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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 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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