as caused by an attack also gives credence to their own condition.
So they don't approve of the recent ODNI report saying that there is no ray gun capable of doing what 'syndrome' sufferers claim they've been exposed to.

I trust the latest Intelligence Community Report on #HavanaSyndrome as much as I trust FDA reporting that experimental mRNA products are safe and effective
Len Ber MD/url] (on Twitter, March 4, 2023)

https://twitter.com/PSardonicus/status/1631945220047908866

 

[dann]

Could the U.S.'s 'Havana Syndrome' report thaw relations with Cuba? It's unlikely (WLRN, March 3, 2023)

Since the 'syndrome' was just the pretext for freezing of the relations, it is indeed unlikely. It is not as if politicians let their decisions depend on reality.

 

[dann]

An opinion piece in Washington Post trying to keep the panic alive: We should keep looking into the ‘Havana syndrome’ mystery (WP, March 3, 2023)

1. It is not a mystery! And it never really was. Pretending that a sinister attack had taken place was all it ever was.

2. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ..."
There is no absence of evidence. There is an abundance of evidence. The authors of the piece say so themselves: "The study, fortunately, dismisses or explains the vast majority of illnesses." I.e. the vast majority of 1,500 cases!
Like with UFOs, the vast majority of 'aerial phenomena' are easily explained. Very few aren't. This doesn't mean that the UFOs are aliens in flying saucers ... or Russians.

3. "... but for a “few dozen” of the “toughest cases.” If those are from the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016-2017 ..."
Patient Zero in Havana got the 26 cases started (+ the ones that were dismissed a long time ago): He heard crickets in his home, had a headache and ear pain, went to the doctor, went back to his house ...

27:12 --> And he records it and he actually brings the recording, this is around Christmas time, New Year's. He actually goes to a New Year's party at the embassy. And he brings the recording and plays it for some of his colleagues to see if that is also what they heard, right?!
The ‘Havana Syndrome’ with Jon Lee Anderson and Adam Entous (Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast, Apple Podcasts, Feb 21, 2023 - 54:21 min.)
See post 1,741

It's not a mystery! It is how you start a social panic!

4. "Given Russia’s past targetting of diplomatic facilities and its ruthless use of advanced weapons"
Russia's attacks on individuals have not been very subtle, the weapons used have not been advanced or difficult to detect, and the perpetrators were easily identified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal
As for the 'mysterious' energy weapon and the hostile (i.e. Russian) adversary:

“The available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of a foreign adversary,” said one senior official. “We have a lot of evidence that points the other way.”
(...)
Moreover, the senior official noted that there was increasing evidence that “pointed away” from the idea of hostile foreign involvement.
(...)
Although the Russian Federation has long been viewed as the most likely perpetrator — based on indications that the Russians had been studying the effects of microwaves on the human brain — U.S. officials could find no sign that it actually possessed such a weapon.
U.S. intel officials: 'Very unlikely' that foreign adversary caused Havana syndrome (Yahoo!News, by Michael Isikoff, March 1, 2023)
See post 1,745

There ain't nobody here but us crickets! There ain't nobody here at all!

We should keep looking = This story is too good. We can't let it die.

 

[dann]

'Havana syndrome' brain injuries in hundreds of U.S. overseas staff weren't from a foreign attack, intel agencies say (Fortune, Mar 1, 2023) ... and they weren't even brain injuries!
- - - - -

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday that findings from an extensive intelligence investigation, which concluded it is "very unlikely" a foreign adversary is responsible for "Havana syndrome" ailments, "in no way call into question" symptoms reported by American diplomats and intelligence officers worldwide.
‘Havana syndrome’ assessment ‘in no way’ questions symptoms -State Dept. (Townsville Bulletin, Mar 1, 2023)

It should have been spelled out that the ODNI 'Havana syndrome' assessment 'in no way' gives credence to the American diplomats' and intelligence officers' interpretation of their symptoms as an attack.
- - - - -
It Sure Doesn't Seem Like Havana Syndrome Is Russia's Fault (NYMag/Intelligencer, Mar 1, 2023)
I don't have access to this article, but it sounds interesting. I have only seen a short summary of it in German:
It Sure Doesn't Seem Like Havana Syndrome Is Russia's Fault (Gloria.tv, Mar 1, 2023)

 

[dann]

Minority Report - David Relman again again

WP Exclusive
U.S. intelligence agencies wrapped up a report on “Havana syndrome.”
What is Havana syndrome? A mysterious ailment that began affecting U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers in 2016. It caused a range of symptoms, including memory lapses.
What the report found: That it’s “very unlikely” the syndrome was caused by a foreign enemy with a secret energy-wave weapon, something many people suspected.
The bigger picture: The findings are at odds with another expert report released last year. This may be the official U.S. word on the mystery, but it probably won’t end the debate.
Thursday briefing: Biden set to issue first veto; ‘Havana syndrome’; food stamps; Ja Morant; TikTok screen-time limit; and more (Washington Post, Mar 2, 2023)

The third link in the quotation is to this article from last year:

An earlier interim report from the CIA found that a foreign country is probably not mounting a global attack aimed at U.S. personnel. People who say they are victims of Havana syndrome strongly criticized the agency’s findings.
But the CIA report didn’t expressly rule out a foreign hand, at least behind some small number of cases for which investigators have found no cause or plausible explanation.
The expert panel’s finding was consistent with earlier conclusions from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which found that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases.”
That study was chaired by David Relman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, who also worked with the intelligence community’s panel of experts. The panel did not attribute any cases to a specific device or country.
External energy source may explain ‘Havana syndrome,’ panel finds, renewing questions about possible foreign attack (WP, Feb 2, 2022)

On Jan 20, 2022, CIA issued its interim report stating that other causes than an attack had been found for all but a small handful of cases. It didn't "expressly rule out a foreign hand, at least behind some small number of cases," but it also didn't rule it in. When it did nothing of the kind, it was because it didn't have enough information to determine what exactly had caused the "small number of cases," and not because anything seemed to indicate that "a foreign hand" was behind any of those cases.

Ten days later, on Feb 2, 2022, David Relman's "expert panel" (making it sound as if the investigators behind the interim report were amateurs) issued its own report saying that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears (!) to be the most plausible (!) mechanism". It wasn't a big surprise that this report "was consistent" with another study headed by none other than David Relman.

Now the CIA interim study has been backed up by the ODNI report after two years of meticulous investigations of individual cases all over the world making it clear that there is not a shred of evidence for the idea that any of the 1,500 cases were caused by "directed, pulsed radio frequency energy." And in this context it needs to be stressed that David Relman's two groups also didn't find a shred of evidence for a "directed, pulsed radio frequency energy" attack. They just thought that it appeared to be more plausible.

Now that it has turned out that Relman's groups were plain wrong, i.e. evidence of other causes have been found for the vast majority of cases, and no evidence whatsoever has been found for an energy weapon attack. On the contrary, evidence have been found against the idea that other nations, i.e. Russia and China, have developed a microwave weapon capable of doing what it was supposed to have done in Havana and elsewhere.

That David Relman continues to agitate for his mysterious microwave weapon and sinister foreign adversaries is proof of nothing but his vanity. He knows nothing about acoustics, he knows nothing about microwaves (post 1,306), and the microwave expert he called on to assist his 'expert panels', Elizabeth Golomb, is a fringe scientist who is very popular in the fringe community of Targeted Individuals.

But large parts of the media doesn't seem to know or care about this, which is why David Relman and references to his two groups keep popping up as the 'authority' to go to for claims that the 'Havana Syndrome' is not a case of mass hysteria but constitutes an attack.

 

[dann]

Double post

 

[dann]

It just occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what Russian RT.com would have to say about this, but there is currently no access to RT's tweets in (most? all?) EU countries and the UK:

@RT_com's account has been withheld in Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Germany, Greece, Romania, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Austria, Luxembourg, Latvia, United Kingdom, [hilie]Denmark[/hilite], Lithuania, Croatia, Estonia, Cyprus, France, Spain, Belgium in response to a legal demand.
RT.com (on Twitter)

I found this on YouTube, but I'm not sure that RT Whistleblowers is the same thing as RT.com. Anyway, it's weird:

In 2016, American diplomats began complaining of a variety of medical symptoms that included things from physical pain to ringing in the ears to cognitive difficulties. These symptoms were largely ignored at first. And then the term Havana Syndrome was coined. Dr. Leonid ‘Len’ Ber joins John Kiriakou to discuss his own case of Havana Syndrome and why the FBI is blaming crickets.
RT Whistleblowers: Havana syndrome (RT Whistleblowers on YouTube, Mar 1, 2023 - 25:10 min.)

They have Len Ber, MD, the 'Targeted Individual', as a guest. He claims to be "scientifically minded," "a man of evidence," which took me by surprise considering that he retweets alleged photos of microchips in mRNA vaccines.

The host of the program is very fond of Relman's NAS study!

Asked about where he was attacked, Len Ber says:

Ber: It does happen in different places, and at this point anywhere. I travel to different states or a hotel. You rent an apartment. I thought maybe it would be easier there. But no, anywhere go, it reaches me out. I even travelled to the national radio quiet zone in West Virginia. There are no towers, no cell towers, nor Wi-Fi, no ... even cars with satellite radio.

Host: This is Highland County, Virginia. There's a U.S. Navy facility there, and it's listening for signals coming from outer space. And so there's no wireless interference at all, no cable TV, no cellphone towers. There's no nothing. It's supposed to be a quiet zone.

Ber: And I was attacked there. I, you have to walk several miles to those radars, and I stood next to the biggest radar in that town, and I got attacked just the way I'm attacked at home. I'm attacked anywhere I go. The only relief I get is when I travel fast enough in my car, about 65-70 miles an hour. So perhaps there's some tracking system that doesn't catch up with me. But that's my hypothesis. I'm a man of evidence. This is just my speculation.
(...)
Ber: My attacks, my piece (?) sort of microwave concussions, it's a daily occurrence. I'm stuck in phase one, and so is my brain degrading? I'm still experiencing (?) these attacks. I can't start in treatment, I can't start any rehabilitation because it would be like putting a bandaid on a bleeding wound because I'm still bleeding, I'm still being attacked every day, right? So this is my brain scan looks like a battle field. There's a network disruption in every network. And I'm 57 years old. I have a handicap placard due to Havana Syndrome attacks.

I wonder how come "a man of evidence" who claims to be under attack on a daily basis everywhere he goes hasn't thought of buying one of the many devices for detecting microwaves and other radiation so he would have tangible proof that somebody is attacking him with rays. I think it's tragic that Dr. Michael Hoffer, if Len Ber's claim that he has been examined and diagnosed by him is true, apparently backs up his paranoia instead of helping him overcome it.

 

[dann]

From post 1,739:

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.

From post 1,749:

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday that findings from an extensive intelligence investigation, which concluded it is "very unlikely" a foreign adversary is responsible for "Havana syndrome" ailments, "in no way call into question" symptoms reported by American diplomats and intelligence officers worldwide.
‘Havana syndrome’ assessment ‘in no way’ questions symptoms -State Dept. (Townsville Bulletin, Mar 1, 2023)

It should have been spelled out that the ODNI 'Havana syndrome' assessment 'in no way' gives credence to the American diplomats' and intelligence officers' interpretation of their symptoms as an attack.

This is what I'm talking about:

A former CIA agent who experienced the symptoms said that there is something counterintuitive about all of this, adding that if doctors are diagnosing some of them with brain injury in the line of duty, and they’re not saying it was a foreign adversary, then what was it? He was quoted by CNN, but not filmed.
U.S. Intelligence: no evidence of adversaries behind “Havana Syndrome” (OnCubaNews, March 3, 2023)

Maybe the 'syndrome' sufferers are receiving explanations individually, at this point. This from the same article indicates that they are:

The intelligence community’s workforce was notified of the assessment this Wednesday, authorities said. During the last few days, the victims were notified that the evaluation would be carried out. Some received a call from CIA director Bill Burns, said a source.

But the general public needs to know, too. I don't know why it doesn't happen, but I guess it might be a question of legalese, of culpability: If the State Department comes clean and says to the 'syndrome' patients, 'Look, we screwed up! We scared the **** out you when we told you that you were under attack, that a hostile foreign power was damaging your brains with rayguns, and that is what scared you so much that you came down with your psychogenic symptoms,' then Mark Zaid has the argument that he needs to sue. (I actually think he already does with the ODNI report, but now he needs to convince his clients that the perpetrator was the U.S.of A. and neither Cuba, Russia nor China).

The ODNI report may put an end to the disruption of the spy and diplomat communities caused by the story of the 'Havana Syndrome', but if it isn't spelled out and made unambiguously clear what actually happened, the 'collateral damage', i.e. people like Len Ber and the other 'Targeted Individuals' will continue to develop symptoms. And people like Karen Coats and Kate Husband will be continue to be debilitated by their electromagnetic hypersensibility delusion.


In my opinion, the USA also owes reparations to Cuba for the damages that this insanity has caused the country and its inhabitants, but we all know that's not gonna happen. I don't think the countries that the USA has waged real wars against will ever see a penny.

 

[dann]

Do any of you think that this woman, Olivia Troye, comes across as brain damaged?
I mean, I can imagine that working for the Trump administration (as adviser to vice-president Pence) might have had a devastating impact on anybody's brains.
I just don't see the least sign of physiological brain damage in her, but I'm not a neurologist.

Olivia Troye tells 60 Minutes about “Havana Syndrome”-like experience (CBS 60 Minutes on YouTube, June 27, 2022 - 3:17 min.) First aired on Feb 21, 2022.

And here she is today:
Hear ex-Trump White House press secretary's warning about Trump (CNN on YouTube, March 6, 2023 - 7:24 min.)
Troye is not the ex-Trump White House press secretary mentioned in the title.

 

[dann]

Of James Giordano and crickets ... and zebras ... and unicorns

This is what is seems to come down to every time:

There are specific patterns that we tend to find in psychogenic associate genic illness, most notably based upon communication. And that was conspicuously absent for these individuals. They did not talk among themselves about these escalating symptoms and signs that they were experiencing, but only upon presenting for medical aid was it then found out you got a bunch of individuals who have this point number one.
(...)
I’m limiting this discussion to those approximately two dozen individuals from Havana
(...)
Now, a caveat here, a real important caveat. Neuro imaging, at that level, it was what we’re doing. That type of structural neuro imaging is very, very difficult to ascertain what represents a prior insult to injury, what may represent an artifact or what represents the real downrange result of something that was incurred to really be able to discern those things.
Havana Syndrome: Bouncing the Reality Check? (Institute for Biodefense Research, Mar 5, 2023 - online transcript)

Warning! The transcript isn't very good. I think it may be a transcript done by an AI, which also seems to have problems distinguishing between the interviewee James Giordano and the interviewer Dr. Denise Bacon.

As we know now, it just isn't true that the diplomats and spies in Havana weren't talking among themselves. There was actually an awful lot of "talk among among themselves about these escalating symptoms and signs that they were experiencing." And not only about "these escalating symptoms" but also about the crickets, as we already know!

And he records it and he actually brings the recording, this is around Christmas time, New Year's. He actually goes to a New Year's party at the embassy. And he brings the recording and plays it for some of his colleagues to see if that is also what they heard, right?!
See post 1,741

James Giordano is also in denial of the role played by the crickets:

But to say it was crickets that did it and that these individuals conflated crickets with this sort of extrapolate the fantasy that something was happening to them simply did not fit the pattern. So what were we left with? But we were left with is that these individuals are most likely exposed to some form of energy. The idea there was was a direct a ball energy perhaps.

It not only fits the pattern, it is the only thing that does!
As Robert Bartholomew has been saying on numerous occasion and repeated recently:

The panel has gone for the most exotic hypothesis while failing to sufficiently assess more conventional explanations. They should have heeded the old medical adage, ‘When you hear the sound of hoofbeats in the night, first think horses, not zebras.’ They wrote that there was insufficient information to ascertain the social patterning of symptoms (“the committee received no epidemiological evidence about patterns of social contacts that would permit a determination about possible social contagion”). We drew the opposite conclusion by looking at the early reports and how they spread.
Study Links ‘Havana Syndrome’ to Radio Frequency Energy (Psychology Today, Dec 7, 2020)

(This quotation is from an article about David Relman's NAS report)

So how did the search for zebras work out for James Giordano and his colleagues? Well, first there was the ultrasound idea ('course it had be the sound hurting them, right?!):

one possibility we entertained was might it have been that these types of devices, these anti vermin devices that utilized some form of range able acoustics and ultrasonics were installed so as to keep these individuals apartments, their private domiciles free of pests, free of vermin, free of bugs, free of rats, mice or weasels? Yeah, that’s absolutely true.

And in at least one of the cases mentioned in connection with the release of the ODNI report (but not in Cuba, IIRC), somebody actually got scared by the sound of an anti-vermin device. However, vermin (and some young people who can hear the noise made by these devices) may find the noise annoying, but when these devices are as ubiquitous as they appear to be, it's because they are not only good at making vermin (and teenagers) go away, they also don't cause brain damage, so they are safe to use! However, this doesn't seem to have concerned Giordano & Co. But since there hadn't been any such devices in the vicinity of the U.S. embassy employees in Havana, they dismissed the zebras and went looking for unicorns instead: electromagnetic rays:

So the body of evidence coming from the scientific and technological side was able to provide supportive and correlative corroboration that what had happened to those individuals in Havana could and likely probably did occur as a consequence of some exposure to some form of energy. (...) We didn’t have the smoking gun. (...) So we came out of this with a relatively strong probabilistic inference that these individuals actually incurred some physical insult and that the physical insult was most probably the result of exposure to some form of energy, either factual or directly, either inadvertently or purposefully.

In other words, they had absolutely nothing. But they were (and still are) adamant that it is possible to imagine the existence of a weapon capable of doing the kind of damage that they imagined had been done to the embassy 'victims'.
This also appears to be Giordano's main objection to the ODNI report:

I think that the report explicitly failed to recognize the existing scientific and technological availability and readiness of these devices capable of doing these types of energies.

But that also isn't true. On the contrary, "these devices capable of doing these types of energies" were dismissed explicitly.
James Giordano concludes with a not-at-all-surprising insistence that the 'syndrome' is real, claiming that ...

there was nothing there happening in Havana is a travesty. And I think that’s important. And the other thing is that, I mean, we ruled out empirically ruled out other factors such as environmental variables, gross exposure to industrial or ecological chemicals or toxins, and these types of prior coexisting medical conditions, inclusive of psychological things that could be contributory, if not directly producing these effect.

Nobody has claimed that nothing happened in Havana. It's a strawman. A couple of CIA officials, maybe actually scared by the sound of crickets, maybe combined with malicious intent, used recordings of cricket sounds to get other embassy employees riled up and make them fear that they were being attacked by a sinister enemy with a supersonic weapon. The "psychological things" were never "ruled out empirically", and at least one of the JAMA studies appeared to confuse mass psychogenic illness with attempts to find an excuse to shirk work!

Last year, the CIA interim report made the mistake of exempting the first 'Havana Syndrome' cases from all other cases, which gave people like James Giordano and David Relman the opportunity to claim that the 'Havana' cases were exceptional as being true victims of a raygun attack. The ODNI report no longer makes that distinction, thus ruining the idea that at least a handful of cases, their cases, were genuine attacks. And Giordano isn't happy with that!

categorically aggregating all of these reports and not distinguishing those cases in Havana and those in the verification pipeline as being something quite different from the majority of reported cases.

He is flailing. He knows that he has been put in his place and he doesn't like it.

 

[dann]

This week's episode of Project Brazen's podcast series THE SOUND: Mystery of Havana Syndrome:

We go to the scenes of the crime in Cuba where we find “the sound” and see the human impact of the Havana Syndrome story. The US Embassy has reopened just as Cubans leave the island en masse.
Guests: Johana Tablada, Raul Rodriguez, Patrick Oppman
Chapter 7: The Two Exits (Mar 6, 2023)

Transcript

I actually like this episode, mainly because we hear the Cuban side of the story. I have been to Havana approximately twenty times since 1998. I know the places. The U.S. embassy (Embajada de los Estados Unidos) - from the outside. Hotel Nacional, also from the inside. I know the Miramar neighborhood where some of the embassy employees used to iive, and where they heard and recorded the crickets. So I enjoy hearing about Nicky Woolf's and his team's excursions in the city. I am not sure that everybody will find it as entertaining as I do.

In Miramar, one of the "various pockets of Havana where Americans got sick" (Got sick! Not were attacked! I appreciate that!), they hear and record the crickets, "jarringly similar" to the recordings we have heard before. It is obvious that it is crickets and neither an acoustic weapon nor the Frey effect, and "it only makes it more confusing."

Nicky is aware that what the 'syndrome' victims recorded can't have been the Frey effect: "The Frey Effect amounts to sound reverberating inside the skull… not a sound from outside it. So you wouldn’t be able to record it." I don't think it amounts to reverberating, but he gets the general idea. (See also post 1,524)

He also seems to understand how it might cause mass psychogenic illness (MPI), but (frustratingly!) he again dismisses MPI for the same old same old (wrong) reason:

There is no getting around it, this bit fits with the psychogenic hypothesis. You can argue the cricket sound didn’t cause the symptoms… the headaches… the nausea. But – according to this logic – the worried Americans heard it… which triggered psychogenic effects.
But – let’s be as meticulous as possible here – the psychogenic theory still has holes. It can’t explain some of the symptoms – like Doug and Kate’s jerky eye-tracking … or Karen Coats’ bleeding retina.

I hope that he'll manage to find out that MPI doesn't have to explain retina bleeding and jerky eye movements. Preferably before next Monday. Several other things, most of them very ordinary, may cause those symptoms, and some of those other aliments are caused by anxiety, probably the main component of MPI.
Nothing indicates that retinal bleeding and jerky eye movements are symptoms of a directed pulsed microwave attack! It is easy to imagine that they might be, but that is all it is.

But like I said, apart from this very annoying repetition of a wrong argument against MPI, I like the episode, not least due to the conversations with Cubans. There's the Cuban official Johanna Tablada, "a deputy director-general at the Cuban foreign ministry":

Cue, Max: Do you think the American officials who reported the health incidents are lying?
Cue, Johana: I wouldn’t say that. I, I, I don’t have any reason to doubt that a person that had a headache, has a headache. What I put into question is that that headache was provoked by a deliberate action taken in Cuba…
So I have no reason to question the integrity of the American officials.

As I made clear in my recent discussion with Roger Ramjets, I am not so sure of the innocence of the first couple of CIA officials who claimed to have been attacked and played their cricket recordings to prove it. But I agree with Johanna when she says:

Cue, Johana: I have all the reasons in the world to question the integrity of Pompeo … And I have all the reason to suspect of Marco Rubio because he has, as a politician, no integrity. And I have all the reason to suspect of Tillerson because he lied. And I have all reason to suspect of Trump and, and Bolton because they have been caught lying… more than one time.

Another Cuban is "Raul Rodriguez, the director of the Center for US and Hemispheric Studies" at the University of Havana:

That’s when… Raul says… the members of the Trump administration get an idea.
Cue, Raul: “… they found it more difficult to stop it unless they created or recreated this national security problem of Cuba as an adversary of the United States, which is an easy sell for many politicians in the United States.
The minute you say, ‘ah, our diplomats were attacked in Cuba.’ That’s it.

Notice that he doesn't say that Patient Zero and his CIA mates made up their symptoms. But whether fake or real, they were eagerly abused by the Trump administrations to exacerbate the blockade and put Cuba on the (absurd) list of terrorist states.

And then there's Eduardo, a man in his 60s, standing in line at the U.S. embassy for a visa to join his son in the USA, i.e. probably not somebody who is eager to give the USA a reason to deny him that visa:

“They sent scientists, they sent the police, the FBI came, the CIA came, they went everywhere,” Eduardo says.
“And they traced it back to crickets.”
Javier translates.
Cue, Javier: So he’s, he’s from the, from the countryside, so he, he have heard some … the little crickets then he said that they’re very annoying, but not to make a, a conflict between two countries. [Laughs]
Cue, Eduardo: [Speaking in Spanish]
“I don’t think it was the main reason, but maybe it was some kind of pretext,” Eduardo says.

So by giving a voice to the real victims of the 'Havana Syndrome', to the Cubans, to "all of these lives that were upended because of this story," this episode makes up for many of the errors in the podcast series so far.

I hope that Nicky Woolf manages to get the story about retinal bleeding and jerky eye movements right before next Monday:
"Next time on THE SOUND: Conclusions"

 

[Steve]

There's money to be made in them thar conspiracy theories!! Gotta keep them marks on the hook for as long as we can! Good ol' American capitalism at its finest.

 

[dann]

In some conspiracy theories, sure. In the case of 'Havana Syndrome', I guess Michael Hoffer can make a buck selling 'syndrome' diagnoses to 'Targeted Individuals' (see post 1,709). Some people sell products to Tis who beiieve that they will protect them from 'rays', but I don't know if there are enough of those people to make a living selling that stuff. If it was a profitable line of business, I don't think this EMF Protection for Targeted Individuals. QuWave Tabletop Defender QWX2 would be "currently unavailable". (But if you are about to run out of household aluminum foil, I would recommend that you stock up before the nest TI conference hits your town, though.)

For the most part, I don't think that the people involved in this particular conspiracy theory are in it for the money. I would like to see the balance sheet for the two-year-long meticulous investigation that has resulted in the recent ODNI report. The people involved in it will be paid, of course, but the vast majority of them are government employees, I assume.

So are most of the scientists involved, but for them it's mainly about vanity, the prestige in the scientific community by having discovered a brand new 'syndrome', something never existing before they discovered it. And like the politicians, some of them are no doubt also devout anti-communists. David Relman's delusional "grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others" may be a conspiracy theory, but I don't think he is trying to monetize it.

I think Marco Rubio and Trump mainly saw the 'syndrome' as a way to get reelected. But they probably also find that fighting communism is worth every penny the state has used on it so far. I think they don't mind the expenses as long as the 'syndrome' harms the Cuban economy and thus the Cubans, which it did.

 

[dann]

Pentagon still probing if a weapon caused ‘Havana Syndrome,’ even after spy agencies found no smoking gun (Politico, Mar 6, 2023)

Of course, they are!

After referencing David Relman's two groups claiming that “directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy” was “the most plausible mechanism” to have caused the 'syndrome', the article says:

But the medical community’s thinking has “evolved” since then, the intelligence official said Wednesday when rolling out the new report’s findings. While initial studies concluded the incidents represented a consistent pattern of injuries similar to traumatic brain injury, more recent studies have not shown a consistent set of symptoms.
Another reason the intelligence community’s assessment determined it was unlikely a weapon caused the illness was that such a weapon would create heat and a racing pulse with victims, neither of which were consistent with what the victims experienced, the intelligence official said. Further, the intelligence community does not have any evidence that potential adversaries have such a weapon, the person added.

But James Giordano can explain why the 'syndrome' sufferers felt no heat - using an analogy:

But some scientists dispute both these points. A continuous, low-power electromagnetic wave, such as in a standard microwave oven, would cause the victim to feel heat. But a high-power, rapidly pulsed source could have a detrimental effect on the victim’s brain while imparting much less energy, and thus there would be no heating effect, explained James Giordano, a professor of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown and the federally-funded think tank the Institute for Biodefense Research.
For example, “If you take a match, and if you put that match out very quickly on your finger and then remove the match, you would not feel heat,” he said.

All kids who have played with high-power, rapidly pulsed matches know about this. They also know that if you rub your fingers really, really fast together after quickly removing the match, you can almost make it sound like crickets. And when matches are delivered to supermarkets and tobacconists, they often come in white vans.

This suggests that whenever you hear the sound of crickets, you should rub your temples quickly with your index finger to neutralize the detrimental effect. Sticking matches in your ears doesn't do the trick.

 

[dann]

An Epic Failure of Science

The Havana syndrome saga is an epic failure of science, one with severe consequences both for patients and international relations, which reveals how medical evidence warps under political pressure. It is troublesome that a scientifically unreliable narrative about the AHI survived for almost seven years. Beyond misinforming the public, its story distorted U.S. policy decisions and, most important, deepened patients' suffering, which it cannot be said enough, is very real. Could you avoid anxiety and despair if authorities told you that your sickness was the result of an attack with a mysterious weapon that caused an unknown disease? What failures in the scientific process let this happen?

The first failure is itself mentioned in the recently released intelligence assessment. It is a well-known problem: confirmation bias, where people find just what they expect to find. Initial medical studies uncritically accepted that "the ailments were unlikely to be explained by natural or environmental factors." They also presupposed that the symptoms reported established the existence of a genuine, novel condition akin to traumatic brain damage, only without an obvious injury. In other words, "attacks" with some weapons were taken as the starting point, and the medical results were interpreted accordingly. The intelligence assessment also recognized that "a combination of medical and academic critiques pointed to methodological limitations," in those first studies. Current medical research offers a different interpretation, according to the assessment, in which environmental factors (such as stress) and preexisting medical conditions play an essential role in the symptoms.

The second failure was dismissing opinions and evidence that did not fit the original narrative.
How Anomalous Health Incidents' in Cuba Sidelined Science (Scientific American, Mar 6, 2023)

If you are interested in how science becomes biassed and how it behaves when it is, you should read the whole thing. It is a brief summary of the errors committed by the JAMA studies and the NAS report.