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Notes -
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 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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