[pessimizer]

It's a bunch of money being spent on on a silly story by three outlets who hoped they'd be fed enough nonsense by three letter agencies to dominate the news cycle with it for a week or two, being frontrun by a comprehensive study showing, yet again, that nothing happened to these people. So they rushed this out.

If anybody finds any factual claims about this device and this supposed syndrome, buried in the innuendo, please post it. But the boldfaced faux-abstract at the top doesn't indicate any new information at all.

[FabHK]

You're too quick to dismiss things. There's without doubt a phenomenon here (a multitude of anecdotes of sudden symptoms, with some victims "medically retired from government service"), with two theories to explain it: a) there's no underlying physical cause, but it's basically random incidences in conjunction with selection bias, or b) there's an underlying physical cause, such as outlined in the article.

These are both possibilities. The article outlines "new evidence — in the form of intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, and call metadata, along with eyewitness testimony". They don't claim to have the device itself, or direct information about it.

Next, there are some studies that find differences, and some that don't find differences between the affected and a control group. If the studies look at different markers, that is consistent with non-obvious differences being there. The absence of evidence sometimes is evidence of absence, but not always.

I think the proper response for now is to suspend judgment.

[pas]

It's the same disease that people got from unpowered 5G towers. If you go around asking people do you have headaches since the new tower is there, you will find people who do.

Amplifying this by the seriousness of 3 letter US agencies and whatnot and you get people medically retired. (And this is ongoing long enough that probably even some Russian agency has sent there someone to check, and then it got picked up by intelligence leaks. Or they leaked it to fuck with them.)

(And of course psychosomatic things need treatment too, and the investigations are warranted, it's not like US chanceries are the safest places in the world.)

[tim333]

> ..the symptoms began as an intense feeling of pressure, which started in the torso and radiated up to the head and neck. Then there was nausea, followed by a “high-pitched squeal.” Taylor raced to a bathroom to vomit before collapsing unconscious on the floor.

> Once back in the United States, Taylor was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury.

>Taylor remembers confronting a tall, muscular man with a military bearing acting suspiciously across the road from the consulate residential complex. After a brief exchange with Taylor, the man responded with a strong Russian accent, shutting down the encounter and running off.

>Taylor did not hesitate in confirming that Gordienko was the suspect skulking around outside U.S. consulate housing.

Gordienko being "Egor Gordienko named as senior member of cell of Russian agents who tried to kill former Russian spy in Salisbury" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/25/fourth-russian-a...

Doesn't sound like a random headache to me.

[pas]

No, it doesn't. And there are probably true positive cases of some hostile attack (and it's unsurprising if we will not be the first to get details on the exact nature of those, and how many, and where and when), but in general the "Havana Syndrome" is likely not that.

(2022 CIA: Foreign involvement was ruled out in 976 cases of the 1,000 reviewed, and ... In March 2024, the National Institutes of Health published two medical studies evaluating people reporting Havana syndrome symptoms, and found no evidence of brain injury, irregular blood biomarkers, or vocational impairment)

[tim333]

Maybe a few real cases and a lot of other people having the odd headache I guess?

[russianGuy83829]

This doesn't address the coincidences that the GRU unit is consistently at the place where the "headaches" happen, get identified by the victims, and work with one of the only people (Russian professor) researching the rare disease that was diagnosed for one of the victims. There are documents in the article that link the group with the researcher, which explicitly mentions acoustic non-lethal attacks.

[pas]

There were ~1000 cases reviewed, and these GRU gremlins were only at a few places, no?

So most likely is that there are a few true positives, and the vast majority of them are false positives. (And of course good luck telling this to anyone who works next to someone who just met a GRU operative, or works in a high-stress job and regularly feels that there are people out to get them.)

[skygazer]

The gist was members of some GRU unit have been seen at the location of several Havana syndrome events, mainly experts in Russia have been affected, and the Russian government has reportedly given awards for the creation and use of such directed energy weapons. The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.

[dilyevsky]

I would add that this is not just some random unit - the same unit has previously engaged in acts of sabotage and assassinations abroad including use of chemical agents. Pretty big smoking gun to say the least

[foverzar]

> mainly experts in Russia have been affected

Yet somehow this was not known beforehand for years and somehow only became "apparent" when Russia became the public enemy.

> The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.

This article makes it sound like military industrial complex fat cats don't get their pockets filled with tax money fast enough, so plebs need some pushing.

Retroactively changing the past to accommodate the present day narrative is a common political trick, similarly to how Radio Free Europe's reports on Ukrainian ultranationalists challenging the monopoly on violence had suddenly become "Russian propaganda".

Another tiny step closer to the hot phase of WWIII, I guess.