My personal theory is people were easily "tagged" somehow like the famous umbrella tap attack, maybe a laced drink, and then the area they were known to be in was radiated with a specially calibrated radio wave. Without an obvious poison these people would be written off, yet they would be too sick to function, perfect sabotage without being credited.
I’m struggling with motivation. You don’t need to attack a superpower’s diplomats to test a weapon. What were we doing in Havana that Moscow cared so much about?
> Most of the affected personnel had done work with Ukraine / Georgia
Sending a message with a clandestine attack vector doesn't make much more sense. Unless they were actively doing work for Ukraine or Georgia from Havana. Again, to the extent that attacking a superpower's diplomats makes sense.
Note that I'm not casting doubt on the findings. Just struggling with the risk-reward calculus.
I think it helps to recall that the same people who allegedly ordered this were the same people who thought that the risk-reward balance was in FAVOR of a second, all-out invasion of Ukraine.
I'm not sure what to make of this either. The public medical reports are suggesting psychogenic illness, which does happen. You'd also think something would show up from public medical evaluations. But these recent reports are saying there's information that isn't being made public, and I know from my own professional life that certain kinds of brain injury are notoriously difficult to detect on brain scans. And then in one of these recent stories one of the people said their phone battery exploded or burst open?
As for the benefit cost analysis, a CBS piece said this:
"Edgreen said the officers targeted were top performers.
'And consistently there was a Russia nexus," he said. 'There was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well.' "
One of the reports said one of the FBI agents was interviewing a Russian agent repeatedly over a long period of time.
Also, there's been a lot of suspicious deaths of foreign diplomats with ties to Russia in the last several years.
Anyway, I'm kind of scratching my head about this as well and am not sure what to think, but it doesn't seem implausible to me in the very least, at least from a political-intelligence-security angle.
I highly doubt mass delusion is real. What other illness is always diagnosed not with supporting evidence, but lack of evidence for alternatives? It’s a bizarre leap given the known incompleteness of medicine, that only gets more bizarre when you dig into specific examples: it happened before the discovery of pathogens, yet we assume doctors didn’t miss a pathogenic cause? Everybody who drinks a certain batch of Coca-Cola gets sick, but if it’s not a contaminant that was tested for, it must not be a contaminant? It spreads more between people who spend more time together, and this is considered evidence is spreads via psychological closeness?
No, this is the same old bullshit: doctors, like politicians and businessmen, depend on an image of expertise, and an assertion of mass psychogenic illness is a non-disprovable way to preserve it when evidence-based diagnosis can’t.
Reminder that every declassified doctors report has brought it down to mass hysteria, worsened by sleep deprivation and high stress. Symptoms ending when people leave would suggest this is not, in fact, a weapon.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadThe opinion article is a reaction to that, and assumes you're already familiar with the investigative aspects of the story.
I think this is the rule that stops the annoyance
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
It's happened at several other locations and the new evidence shows GRU was in the area at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome
My personal theory is people were easily "tagged" somehow like the famous umbrella tap attack, maybe a laced drink, and then the area they were known to be in was radiated with a specially calibrated radio wave. Without an obvious poison these people would be written off, yet they would be too sick to function, perfect sabotage without being credited.
Sending a message with a clandestine attack vector doesn't make much more sense. Unless they were actively doing work for Ukraine or Georgia from Havana. Again, to the extent that attacking a superpower's diplomats makes sense.
Note that I'm not casting doubt on the findings. Just struggling with the risk-reward calculus.
As for the benefit cost analysis, a CBS piece said this:
"Edgreen said the officers targeted were top performers.
'And consistently there was a Russia nexus," he said. 'There was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well.' "
One of the reports said one of the FBI agents was interviewing a Russian agent repeatedly over a long period of time.
Also, there's been a lot of suspicious deaths of foreign diplomats with ties to Russia in the last several years.
Anyway, I'm kind of scratching my head about this as well and am not sure what to think, but it doesn't seem implausible to me in the very least, at least from a political-intelligence-security angle.
No, this is the same old bullshit: doctors, like politicians and businessmen, depend on an image of expertise, and an assertion of mass psychogenic illness is a non-disprovable way to preserve it when evidence-based diagnosis can’t.
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