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60 minutes recently released a big investigation on Havana Syndrome basically saying that the cause is real attacks by Russian intelligence agents and not some sort of psychosocial mass hallucination (which many have believed since these incidents first began to occur). They identify specific Russian agents and link their movements to occurrences of Havana Syndrome aka AHIs (anomalous health incidents). As someone who was unsure about what was going on here this seems pretty convincing: Russians have been using some sort of weapon to target US intelligence personnel.
The culture war angle to this is twofold. First, the US IC has seemed unsure whether these AHIs (which usually take the form of some sort of brain injury) were the result of Russian attacks. If this article is legit then these reporters managed to do a better job than the people we pay and give access to classified information to so that they can find out exactly these sorts of things. This is an enormous failure on the part of US intelligence services, its agents have been getting attacked, many have been forced to medically retire, and the organizations they belong to haven't even been able to determine whether an attack happened at all. To be fair, some organizations seem to have said these were likely attacks, others have said the opposite, so not every organization failed to the same extent in this respect.
The other culture war angle is that if this article is true, Russia has been attacking members of the US intelligence community for a decade. What will be the retaliation for this? US relations with Russia are already pretty bad, but this is quite a big provocation. Russia occupies a spot in the US culture war, I wonder if this will change that position very much. Is Putin still strong and trad? Can he get more reviled by the people who hate him? Most people seem uninterested in/uninformed about spy stuff so maybe this won't really register in the public consciousness.
This isn't as culture-war-y a topic as some, but I think it's interesting.
I did not read the full article (it is big on social media photos of Russian kids with sniper rifles, and short on anything definitive, or even a correlation coefficient), but I am still skeptical based on priors. For the sake of the argument, let us assume that Russia has developed through some significant effort some tech with which it can give concussion-like symptoms to of diplomats from a van parked across the street.
They then decide that the perfect use for this weapon is to annoy US and Canadian diplomats/spooks in Havana in 2016. Why? Were the Canadians staging an anti-communist coup from their embassy, and this was the only way the Castros could be kept in power?
It might be possible that the Russians have a weapon which is invisible to the naked eye. It seems very unlikely that they have a weapon which is totally beyond the ability of any American sensor system to detect. The natural response would be to put up sensor kits. Have every diplomat carry a small black box capable of detecting the top five guesses what that weapon could be.
Like zero-days or Death Note, using a covert method risks giving that method away. So why Havana, why Canadians?
On the other hand, the mass hysteria is real. If you want to measure an increase in the prevalence of some symptom, you have to be very careful to avoid priming your patients. I think it is unlikely that some government bureaucrat woke up one day and thought "today I will try to falsify the theory that some symptom affects the US embassy staff in Havana" out of the blue. Much more likely that the embassy staff discussed their symptoms with each other, allowing for memetic infection.
I have as much disdain for the US intelligence community as anyone here, but even I don't think that "bringing the truth to the American people" is in their job description. If the CIA is learning of the existence of Unit bignumber from the press, that would be a failure on their part. But it is also possible that all of the stuff in the article was well known to the spooks in 2016, and they decided to keep it under wraps for some reason.
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Wow, I am shocked, shocked, that the guys who can get away with deploying a mysterious directed energy weapon to debilitating effect that is dismissed by later medical analysis have once again deployed a mysterious directed energy weapon to debilitating effect that is dismissed by later medical analysis!
I don't think Russia is the Great Satan, or something, and I think it is unwise to take everything that Western intelligence community types say at face value, so I'm open minded about alternative explanations, but Russia microwaving US IC personnel isn't super surprising to me.
However, it's quite possible, maybe even likely that Russia isn't deliberately trying to injure people, and that these aren't weapons at all – this could be a side effect of intelligence gathering work. It turns out that if you beam enough energy at an electronic device, like a phone, you can scoop information off of it – and there's some evidence that the Russians have used that on high-ranking US officials in the past (such as, the President and First Lady of the United States). This would make their actions much more reasonable, I think – instead of just doing a little high-powered trolling for no real gain, they may be trying to scoop sensitive data using aggressive means.
Since the US has the same technology (and thus possibly has created its own fair share of victims in using it) that might explain the somewhat mixed messaging from within the government – plausibly revealing all we know would reveal our own capabilities.
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I can't help but find the timing of this to be extremely suspicious. A few weeks after the western IC warns Russia of a terror attack, a few days after it happens, practically at the same time as the Russian propaganda machine starts firing on all cylinders that we (NSFL links ahead) "beat the evil terrorists black and blue, barbecued their nuts and fed them their own ears and they confessed to being hired by evil satanic ukronazis", anti-Russian propaganda outlets start spinning tales about how the GRU with their secret spy shit ray guns are unquestionably to blame for melting the brains of US bureaucrats for the last ten years (despite the well known fact that said bureaucrats have no brains to melt - cue rimshot). I don't think anyone taking part in this whole cold war 2: electric boogaloo embroglio is even remotely credible, and I think it takes a lot more than a news theory to move the needle on public sentiment around Russia.
This is too zany, too spy-thriller, for the average person to care. I kinda doubt it was meant for us, i.e. normal(-ish) people with typical culture war axes to grind. Maybe it's a distraction to keep people from thinking too hard about the Crocus attack, maybe it's an influence op perpetrated on the western IC to build consensus about Russian foreign meddling, maybe it's a freak coincidence. The only culture war implications I can draw from this are increasing levels of paranoia in the US IC about the Russian Menace, continued wagon-circling about Ukraine policy, etc. That isn't terribly interesting to me, particularly because it isn't clear the manufactured consent is remotely in need of fortification in the US IC, so I don't have much else to say about it.
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NIH issued a release on their study last month.
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https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-studies-find-severe-symptoms-havana-syndrome-no-evidence-mri-detectable-brain-injury-or-biological-abnormalities
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Has there ever been a more reprehensible neologism? These people are, at best, wildly overpaid midwit bureaucrats and at worst absolute crooks.
You were warned last week for a sneering one-liner. I suppose this comment drips with slightly less disdain, but it makes up for it with vagueness. If you aren’t going to put any effort into your disapproval, don’t share it at all.
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The US intelligence community is large and contains all sorts of people such as analysts, techies, killers, and, yes, a LOT of bureaucrats.
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There's no real intelligent analysis I feel I can add, but I always imagine the term "Havana Syndrome" to mean "lung cancer acquired through smoking cigars." As in, "Rush Limbaugh died of Havana Syndrome."
Technically speaking, cigars don’t give you lung cancer- if you inhale them, you throw up. You’re supposed to hold the smoke in your mouth and get gum cancer instead.
More technically, I think that if you inhale a cigar you are likely to choke to death as it blocks your airways.
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I don't find that report very convincing at all. They don't even know the mechanism of what's happening. They just present a bunch of Russians that exist around these events and then say there's classified intel they have that makes it clear that it's Russians but they can't reveal what that is. It's possible sure, but this report basically has people saying they have had Havana Syndrome, there were Russians around when they got it, and there's classified intel that makes them sure it's Russians. It all seems like highly motivated reasoning.
I mean this was included, as near as I can tell it's nothing. It doesn't even say that they think it was actually Havana Syndrome it just says he had symptoms, then they turn to the talking head to confirm that Russia definitely did that. Why not target Ukrainians? I tried to ctrl-f looking Ukraine in the fairly long wikipedia article on it and got no results. What makes Americans and Canadians so special? I also don't know why the Office of National Intelligence would release a response saying that it's unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible after this report because, at least in my mind, it's favorable for the US to pretend its true even if it's not because bolstering Russia as a boogeyman is a valuable distraction against anything happening domestically. Especially when the FBI and the White House released statements that basically said nothing at all except acknowledging that Havana Syndrome exists. All that being said, I don't think it's super unlikely just that this isn't convincing.
Anyway, this is actually what I wanted to post about about anyway. What, they couldn't list her height and weight and DOB?
Your point about Ukranians and other non-US nationalities is a good one, as is the fact that we still don't know exactly how this is being done. Likewise for the point about talking heads and extraneous details about graduate degrees.
On the other hand, mass psychosis seems unlikely. They don't cite much medical evidence in the article, I wish they had included more, but if peoples' pets have been affected I don't see how psychosis can be the cause. I also think that, if these russian agents were actually seen right around the time symptoms started for these people, that's quite a big point for the Russian ray gun theory. The movements of these people coinciding with hallucinated symptoms (not just the same city but within the same block) is possible but seems unlikely. Perhaps there are enough russian spooks travelling around that you can haruspex up a specious pattern from noise but I find that hard to believe in this case.
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I don’t have an extremely high view of the CIA’s competence but I’m sure they have better intel on Russian weapons development than implied by them having “no idea” what this mystery energy weapon was (if it existed) would suggest.
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It is hard to believe that US intelligence is becoming worse. The recent events (Ruso-Ukrainian war, Crocus City Hall shooting) show that is has become better.
It appears that CIA has wide access to online communication worldwide and combined with modern AI technologies that allows to sieve vast amounts of information and find a needle in the haystack. A translator I had known got hired by a US agency couple of years ago. She has never spoken what she does but I suspect that she works on automated translation models for US intelligence. Currently we should assume that communication in any language is equally monitored and analysed.
Also, it hard to believe that if Russians really possessed such technology that many describe as improbable it wouldn't have leaked by now. Even best agents eventually make mistakes.
Russians have been involved in assassination in other countries, like in the UK. But we know that because eventually we found some evidence. It is likely that it could have happened in this case too, especially after repeated attacks in several countries. Unless, of course, CIA knows more about these cases but keep silent.
And third, why would Russians use this technology against targets of low importance instead of someone who really matters?
They missed October 7th, a pretty stunning lapse. They called the Russia-Ukrainian war but then they thought Kiev might fall in 72 hours (as did I tbh) - then they overcorrected and went 'yeah, launch this massive telegraphed armoured thrust into a fortified enemy with air superiority, they'll run and panic'. Then they went back and said 'oh you should've attacked sooner in a more focused direction, been more Western and less Soviet - the defeat had nothing to do with attacking while outnumbered and outgunned'.
Let's not forget the constant fumbling over their own feet on Russiagate. I would've thought it was pretty important to know whether or not Russia was 'interfering' in your elections so you could then provide assurance about what exactly happened. Instead they just spread confusion and distrust all over the place with endless dossiers - confusion and distrust in elections is exactly what Russia wants.
US intelligence is pretty bad in a holistic sense. They have excellent technical capabilities (finding things via satellite for example) but their ability to achieve positive results is poor. Why couldn't the CIA rustle up a countercoup in Niger and keep their huge base there? Why are the Russians of all people making gains in Africa?
Did the US miss October 7th? I thought the emerging narrative is that the Egyptians and Israelis (and therefore certainly the Americans) knew ‘something’ was going to happen, they just didn’t expect it to be as big as it was and as well-planned as it was. Similarly re. Ukraine it seems they overestimated Russian competence rather than underestimating Ukrainian resolve (they predicted an ongoing guerilla campaign which wouldn’t happen if they were unmotivated). That’s a failure, but I guess it’s one they’ve been making since 1945 (arguably since 1917) and is probably better than the reverse.
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Bad/good is different from worse/better. Besides many things you are demanding of them are not of intelligence but executive which belong to a completely different part of the government. I doubt that CIA runs the country. And it is good that they don't.
Intelligence/analysis:
October 7th. Ukraine war. Russiagate.
Executive:
Africa coup/countercoups.
There's more I could add - the FBI for instance has been mobilizing lone wolves, encouraging them to launch terror attacks that could then be foiled. This isn't really productive behaviour.
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/
US intelligence used to do quite a decent job. Coups and regime change, they got some wins down on the board. They got some high-profile Soviet defectors, funding Solidarity. A fair few failures but a pretty good showing compared to now.
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It's difficult to reason about the competency of US intelligence since both the successes and failures are often hidden.
From first principles, we'd reason that US intelligence is not very competent because they can't effectively recruit high IQ people in comparison to tech, banking, and consulting.
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These guys missed that the Afghan military was 225 000 man smaller than they said when they had thousands of people on the ground.
As for Ukraine I think they massively misscalculated it. Their goal was to provoke Russia to invade and then turn Ukraine into Russia's Iraq war. The idea was sanctions against Russia while Russia is forced to integrate Ukraine's basket case pension system into the Russian system while they have to deal with riots, terrorism and stinger missiles shooting down choppers. Ukraine was supposed to be a repeat of the Soviet-Afghan war. Instead, they have to be the logistics and training for a Ukrainian force 4 times the size of the US Marine Corps including their reserves fighting a high intensity war. Russia didn't collapse and if anything their arms industry is producing at a record pace.
IMO without doing the whole debate again you are making a giant assumption the CIA purposefully tried to provoke Russia into war versus what I believe is a much simpler explanation that Ukraine just wanted to be richer. Poland is at current trajectories will be wealthier than England by 2030. From a cultural orbit for Russia it’s tough for them to keep people in their sphere of influence when they can look at their neighbors house and see it getting wealthier. If the CIA does nothing Ukraine itself would be looking for western connections.
Russia had no issue with Ukraine doing business with the west. It was the west who demanded that Ukraine cuts ties with Russia. An infeasible demand when they had millions of Russians in the country and deep economic ties to Russia. Western intelligence was deeply involved in the 2014 coup. Then our politicians who freak out over "it is ok to be white" had no problem funding people wearing swastikas who wanted to drive panzers into Russian cities while banning the Russian orthodox church and prohibiting the use of the Russian language.
Continuously shelling the Donbass, Merkel outright admitting that they were disingenuous during negotiations in order to buy time to arm Ukraine and building CIA bases right on Russia's border points to the US provoking a war.
As for Ukraine's economy their GDP increased 600% between the year 2000 and 2013. Since joining Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria in being border states to the US empire, their GDP has collapsed by a third over a decade. The polish option was never an option for Ukraine. Poland's export is labour. Poland's birth rate was substantially higher than Ukraine's and they have far more young people to export. Ukraine is demographically a combination of Japan's birth rate and Venezuela's emigration rate. Exporting labour when the demographics are comparable to the collapse of the Roman empire isn't sustainable.
I am sure there are Ukrainians who are fighting thinking that they can become a truck driver in Germany if they join the west but this doesn't account for the overwhelming political support from the west.
I find it hard to believe that the US demanded that Ukraine stops doing business with Russia.
Also, I also don't believe that Poland's main export is labour. It is true that a lot of Polish people were working in other EU countries but now Poland is developing their own industries and getting richer in this way.
Ukraine however remained poorer than Russia, mostly due to its own corruption. Despite all the flaws of the EU, the EU membership has been good for economic development of post-Soviet countries. Ukraine could definitely benefit from the EU membership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine_Association_Agreement#Trade
This would have turned Russia's biggest trading partner and a deeply integrated part of the Russian economy into a state with the same rules for trade with Russia as EU countries. Effectively the idea was to bribe Ukraine into chosing the west by promising mountains of tax money from northern Europe in exchange for taking an anti Russian stance.
Several million Poles have moved west to work and western European companies are major employers in Europe. It is effectively a wage dumping operation.
Obviously when Ukraine joins the EU, it will be required doing business with Russia in accordance with the EU customs rules.
But that is completely different from the statement that the EU demanded Ukraine stop doing business with Russia.
We need to be precise what we mean to have a meaningful discussion.
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The US is already engaged by proxy in the hottest interstate war in decades with Russia. Even if true (X), this is totally eclipsed by the Russo-Ukrainian War - Russian allies in the US still think Putin is the based defender of Christian civilization against the homosexual globalists, people worried about escalation are probably more afraid of Russia exercising the ultimate veto than espionage bullshit, and anti-Russians still want to bomb Russia.
What % of Americans do you think this is? Above or below lizardman constant? I'd guess way below, like OOM less than "literal Nazi," but maybe it's my bubble.
Yeah I've run into semi-literal Nazis (at least Nazi apologists) but never Putin defenders.
I've had the opposite experience - Nazis are an entirely online phenomenon for me, but I've encountered multiple right-wing Putin apologists in meatspace.
I've run into teenaged Putin apologists in meatspace, and adults who want nothing to do with an eastern European shithole regardless of how bad Putin is. What I haven't seen is adults who are actively pro-Putin.
I've run across a few antisemitic open white supremacists. All of these people were blue collar and male(amusingly, not all of them were white), so it seems like maybe a filter bubble issue. Definitely less common than adults who don't care where Ukrainian bribes eventually wind up but not notably more or less common than teenaged Putin fans.
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I think I might get labeled “Putin defender” but I would disagree with the label.
I don’t think the Ukraine invasion is a morally good war, especially from the perspective of Catholic Just War doctrine, but I also don’t think it’s all that unusual given the history of how great powers pursue their interests.
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It's ironic that, after so many years of dismissing conspiracy theories, the government is telling us that the Russians are shooting energy beams at their brains. Maybe they could wear tinfoil hats to protect themselves.
If you work for the CIA or State Department and ever experience fatigue or headaches there is now a huge financial incentive to blame the Russians for it:
Yeah, free early retirement on what is probably pretty close to full pay (once all compensation is factored in) at 40 sounds like a pretty great move for a career state office bureaucrat.
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I'll read this later, but do they have more argument/evidence than just that some apparently very visible Russian assets happened to pass through similarly visible diplomatic and intelligence locations? Do we know how they're doing this? Do these assets pass near locations that don't report Havanah syndrome?
Not that I judge much credibility for the US intelligence apparatus, but I surely rate them less likely than 60 minutes to go "Russian boogeyman did it."
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Does anyone have any ideas on how to potentially defend against these attacks?
I could see regular people finding a way to get their hands on this in the far future. It would be nice to start preparing now.
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Probably. Are there people that would characterize Putin as strong and trad that like the CIA?
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