>they now can't admit that it was "absolutely nothing".
It may or may not have been an attack but what’s the explaination for 24 embassy staff members randomly experiencing the same symptoms and all showing brain abnormalities?
I think it’s a lot more likely intelligence agencies know exactly what caused it. Public releases of sound clips of strange sounds claiming to be the cause, later publications proving those sounds to be crickets and nothing Nefarious all reads like something out of an intelligence playbook to misdirect the public and other governments. Unless you are intimately familiar with intelligence operations it sounds like conspiracy theory, until you come full circle to 24 staff members with brain abnormalities. At minimum that doesn’t result from absolutely nothing.
> It may or may not have been an attack but what’s the explaination for 24 embassy staff members randomly experiencing the same symptoms and all showing brain abnormalities?
I haven't followed the story in detail, but the claim of "brain abnormalities" appear to come from a small number of doctors who likely were primed with irrelevant information. "Doctor, take a look at these CT scans of diplomats in Cuba who might have been attacked using a sonic weapon." It is not far-fetched to imagine that this priming caused the doctors to see brain abnormalities where none existed.
Oh, and someone who was down-voted to dead status already linked to an article from 2017 in which the Cubans said they believed crickets were the culprit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837926
See also this blog post, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2018/04/07/ba..., which in not so kind words calls the original study junk: "The condition suffered by the US diplomats in Cuba has been labelled “mysterious” (Rubin, 2018). The real mystery though is how such a poor neuropsychogical report could have passed the scrutiny of expert reviewers in a first class outlet."
>the claim of "brain abnormalities" appear to come from a small number of doctors who likely were primed with irrelevant information
The study was published by the UPenn Center for Brain Injury and Repair (I’d recommend reading it) by the treating physicians.
It’s funny you would opine the treating physicians have irrelevant information. Yet, like many in this thread you tend to gravitate towards doctors/scientist making diagnoses sight unseen who have no patient information.
I’d say the real mystery is how anyone on HN could ignore the study from the UPenn Center for Brain Injury and Repair who examined and evaluated the patients completed with objective tests like MRI and hearing. As if that’s not enough you say
>it’s not far fetected this priming caused the doctors to see brain abnormalities where none existed
I’d like to know how the doctors bias manifested to the MRI and hearing testing. And I’m wondering why your logic doesn’t get applied to the scientists and the neurologist (who is clearly biased) who hasn’t examined the patients and has diagnosed them as suffering from psychosomatic mass hysteria.
You are clearly arguing by appeal to authority. The staff at The University of Pennsylvania Center for Brain Injury and Repair is not infallible. Sometimes bad science is produced by even renowned institutions. This is what the study says about the MRI scans:
"MRI neuroimaging was obtained in all 21 patients. Most patients had conventional imaging findings, which were within normal limits, at most showing a few small nonspecific T2-bright foci in the white matter (n =9, 43%). There were 3 patients with multiple T2-bright white matter foci, which were more than expected for age, 2 mild in degree, and 1 with moderate changes. The pattern of conventional imaging findings in these cases was nonspecific with regard to the exposure/insult experienced, and the findings could perhaps be attributed to other preexisting disease processes or risk factors."
Translated to English: Only a few minor brain abnormalities were found. Those could all have been the result of prior, more natural causes. The MRI scans themselves aren't available, presumably because of "security" reasons.
Personally, I don't see why the crickets theory would be implausible at all. Listening at their sound for just 20 seconds was enough to give me shivers and ringing ears. I'd easily go insane if I had to hear them every night for several months straight.
This reminds me of a orthopedic surgeon that mentioned when MRI's became available docs could see what was causing the patients problem. Later when MRI's got cheaper and more widespread he started getting referrals because of same things on asymptomatic patients. Which meant to him, just because there is an abnormality on the MRI that isn't necessarily the source of patients problem.
Yes, but "appeal to actual authority" is a positive description of an argument, not a fallacy. The fallacy is appeal to irrelevant or incorrect authority.
This is like the third time in the past couple of months I've had to make this point. Is there someone out there actually telling people that using what authorities say in an argument is always wrong?
You're missing the point. Presenting a source for a claim is fine, but the naked fact that the author of the source is an expert in the field is not sufficient. You need to also show that their expertise is properly applied.
The person with whom you are arguing is making the point that they may have been misdirected by prompting that turns out to have been questionable, and that they acted on this instead of properly applying their expertise.
If you're saying something like, "Well that's just not possible! They're an authority on this topic!" ...then yes, you are committing (arguably the quintessential) fallacy of appealing to authority.
It is also a fallacy that every argument must spell out every step. You are allowed to jump over simple things like "doctors qualified to examine these people are qualified to have opinions about them." Is the claim that you fear that they may have been examined by random hobos grabbed off the streets? Who are somehow associated with that group of doctors?
By what stretch of the imagination are these not relevant authorities? Demanding to have that spelled out is either demanding to have your intellect insulted, or simply mendacity. I trust those doctors far more than I trust people trying to chop logic on some random programming site.
>You're missing the point. Presenting a source for a claim is fine, but the naked fact that the author of the source is an expert in the field is not sufficient.
Only that’s not what I did. The other party is a neurologist, so the appeal to authority would be the same on either side.
UPenn treated the patients (separately doctors from UM went to Cuba and treated the patients) and all have ruled out A psychosomatic cause. Then you have a neurologist who hasn’t seen/treated the patients diagnosing them with psychosomatic mass Hysteria.
My point is clearly not an appeal to authority. Anyone who is siding with the neurologist is appealing to authority, I’m saying it’s odd to dismiss the different groups of physicians who actually treated patients and have data.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. The authority of a source is not absolute proof of a claim. It is evidence, and it is evidence that should probably be given extra weight commensurate with the authority of the source. However, usually when someone says "you're appealing to authority" what they mean is: yes I accept your source, but just because they have authority does not make them beyond reproach, or beyond error, and here is why I think that, even though they are authoritative, they are wrong in this instance.
I don't think that's what's being said at all. He makes a specific set of points about why this authority is wrong here, points that the other commenter hasn't tried to address, except by reasserting the authority of the source. That's why it's an appeal to authority.
I don't see any specific points where bjourne points out why the UPenn Doctors are wrong. He just points out that they are not infallible and says they may have been primed.
As you said, and I very much agree with "The authority of a source is not absolute proof of a claim. It is evidence, and it is evidence that should probably be given extra weight commensurate with the authority of the source"
I believe what bjourne is saying is that he believed the crickets story because he places more weight with the authority pushing that story.
will_brown is saying he things UPenn doctors have more authority.
quick edit: What I am trying to say is that bjourne should not just blow off the UPenn authority, but instead justify his own authority is better.
>will_brown is saying he things UPenn doctors have more authority.
Not at all. I am saying UPenn doctors examined and treated the patients. Not mentioned at all is a UM doctor also went to Cuba and treated the patients. All ruled out psychosomatic mass hysteria.
Then an HN poster called that diagnosis/published study flawed and linked an article with a neurologist quoted as saying the UPenn diagnosis is wrong and it is psychosomatic mass hysteria.
My point has nothing to do with authority, I just don’t understand how anyone can dismiss the group(s) that actually examined and treated the patients based on some quotes from a neurologist in a newspaper article that diagnosis the patients without having examined/treated them.
I’ll admit in this context authority is important, but Both sides have authorities, and its those people aiding with the neurologist that are appealing to authority, because what other reason is there to side with the one doctor who hasn’t seen the patients, while all treating physicians ruled out the mass hysteria diagnosis?
Appeal to "actual" authority is still appeal to authority.
Consider an unproven theorem in the MetaMath database. Now consider an amateur mathematician, or perhaps a high school student finding and formalizing a proof. Irrespective of how (un)interesting the theorem is, Norman Megill and the users of MetaMath can verify (by pure reasoning) the theorem regardless of the authority status of the author of the proof.
Appeal to "actual authority" is just appeal to authority, which is a potential proxy for truth, and the phrase "appeal to authority" reminds us that sound reasoning and logic is superior to any reference to status or past achievements.
> MRI neuroimaging was obtained in all 21 patients. Most patients had conventional imaging findings, which were within normal limits, at most showing a few small nonspecific T2-bright foci in the white matter (n =9, 43%).
This sounds to me like the MRI showed most people were normal. It continues:
> There were 3 patients with multiple T2-bright white matter foci, which were more than expected for age, 2 mild in degree, and 1 with moderate changes.
Three out of 21 patients doesn't sound like a lot. The researches agree that 3 people showing something somewhat unexpected isn't significant, and it's probably due to other diseases or conditions:
> The pattern of conventional imaging findings in these cases was nonspecific with regard to the exposure/insult experienced, and the findings could perhaps be attributed to other preexisting disease processes or risk factors. Advanced structural and functional neuroimaging studies are ongoing.
So it's not that "MRIs are subjective" or "are as bogus as lie detectors". Rather, it's the people forming an interpretation of what the results mean (especially those who are not experts, as we can see that the experts agreed only three of the 21 people examined show something, and it's probably unrelated).
Also, every brain is abnormal in some way. This and priming together caused the doctors to conclude wrongly. It's like therapy, garbage in and garbage out.
That article points out the importance of statistical correction not innate problems with MRI. From the article:
>Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn't the case, it's actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.
It further points out the by 2012 90% of labs were using the corrected techniques.
>what’s the explaination for 24 embassy staff members randomly experiencing the same symptom
that scenario happens all the time. read up on mass hysteria.
>showing brain abnormalities
What we know is that some unknown number of the 24 diplomats showed "white matter tract" abnormalities, not all of them. Since they only had brain scans after the incident, we don't know what caused them. Was the number of diplomats that had these abnormalities much greater than one would expect by change? We don't know.
It was reported[1] that these were not random embassy staff members:
> The first four Americans to report being struck by the phenomenon — including the fit-looking man in his 30s — were all CIA officers working under diplomatic cover, as were two others affected later on.
Ignoring the terrible operational security in effectively leaking the identities of intelligence officers, this could point out a more mundane explanation - an occupational injury, maybe as a result of operating specific equipment.
> It may or may not have been an attack but what’s the explaination for 24 embassy staff members randomly experiencing the same symptoms and all showing brain abnormalities?
Were there any physical injuries to the brain found? As in leisures, damaged nerves etc. Or was it all self-rerpoted stuff. "I can't see, can't hear, losing my balance etc."
Consider these are CIA employees in an embassy that was going to probably be wound down eventually. Now they have to leave for another post or back to a desk job. So someone came up with an idea that they have been attacked and reported headaches, so maybe they could retire early or get extra compensation based on injuries in the line of duty. They wouldn't even have to conspire with others, as they could have just understood what to do by observing. Remember lying and making up stuff is they day job. Just another thing to consider...
These are physical changes. Medical testing has revealed the embassy workers developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate.
Did it though? I commented this on another sub-thread, but it seems to be relevant here too. Straight from the report:
> MRI neuroimaging was obtained in all 21 patients. Most patients had conventional imaging findings, which were within normal limits, at most showing a few small nonspecific T2-bright foci in the white matter (n =9, 43%).
This sounds to me like the MRI showed most people were normal. It continues:
> There were 3 patients with multiple T2-bright white matter foci, which were more than expected for age, 2 mild in degree, and 1 with moderate changes.
Three out of 21 patients doesn't sound like a lot. The researches agree that 3 people showing something somewhat unexpected isn't significant, and it's probably due to other diseases or conditions:
> The pattern of conventional imaging findings in these cases was nonspecific with regard to the exposure/insult experienced, and the findings could perhaps be attributed to other preexisting disease processes or risk factors. Advanced structural and functional neuroimaging studies are ongoing.
So it's not that "MRIs are subjective" or "are as bogus as lie detectors". Rather, it's the people forming an interpretation of what the results mean (especially those who are not experts, as we can see that the experts agreed only three of the 21 people examined show something, and it's probably unrelated).
How did we, the public, get the evidence of the medical testing? Do we have the actual imaging or the testimony of the physicians who treated them? Aside: wouldn't they need permission from the patients in order to reveal the diagnosis?
Because 21 of 24 of them were treated by UPenn doctors who published an article about it in the Journal of The American Medical Association.
As you might expect the government was screwing these employees on treatments and reimbursements, so a number of them hired a lawyer who is pretty well known for these types of cases against the government. He has also been on record about what’s really going on and even represented another government employee in the 90’s who had similar issues, where the NSA confirmed they have knowledge microwaves have been actively used against us.
I believe many of the people and their spouses (who are also having these issues) want full transparency.
I’m guessing you can search the former client Mike Beck and see what you come up with, but I think due to his position and it not being 24 people from an embassy, most of the facts remain confidential/classified. The following is a excerpt from a Miami Hearld news article:
In a separate case, another Zaid client — Mike Beck, a retired National Security Agency counterintelligence officer — suffered a "potentially similar attack" in the 1990s when he traveled to an unidentified country. Years later, Beck and a companion on the trip were found to be suffering from Parkinson's disease. A confidential report convinced him that his illness was linked to a covert attack with a weapon that used microwaves, Beck told The Washington Post last year.
"My gut is that this has been going on for a while," said Zaid. "The NSA has revealed to me in an unclassified setting that a foreign power has used a microwave weapon against people."
Weapon seems unlikely, tool seems more likely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Something like that, powered by a couple of microwave beams out of phase which constructively interfere on intersection would allow you to reduce the power of each beam. If your head were in the area of constructive interference though, you’d have damage.
So an attack in the sense of depraved indifference to potential harm, but probably not meant to be an attack.
Using separate beams to constructively interfere allows for at least half the necessary power being delivered per beam. The more beams you use the greater the effect and the less each beam needs to carry on its own. This is not my field, but it seems like you could have beam be quite weak until the necessary constructive interference occurs. What am I missing? I’m not being sarcastic, I’d truly like to know.
Even 1/20 of dangerous is quite a lot of energy and vastly more than you would need to surveil. And unless the beams are exceptionally narrow and all aimed at the exact same spot, you're going to be filling the room with smaller peaks and it will be very noticeable as heat and touch and more.
Well, you say changes, but really all we have is that these 24 people were scanned later but not before taking that assignment. You can’t really say changes, you have no idea what these brains looked like before Cuba.
You know, if you care about scientific method and all...
I’m not saying changes the treating physicians and scientists at UPenn Center for Brain Injury and Repair are saying changes.
You can apply the scientific method and let me know how likely it is that 24 random people became government employees and all had the same/similar brain abnormalities, further this random group with brain abnormalities were all randomly assigned to the same embassy and around the same time they all began to complain of the same/similar symptoms and none of them ever had prior mris/hearing tests/balance tests dispute all of them living their entire lives with brain abnormalities.
> 24 random people became government employees and all had the same/similar brain abnormalities
Only 21 were checked afaik, and out of those only 3 showed something significant in the MRI, which the researches concluded "the findings could perhaps be attributed to other preexisting disease processes or risk factors", according to their published report [1].
I don't understand, it's impossible not to hear the crickets.
At some point someone jokes/suspects/postulates the presence of accoustic warfare. (tangentially, why do crickets spend so much energy creating that power level of noise? is it to annoy other species away and claim the area as theirs?)
Up to there I can follow with how the embassy reacted. But the moment you suspect and attach importance to the possibility of accoustic warfare, why just send them to the doctor? Medicine works on subtle percentages with large sample sizes. They save lives and livelihood mostly statistically, and not individually in the context of new threats (new virus strain, new weapon, newly recognized cancer...)
It was impossible not to hear the crickets before, so at that point the most rational question becomes: what power spectrum should we expect from those annoying crickets outside?
Why didn't they simply sollicit help from people with actual domain knowledge? normal engineers and sound engineers, physicists, biologists, ...? Why not rent a thermal camera, and survey the local environment, map out the location and density of individual crickets, estimate the total number etc. Then isolate a bunch of crickets and keep them fed, and transport them to a place without crickets (ship them to a ship or whatever), then record a few thousand of their individdual chirps at different distances. Then you can simply calculate/simulate the total sum of both synchronized and unsyncronized chirping behaviours, not sure how to model the synchronization? look at that shelf with the Steven Strogatz book, and if necessary just ask him if he (or one of his grad students) can help out... ffs this whole kindergarten drama can be viewed as an inadvertent leak (poor tradecraft) revealing you organizationally don't even try to get at the bottom of things anymore! All the leet access to backdoors has made the agencies lazy and complacent. It appeared like you no longer needed to select the best and the brightest, ... so you just put your daughter and son in the organization?? pfff
Ok on one hand there is a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair by doctors who examined and treated the patients (clearly you haven’t read the study).
Yet you are dismissing the study based on an article with a few quotes from scientist who haven’t examined the patients yet are diagnosing them with psychosomatic mass hysteria. I notice your article/those scientist have nothing to say about the objective tests such as MRIs/hearing tests. Clearly the UPenn Center for Brain injury and Repair has no idea what the hell they are doing or how to run a study...clearly the right way to debunk a study and diagnosis patients with mass hysteria is to shoot from the hip without exaimination of the patients.
The amount of armchair diagnosis going on, both in this case and in this thread, is remarkable.
>Dr. Douglas Smith, who led the medical examination of the American diplomats, questioned how much a single recording could reveal about the experience. Some patients didn’t report hearing anything unusual, he noted, while others heard a range of sounds.
>“It could be like a low-tone motor, or metal scraping, or like driving in a car with the back window open,” said Dr. Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania.
>Dr. Smith wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some diplomats might have heard crickets, but said that had no bearing on the real damage they’ve suffered.
I'm also curious if these crickets are native to China, where diplomats have had similar symptoms.
>I notice your article/those scientist have nothing to say about the objective tests such as MRIs/hearing tests
Well the actual study found no abnormalities in the imaging tests:
"Most patients had conventional imaging findings, which were within normal limits, at most showing a few small nonspecific T2-bright foci in the white matter (n =9, 43%)"
As for hearing loss:
"Moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss was identified in 3 individuals."
So only 3 out of the 24 had some kind of hearing loss, and we don't know what their hearing was like before the incident.
So no it’s no longer a flawed study but one that supports that nothing occurred? I see, you must have missed the non-cherry picked parts, here is the conclusion for your benefit:
>Results Of 24 individuals with suspected exposure identified by the US Department of State, 21 completed multidisciplinary evaluation an average of 203 days after exposure. Persistent symptoms (>3 months after exposure) were reported by these individuals including cognitive (n = 17, 81%), balance (n = 15, 71%), visual (n = 18, 86%), and auditory (n = 15, 68%) dysfunction, sleep impairment (n = 18, 86%), and headaches (n = 16, 76%). Objective findings included cognitive (n = 16, 76%), vestibular (n = 17, 81%), and oculomotor (n = 15, 71%) abnormalities. Moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss was identified in 3 individuals. Pharmacologic intervention was required for persistent sleep dysfunction (n = 15, 71%) and headache (n = 12, 57%). Fourteen individuals (67%) were held from work at the time of multidisciplinary evaluation. Of those, 7 began graduated return to work with restrictions in place, home exercise programs, and higher-level work-focused cognitive rehabilitation.
Conclusions and Relevance In this preliminary report of a retrospective case series, persistent cognitive, vestibular, and oculomotor dysfunction, as well as sleep impairment and headaches, were observed among US government personnel in Havana, Cuba, associated with reports of directional audible and/or sensory phenomena of unclear origin. These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma.
71% having balance problems 3 months later doesn't sound like the effect of crickets or other loud noises. Could be the microwave hypothesis though maybe?
An MRI isn't a clear cut test. It is an imaging technique. The images must then be interpreted. There is room for mistakes in this interpretation process.
Obviously, I have no idea if that is happening in this case. But we must admit the possibility, especially if other more rigorous medical evidence is not present.
My lab does MRIs of humans and animals. There's a crazy amount of variability in the structure and function of an allegedly "normal" subject's brain. For example, a good friend has what looks like an extra little bump near the vertex. He's normal enough though, and will probably finish his PhD this year.
The Brain Imaging Center does refer people with weird scans to (clinical) neurologists. They've caught a few things, but the vast majority of those are also "weird, but apparently fine" too.
It's obviously not ideal, but it's not like you can recruit subject, do some baseline tests, and then prospectively assign some of them to a foreign embassy where they /might/ be caught in the middle of something.
Not everything needs to be an RCT, and we've learned a lot from case studies, especially where the "case" is due to some effect that's difficult or unethical to replicate. Some examples:
Yes I’m the abstract and conclusion UPenn clearly acknowledges the medical history of the patients. None of them had any history of head/brain injury.
I’d like to see you cite anything from the study that states the doctors made that statement without reviewing the patients medical histories. Or anything at all from the study suggesting UPenn had no access to the patients medical histories.
Science is not unimpeachable, no matter how many times you try to appeal to authority. I’ve personally read many papers from prestigious institutions where the conclusions seem flashy but the methodology is suspect.
It’s possible (even expected) for two researchers to come to differing peer-reviewed conclusions for the same circumstance. Some scientists wrote a paper in a journal, others wrote to the journal to disagree. It’s a normal day in academia and how science progresses, not ‘shooting from the hip’. Without being involved in this particular field, it’s nearly impossible for a layperson to draw conclusions either way.
> "24 staff members with brain abnormalities. At minimum that doesn’t result from absolutely nothing."
I wouldn't be too surprised. If the baseline is some average brain, then that brain does not exist. Everyone has "brain abnormalities", instead it is a matter of how "abnormal" each of our brains is compared to the average.
I think China definitely did it and now the US is covering it up because they have made an under the table agreement to “stop doing that.” This is an exceptionally clumsy attempt at covering it up.
Wow, that second recording (which continued to play in the background after I left the page in the HN reader I’m using) brought on a bout of tinnitus. I only played it on an iPhone at a modest volume (below half), with the phone a comfortable reading distance away.
Could be, but for me at least, I don't get tinnitus too often (that I'm consciously aware of†), and I didn't know that this was one of the supposed symptoms of the alleged "attack" until after I'd played the sound, noticed tinnitus, and written that comment.
I genuinely went from no tinnitus to conscious tinnitus after playing the recording.
† I get the sense that the brain masks it to an extent, like other background noises, but it comes to the fore when conscious of it, like now as I write this comment. However in this case, it came to the fore, or was brought on, depending how you think of it, as a result of playing the annoying noise. The tinnitus came before the thought of tinnitus, if that makes sense.
Oh I meant for me, not for you :) You obviously had no suggestion. Where I did, reading your comment. And I always have some tinnitus, so it's a bit subjective to say if it increased it, as paying attention to it also makes it louder.
How do we know that's actually the sound, and not a sound? It's some reporter "who got their hands on it", not an official finding of the investigators.
I don't know if it was deliberate American propaganda campaign. The US is always looking for an enemy even if they have to invent one.
Its telling that none of the media even once asked themselves WHY someone would want to attack embassy staff in such a bizarre way. At least the US State Department kept its cool. Saving America from Americans is their mission.
> Its telling that none of the media even once asked themselves WHY someone would want to attack embassy staff in such a bizarre way.
Simple answer: intelligence officers work out of embassies. We do it, our adversaries do it, our allies do it. An adversarial intelligence service might do something to disrupt another countries intelligence operations if they thought they could get away with it.
A second possible explanation is that it wasn't actually an attack. In the 40's ago the KGB used listening devices where they hid a passive reflector in a building that would later get painted with high power microwaves which would get reflected back and interpreted. Not hard to imagine that this technique was iterated on and potentially still in use, with the side effect of physiological damage.
I personally don't think this comment is flamebait or nationalistic, and I think it raises a good question that I think could bring substantive discussion-- why would Cuba want to attack American diplomats?
This comment also begins with an opinion by OP, not an unfundamented statement. OP opens with:
> I don't know if it was deliberate American propaganda campaign.
Which is completely valid-- I don't know either, even though I can choose to believe it was simply a mistake.
Our local species of cicada has been measured at 150 decibels - bloody loud. So I imagine if the bedroom walls were bugged next to one's pillow, hearing damage is plausible.
The crickets could just be a red herring. Just because the sound recorded turned out to be crickets doesn't mean that there wasn't something else going in in addition.
And I have to say, listening to the recordings, that sound would drive me absolutely nuts.
It's usually the most mundane answer. But the answer also has to be consistent with the data. I am given to understand that the victims suffered actual brain damage. It's unclear whether or not this is true, but if it is true, then that probably rules out crickets as the cause.
Fifty years from now there's going to be a PBS documentary with the true story. Until then, we have no way of discerning fact from fiction, and any real intel is going to remain highly classified.
My thoughts exactly, this whole story is textbook spook shit. Any of the involved parties may have any number of hidden motivations for lying to everybody. Normal analysis of news stories assumes that at least some of the involved parties are relatively neutral and at least aren't intentionally lying, and that conspiracies rarely happen. That all goes out the window when you're dealing with intelligence agencies.
Take Roswell for instance. The government said it was a weather balloon. Conspiracy theorists said it was aliens. "Rational skeptics" said it was an experimental aircraft that the government covered up with the weather balloon story. Paranoid "rational skeptics" said it was an experimental aircraft and that the government had seeded the aliens conspiracy theory to distract anybody skeptical of the official weather balloon story.
Do we assume "incompetence", or "deliberate action", in misidentifying the source of this sound?
I always assume good faith and that honest mistakes happen, but in the realm of politics, "mistakes", whether rightly or wrongly, lead to hundreds of deaths [1]
[1] Korea Air shootdown, USS Vincennes shootdown, US bombing of Chinese embassy Belgrade [2]
[2] "Sorry, intern put in the wrong bombing coordinates"
I think it’s a very fair question. Just look at the Bay of Pigs intelligence operation. You have US intelligence agencies organizing/training a bunch of Cuban dissidents/exiles in Miami, to launch a paramilitary operation to over throw Castro with the backing of the US military/intelligence agencies and then allowed this group to get slaughtered (with no heads up they were withdrawing support).
Is that just incompetence or deliberate action. To this day it’s a fair question, I personally conclude it’s both and I call the mixture of incompetence/deliberate action...politics.
Or the Iraq intelligence operation, which led to the Iraq war and a lot of the present-day instability in the region. There was wrong intelligence that was believed-in, and right intelligence (claiming there were no massive stockpiles of WMDs) that was dismissed [1][2].
> Or, just maybe, the USA feels that today is not a good day to start a war with Russia?
Is telling the middle east they should either build a full blown nuke (ala NK) or allow the Russians to build a base are ways to avoid invasion the message we want to send?
I agree as a practical matter the Russian base plays heavily into our decisions but maybe we shouldn't incentivize small countries to allow them to...
Couldn't this be explained by the US intelligence agencies just being bad at reading the general public in Cuba, the invasion could not have succeeded with such a small force without a general uprising and IIRC the invasion was supported by both Eisenhower and Kennedy so to claim it was some deliberate failure on the part of the USA needs extraordinary proof of conspiracy including both presidents - the US government has supported many other coups around the world. It seems more like the intelligence agency trusted their Cuban allies enthusiasm and reading of the situation too much.
What benefit might be expected from deliberately misidentifying the source of the sound, especially given the probability that it could be correctly identified at any time?
Florida is often seen as a state that can go either way in a Presidential election. Cuban exiles are a tiny percentage of the electorate there but wield huge influence since they vote so to curry favor with these exiles some politicians use being hard on Cuba (whatever way one wishes to interpret that) as politically unrisky - those who are on the other side of the issue or neutral or ignorant of this are not one issue voters compared to the Cuban immigrants, this is supposedly changing slowly with the next generation of Cubans in Florida.
I suppose it could provide diplomatic leverave and stir up public fervor against Cuba, which might allow the US to launch an operation against the government in Cuba that the US seems to not tolerate very much.
There's a lot of incompetence in reporting this story.
The Cubans claimed[1] the source of the sound was cicadas more than a year ago and it was dismissed. The Cuban claim is not even mentioned in the NYT story.
The US never accused Cuba of perpetrating the attack itself, but did formally accuse it of "fail[ing] to take appropriate steps to protect our diplomats in accordance with its obligations under the Vienna Convention" [1], and retaliated by kicking some Cuban diplomats out of the US. In remarks to the press, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson elaborated:
> “What we’ve said to the Cubans is: small island,” Mr. Tillerson said, raising his hands. “You’ve got a sophisticated security apparatus. You probably know who is doing it. You can stop it. It’s as simple as that.” [2]
This is easily debunked by the fact that similar attacks happened to US personelle in China.
Having read about the history of the CIA, planted stories like this are not actually conspiracy theories. This has the feel of a very real coverup. It seems so obvious.
There was an article a year ago or so that I thought was pretty convincing. It talked about how multiple high frequency spying devices could be interfering with each other and creating the effect. What happened to that theory? No one seemed to think it was solved after that article came out.
Crickets still sound more plausible than the status quo explanation that intelligence agencies in multiple countries would attack US (and Canadian!) diplomats with no apparent motivation, especially after being "caught" committing the supposed attacks. Most likely, though, the diplomats are experiencing a mass psychogenic illness.
The US has reduced staffing at affected embassies and has probably taken other precautions. Don’t you think that hostile governments have good reason to hinder US operations on their territory? A lot of intelligence gathering happens through embassies.
Especially when you consider that China is aggressively moving to buld up its relationship with Cuba right now.[1][2]
Russia is attempting to station nuclear bombers in Latin America right now, with Cuba's #1 ally.[3][4][5]
All of which is conveniently being ignored by both the article and the skeptics in this thread.
Those competitors (and potential enemies) aren't non-existent, they're publicly going to work right now in the backyard of the US. Why the hell else would Russia be attempting to station its bombers so close to the US? It's a response to NATO and the tensions with the US on arms treaties, or just another case of Putin pursuing a copy of the USSR strategy of poking their US enemy in one of the few ways they can.
Obviously the sound was not crickets, but two weather balloons vigorously rubbing themselves. Obviously this is a sensitive subject[1], so the USG had to invent a cover story.
I grew up in a tropical country and went to a Primary school which had massive number of Angsana tress directly outside the open windows. Everyday we would be bombarded by the sounds of multiple Cicadas chirping away. They were very loud and it would go on for pretty much the whole day. And sound itself would be very distracting. The whole school was affected by these sounds, but I don’t recall any of my class/school mates getting impacted by the sounds (except for perhaps a constant bloody distraction that got me disciplined for not paying attention in class)
The whole thing and its explanations has conspiracy theory overtones. Honestly, I’m going to null hypothesis this whole event because none of the stories are convincing.
The reason for the conspiracy theory overtones is that a lot of information is not being reported.
> The first four Americans to report being struck by the phenomenon — including the fit-looking man in his 30s — were all CIA officers working under diplomatic cover, as were two others affected later on.
Even this report effectively leaks the identifies of the intelligence officers involved.
Reminds me of the mysterious and highly disruptive drone activities at UK Gatwick airport just before Christmas. Mass confusion about what actually happened if anything
We ban accounts that do nationalistic flamewar on HN, regardless of which one they have a problem with. It leads to lame, rude, and dumb discussion. Please do not foment it on this site again.
America is constantly targeted by their enemies, much like every country on earth. They don't kick back and take breaks when it comes to state-sponsored intelligence work. There has been real evidence of that going back forever. Are you working under the assumption that America has no enemies and no one is continually attacking it in different ways?
Your sane conclusion is that there's collective madness happening? Seems like a pretty large stretch of the imagination for that to be the sane conclusion, especially after doctors have studied it and said otherwise.
Your comments are extremely anti-American with just about 0 evidence to back any of it up. It comes off as a pretty out-there anti-American rant to be honest.
> This is the USA actively & agressively trying to find reasons to bomb or persue regime change operations like they have throughout almost all of their history.
Where almost all of their history mostly equals part of post WW2. The US dates back to the ~1776. Post WW2 was ~170+ years later. Before that, US foreign meddling was no more egregious than any other equivalent nation throughout history. In fact it was probably far less due to the age of the US and lack of the structural development of the political tools required to persistently meddle in foreign affairs. The US military rarely left US shores for the first 140 years, which is the majority of US history.
The medical team at the University of Pennsylvania, who actually examined the victims and published their findings in the peer reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the victims suffered real injuries and psychosomatic illness was ruled out.
Meanwhile, all these people who have never examined the patients keep speculating the opposite. Color me skeptical.
> MRI neuroimaging was obtained in all 21 patients. Most patients had conventional imaging findings, which were within normal limits, at most showing a few small nonspecific T2-bright foci in the white matter (n =9, 43%). There were 3 patients with multiple T2-bright white matter foci, which were more than expected for age, 2 mild in degree, and 1 with moderate changes. The pattern of conventional imaging findings in these cases was nonspecific with regard to the exposure/insult experienced, and the findings could perhaps be attributed to other preexisting disease processes or risk factors. Advanced structural and functional neuroimaging studies are ongoing.
The study concludes that "These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma." but its not clear to me whether that is to say the study identified specific signs of injury (the imaging section certainly doesn't indicate that) or whether it is saying the symptoms would usually be explained by injury that is as-yet unidentified
It's much like hands. If you were tasked with finding out if someone had a hand chopped off, and saw they had two hands on them, you wouldn't need to know how many hands they had before to be able to medically claim "Yeah, two hands is within normal limits".
> Meanwhile, all these people who have never examined the patients keep speculating the opposite. Color me skeptical.
You are poisoning the well, since the article even says
> That’s not to say that the diplomats weren’t attacked, the scientists added — only that the recording is not of a sonic weapon, as had been suggested.
There were symptoms, and there was a sound. It was assumed that post hoc ergo propter hoc
- the sound was the cause of the symptoms. This was always a strong hypothesis without real evidence to back it up.
How was it ruled out. Did they find physical damage in the brain or other organs?
In a lot of cases it was self reported or stuff people could fake if they wanted "oh look, I am losing my balance and falling".
Another point to consider is that a lot of the staff were CIA emoyees working in an embassy that was probably going to be closed or have staff reduced because of the current administration's stance regarding Cuba. And one thing CIA employees do professionally is make up cover stories. If they could make up a cover story to retire early with extra pension for injuries in a high profile case, I can see some taking that route.
For instance last time we discussed a story in the New Yorker about someone who went through this and surely at the end they said they might retire early because of the injuries received. That for some reason made me skeptical too...
