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Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 U.S. victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top U.S. diplomat has called them "health attacks." New details learned by the Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling U.S. officials who say the facts and the physics don't add up.
Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation. Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the U.S. government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August -- nine months after symptoms were first reported.
Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation. Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the U.S. government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August -- nine months after symptoms were first reported.
I commented on this story in the past, and I'll say it again now. It doesn't make any sense that the Cuban government is doing this. They are a dictatorship, and if they didn't want US diplomats there, or didn't want to try and reconnect with the US, then they simply wouldn't do it. For them to try and injure US diplomats makes no sense at all. I believe this is being done by some 3rd party nation to try and cause problems between the US and Cuba. Why? Because they want to maintain the status quo (the US and Cuba not having diplomatic relations) because they stand to gain either financially and / or in regional influence and power. Several South American countries, as well as Russia, come to mind...
From an excerpt from a 2016 article discussing the US restoring some relations with the Cuban Government:
As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, this has occurred with Cuban-Russian relations at their strongest since the demise of the Soviet Union. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has visited Cuba twice since February 2008 while Vladimir Putin visited in July 2014. Meanwhile Raúl Castro has been to Moscow three times in recent years. Can these two relationships really keep improving in parallel?
http://theconversation.com/cub...
Better known as 318230.
This time the CIA is on the receiving end and it's the Communists' fault.
Fifty points to Slytherin for irony.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
CBC recently had a story on the 5 Canadian diplomats and families affected. They also speculated that since Canada has better relations with Cuba it's unlikely the Cuban government is behind this. The story also mentions that since Russia has a large diplomatic presence in Cuba, has been known to harass foreign diplomats and also has the know how to possibly develop this kind of high tech weapon that they are a possible suspect.
Yeah, but does the target know that it's the targeting target being targeted?
Experimental weapons testing has almost always targeted "innocents". Quite often their own soldiers or citizens. Go ahead and read about some of the atrocities the US government has (then) secretly committed against US citizens in the last century. It'll break your heart.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The US isn't invading Cuba. I'm not relying on any non-public information that I know. I'm just stating it as a bald fact that the wherewithal might be there, but the will isn't and never will be as far as my crystal ball goes. If the US were so inclined, it would have happened in the 1990s, when more will could have been mustered. The Cuban emigres who would be the strongest supporters are getting old and dying by now.
Given that the invasion of Cuba is a non-starter and therefore there is no profit motive here, the idea of Trump himself arranging harm to come to US diplomats is abhorrent. I'd like to say you know better, but i'm not sure about that.
The KGB was wont to have flights of fancy toward conspiracy theory. It was one of their chief problems in evaluating events in the West. It was born of the requirement to never gainsay the belief structure of the Politburo and nomenklatura. This was bad for your career, and back in the 30s and 40s would also carry the threat of death. So the KGB evaluation of every event was wound into a complex conspiracy theory involving the mythical denizens of the West, rather than being evaluated rationally.
The other problem they had was being captive to their ideology. Anyway, there are much simpler solutions than Trump trying to pad his bottom line. Besides which, the guy is dying soon, He couldn't care less about that, he already made and lost a fortune several times.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I'm going with mind altering cat parasites.
I'd expect that pressure waves strong enough to cause cell damage would also most likely cause damage to the environment, especially since you can rarely completely eliminate constructive interference everywhere but the targeted location. There'll be other points in the area that would get similarly strong pressure and that'd be enough to shatter fragile glass or cause vibrations. A microwave attack could be more plausible, but I don't know how they'd be able to set all of that up without someone noticing.
Well, that's the myth at least. We won't know for sure until we see those tax returns.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Do you often hear one person talking, then a room full of people laughing and then you realize you're not?
... like "Trump make this happen and we'll give you a mile of wall". He would pant and drool. He doesn't want love. He doesn't need money. He wants buildings and walls and golf courses with his name on it. He assumes that this would be his 5000 year competition for the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids. He knows that if the wall goes up, it will stay up and maintained in some form or another for at least several hundred years... dedicated to Trump.. If Hoover can get the damn, Trump can have the wall.
... in neon for 200 years.
This is commonly referred to as "Missing the joke". It is common among people who are told one thing and hear something else.
Of course, I don't have a good vocabulary entry regarding when it's about politics rather than jokes, but I believe you have just experienced it. There are actually therapists (not to be confused with "the rapists") who specialize in trying to help you with this disorder.
Trump is and always has been about monuments. I've seen many of his monuments. As a real-estate developer, he was generally willing to build things just about everywhere and anywhere so long as it would have his name on it. His gift has generally always been to gather business people and investors together to pool their money for a development project. He would then make provisions that said that he really didn't care whether he made money or not himself... it was only important his name was on it. He likes big shiny things with his name on it.
Watch every single thing he has done in D.C. so far... every deal, every negotiation. Consistently, it's been about gaining leverage for the "Trump Wall" or "Great Wall of Trump". No other topic causes him to become so impassioned as building a wall. He is backing off of dreamers now because he realized "I have to admit that there are some Mexicans that actually should be sent back"... he really doesn't care one way or the other. Hell, if he did, Trump would never have employed dreamers himself. What he does care about is that he will get one of the biggest monuments in the world with his name on it.
So... stop thinking about Trump in terms of politics. He will (as he has so far) do absolutely anything to gain support for his new monument. Congress could get tons of stuff out of him if all they did was use 1 mile of wall as a form of payment for him
Then there's Cuba.
Cuba is an excellent opportunity for :
a) Land grabs. Greece, Southern Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Mallorca, Malta, Gozo, etc... are covered with hotels... almost all sea front real-estate is owned by opportunist land grabbers from elsewhere. This is probably Greece's #1 financial problem. Their most valuable industry... tourism is completely owned by external entities.
b) Tax haven.... Trump has always loved a great tax haven... I'd bash him.. but he would be stupid if he didn't.
c) Monuments.... the cost of building in Cuba is low enough now that Trump could build and furnish the world's largest casino for pennies on the dollar. It's not about profit. It's about making a hotel with a sign so big you'd be able to read "Trump" from the Florida Keys.
Trump is done padding his bottom line. Even if he loses everything now, he will still get the presidential retirement package which is pretty good from what I hear. He doesn't have to make more money. He simply needs to relocate it to maximize the visibility of Trump for as long as possible.
He wants the monuments. Casinos come and go... but with some luck, we can keep his name on one
A microwave weapon seems to be the most likely hypothesis because of its ability to explain all of the symptoms observed. I haven't seen evidence that sonic weapons could explain the full range of symptoms. Microwaves can and do pass through walls, so I'm wondering about why people staying in other rooms in the direction of the microwaves wouldn't also report symptoms as well. You'd need to be fairly close in order to direct a beam that narrowly and precisely. Higher frequencies would require smaller parabolic antennas to direct the beam, plus they would attenuate more rapidly, perhaps limiting the exposure to others in the building. Accidental exposure to radar wouldn't explain this because a radar spends most of its time listening rather than transmitting. My guess is that someone is transmitting microwaves from nearby in the building.
I find it unlikely that someone who isn't state-sponsored could carry out this volume of attacks with this degree of precision. I concur with the others in the comments who suspect Russia of being responsible. Cuba stands to benefit from normalized relations with the US and it makes no sense for them to attack American and Canadian diplomats. Russia would be the prime suspect, but this type of attack is very difficult to link to them. Simply turn off the transmitter and remove some relatively small equipent to eliminate any trace of the attack.
This is a US Government installation. They almost certainly are using Cisco or Aruba Wireless. Of course, they never buy the cheapest model either.
Let's talk Cisco for a moment. Cisco delivers a technology known as "CleanAir" which Aruba also has for the most part. It's designed for site survey and is able to scan large chunks of the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz spectrum.
Turn the feature on... then look at the map and see if there's microwave near by. It will assign pseudo MAC addresses to unknown signals and attempt to identify them by radio pattern.
Now, if CleanAir isn't picking it up, then install some spectrum analyzers.
As others had mentioned... you don't need to transmit audible signals into someones head to make them hear it. You simply need to transmit signals which trigger the mind to believe they are audible. Microwave and others are perfectly capable of having this effect. In fact, some people believe that the reason why some people claim to be susceptible to wireless networking is because it causes a ringing like tinnitus. Of course like Tinnitus (which I recently began suffering... Merry Christmas 2016) it's not possible to diagnose properly.
As for targeted signals.... all frequencies can be targeted. It's not as if there's something somewhere which says audio absolutely must be as close to isotropic as possible. Any frequency can quite easily be targeted.
As a cheap but effective example... sound showers are an example of this.
Visit New York New York® Las Vegas hotel. Visit the Cirque show. Visit the bathrooms associated with the show. Listen to the strange voices you hear. But, only you can hear it. This is done with modulated ultrasonic sound waves, a shaped reflector, and your ears.
And if the State Department people are so dumb they cannot turn around and sleep with their feet where their head would normally be to escape something specific to where the head normally rests, they have earned their headaches. And, yes, I believe the average US diplomat could not find its ass in the dark using both hands.
{^_^}
China is the last country that would risk targeting US and Canadian diplomats. They have too many diplomats of their own and too much vested monetary interest in stability of relations (for trade) to take even the tiniest risk of the kind of worldwide condemnation that action would bring if discovered. Venezuela is a possibility because they're desperate. But a non-governmental group is more likely.
It can't be a false flag operation, because there's no flag and no clear attempt to implicate a country. It can be a clumsy attempt by extremist elements from Miami to sabotage relations.
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Gee, what if there was a country that has high tensions with the United States right now and is also obsessed with attacking, injuring or harming the United States as a matter of ideological zealotry, and actually has a goddamned physical embassy in Cuba to base agents out of? Gee, I fuckin wonder.
He didn't show shit, you liar.
Well, that's the myth at least. We won't know for sure until we see those tax returns.
He's already shown them, and caused the Hillary loving media to weep. Trump's black-mark in business is a casino hotel in NV needing to go into administration (chapter 11), which it soon left to continue as business as normal. The bank that held a significant part of the debt were happy to take a large number of shares in the business as principal repayment. Hillary's media chums won't tell you that, it doesn't fit their rhetoric. It happens hundreds of times per day across the land.
Here's an annotated list of Donald Trump black-marks in business (aka. bankruptcies). And yes, there's more than one of them: http://www.politifact.com/trut... It's worth keeping in mind that this does not count his other failed business ventures that petered out into nothing or ended up being quietly euthanized in a hailstorm of lawsuits and even fraud and racketeering allegations without actually declaring bankruptcy.
I also suspect it is a microwave / RF based weapon. It would be extremely difficult to focus sonic energy and have it pass through walls in a building. Sound waves are, after all, vibrations through a physical medium, and every time you transition from one physical medium to another (air to wall, through the things in the wall, back to air, etc), the sound would be diffracted and reflected all over the place.
Because the energy was very highly focused, that pretty much rules out an acoustic device unless the device was right in the room or perhaps embedded in the wall of the room. Due to the number of people affected in various locations, I don't think it is realistic that there would have been so many of these devices in so many places. Plus they would be discovered once an investigation began if they were in the buildings.
There are many studies showing that RF energy with enough power, directed through the brain, will manifest as sound. The energy will also cause various kinds of damage to the structures in the head and brain.
So that really only leaves RF energy as a source that can be focused to that extent ("It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room."), which can pass through walls with little or no refraction / reflection, be operated from some distance away (even outside the building), manifests as sound when the head is directly in the path of the energy, and can cause injuries more than just hearing loss.
It sounds like the attacks were done while people were asleep in bed. If the attacker knew the general layout of the rooms (where the bed was relative to the window) then they could easily direct the weapon to the head area of the bed and leave it for a few minutes, perhaps very slowly sweeping it across that general area. If a light was turned on, then they would probably move to the next target room because they knew they had achieved the desired result.
Here's a study going into the specifics of RF energy being perceived as sound:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups...
Better known as 318230.
...just "Despacito" playing 24/7 at a nearby cafe with the bass jacked all the way up.
You could use two or more beams from different directions in order to insure that the critical level only occurred where the beams met. A bit like they way radiation therapy is done.