Just weeks after the intelligence community came out to disavow claims that “Havana syndrome” – the strange eruption of neurological disorders that afflicts hordes of US foreign service officers – was the result of a directed energy weapon, a recently declassified report alleges that could very well be what it is.
The Abnormal Health Incidents (AHI) Intelligence Community Panel was created by the government to figure out what had happened to the approximately 1,000 US government officials who claim to be suffering from bizarre “Havana” symptoms. These symptomswhich began to appear in Cuba in 2016, includes a rash of inexplicable mental and physical ailments, such as hearing and memory loss, severe headaches, sensitivity to light, nausea and a host of others debilitating problems.. After a substantial research effort, the panel finally made its findings public to the government last September, but the contents of the report remained confidential. Well, until now, anyway.
In a exclusiveSalon published the entire 153-page report brought together by the panel. The document (which is heavily redacted) was recently declassified following a lawsuit by the James Madison Project, a nonprofit that lobbies against government secrecy. This has previously reported that the expert panel’s findings supported the idea that electromagnetic energy may have been the culprit, but the full findings of the report have not been made public so far.
According to the report, a plausible explanation for the disturbances could be “pulsating electromagnetic energy”. It reads:
Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radio frequency range, plausibly explains the characteristics of the heart, although there are information gaps. There are several plausible pathways involving forms of electromagnetic energy, each with its own requirements, limitations, and unknowns. For all pathways, there are sources that could generate the required stimuli, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements.
Further, the report speculates that such energy could be “propagated with little loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials.” This could potentially be done using “off-the-shelf commercial technology” and there are devices that “are easily portable and concealable, and can be powered by electricity or standard batteries”, he says. .
The report is really interesting, but it’s also kind of funny because it seems to be saying the exact opposite of what the government just released and tell everyone less than a month ago. On March 1, Haines and CIA Director William Burns told reporters that most cases of Havana syndrome could likely be attributed to “environmental factors” or “conventional diseases.” While officials left the door open for further explanations, the press conference appeared to be a clear attempt to shut down further speculation about the bizarre episode. For the most part, the idea that the symptoms were caused by a “directed energy weapon” was considered “highly unlikely,” Haines told the audience.
But far from making victims’ symptoms disappear due to “environmental factors” or some sort of mass delusion, the recently declassified report refers to Havana syndrome as a “unique sensorineural syndrome” that is “markedly unusual ” and “not elsewhere reported”. in the medical literature. Besides “electromagnetic energy,” this also seems to rule out most other potential explanations for the victims’ symptoms.
For example, a frequently offered explanation for the bizarre troubles has been the mass delusion – a kind of strangely global psychological affliction that affects American officials everywhere. But the report says that psychosocial factors alone “cannot explain the fundamental characteristics [of Havana Syndrome]and that “incidents with these characteristics do not meet the majority of criteria” for a “mass sociogenic disease”.
The other explanation, often offered, that the symptoms are the result of ordinary environmental factors or previously diagnosed illnesses, is also ruled out; the report states that based on “literature reviews and discussions with a convened group of experts from government and academia…the committee determined that the essential characteristics cannot be explained by natural factors or benign environmental ones”.
Other potential causes of the syndrome that the panel considered, such as ionizing radiation and chemical and biological agents – are considered, but the panel ultimately concludes that these are “implausible explanations for the essential features in the absence of other synergistic stimuli,” the report says.
Mark Zaid, an attorney for the James Madison Project (and a representative for some of the Havana Syndrome victims), told Salon he thought the report showed the government was clearly hiding something. “The US government is covering up evidence of what AHIs are,” Zaid told the outlet. “It becomes clear that these events were either perpetrated by foreign actors or that this was an experiment gone horribly wrong.”
