By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on November 9, 2021
Acoustic damage? No, there is nothing worse than someone who doesn’t want to hear. Image: Osal
On October 8, 2021, Joe Biden signed into law a bill that had been unanimously passed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives, in a rare show of bipartisanship in today’s US politics. The law will be known by the suggestive name of HAVANA, as its drafters intentionally sought a title that would establish a link between the Cuban capital and the alleged, or real, health symptoms reported by US officials at their embassy since November 2016.
The new legislation is titled the Helping Americans Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act, and it provides a set of general guidelines empowering the CIA director and the secretary of state to determine which of those “affected” will receive compensation and in what amount. This means that the main “help” for these officials would be to give them money and not arrive at an accurate diagnosis of their condition, discuss appropriate treatment, and finally find the real source of the problem.
In taking this step, lawmakers from both parties appealed to a certain cheap sense of patriotism by declaring their commitment to “those who serve America abroad,” forgetting the small detail that they are coining the term “attack” for history, which had previously been discredited by US federal agencies, and committing the even greater irresponsibility of definitively linking this strange story to Cuba, the only country that has suffered direct consequences from the still unclarified events. They also overlooked the fact that many X-ray analyses used as “evidence” show no brain damage, and those that did show abnormalities in that organ cannot be linked to any of the possible explanations that have been repeatedly put forward, much less to the fact that the effects occurred in Cuba. It is known that the State Department does not have medical records of its personnel’s medical conditions prior to traveling abroad.
Several media outlets, in reporting the news about the new law with more sensationalism than objectivity, relied on the conclusions reached by a 2019 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which stated that the illness suffered by a large group of CIA agents with diplomatic passports was probably caused by the use of directed energy, specifically microwaves. The same media outlets commented recently that if anyone was responsible for these alleged actions, which were nothing more than theoretical proposals, then it was Russia.
Coincidentally, various “sources” and “specialists” who covered the creation of HAVANA cited the same paragraph from the Academy’s document, which places the beginning of this story in Cuba in 2016, when “a US official reportedly felt severe pain and pressure on his face during the night at his home, along with an intense sound in one of his ears, which caused nausea and loss of balance.” This scene, which may evoke feelings of solidarity in any reader, is the same one described by people suffering from half a dozen different illnesses in any country, who have recently been in combat zones, dive frequently, use certain technologies in their daily work, or consume specific medications or chemicals. But the successive accounts of several “victims” to the interrogators at the time immediately pointed to the legend of the “attacks.”
It is striking that the signing of this legislation did not receive the same fanfare that accompanies every time the president signs new legislation, especially now, when the US Congress is one of the least productive in history. There were no grand statements from the president, no gift pens, no group photos. One possible reason is that the current administration, much as with the poorly organized withdrawal from Afghanistan, feels it has been left to deal with a problem it did not help create, on which it has decided to continue the narrative, but on which it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis for the future.
In Washington these days, disciplined journalists are not asking questions, but Biden and his team are wondering why, after four years of these “incidents,” Trump emerged unscathed and the Democrats are left to write lyrics to a song they did not compose.
In the long list of contradictory facts and situations related to the issue, all lawmakers, the White House, and even the press left one small detail off the radar. Almost a week before the approval of HAVANA, Buzzfeed News managed to declassify an internal State Department document from 2018 (a year before the Academy’s report) that referred to an investigation carried out by the JASON Advisory Group, according to which the use of microwaves was ruled out as the probable cause of the officials’ ailments, after the use of sounds had already been scientifically disqualified as the cause.
To the general public, the name JASON does not mean much, but in the White House and on Capitol Hill, it is known that this team is composed of high-level specialists in various disciplines who have assisted the US executive in assessing countless threats to the country’s national security. In other words, these are not amateurs or opportunists who go around fabricating hypotheses to justify new defense spending.
In making its revelation, Buzzfeed added another strand to this tangle of confusion: the team that produced the Academy’s 2019 report was never aware of JASON’s previous work in 2018. And the question that needs to be asked is: Why have reports that are closer to science and do not contribute to the reproduction of the official narrative been repeatedly relegated? Perhaps another would be: Why did the Trump administration, after having a conclusive text with a broad scientific basis, commission another “study” that was conducted with less rigor?
Biden officials have said, however, that their view of the matter is not represented by either of these two texts and that they will continue the investigation, broadening the range of possibilities and experts, including “those who found Osama Bin Laden a decade ago.”
This may be a mention that indicates the government’s commitment to “find a needle in a haystack,” but at the same time it links a poorly told story with another even worse one: the 2001 attacks and their real masterminds, plus the purpose of the “war on terror.”
It is no coincidence that a renowned Washington Post journalist warned in his October 28 edition about the similarity between the “unidentified health incidents” and the narrative constructed around the alleged weapons of mass destruction that were never found in Iraq, after a war that also had bipartisan support and caused great losses.
Other voices have joined this line of thinking in recent days, calling for restraint and insisting on the need to seek concrete evidence and scientific explanations before pointing fingers at possible culprits and, even more so, before determining a response.
The deliberate coverage of the issue over the last month has had other commonalities:
it is repeatedly stated that US officials have been “attacked” in various parts of the world, but it is forgotten to mention that at least one of these “actions” took place in the US capital, meaning that several agencies responsible for ensuring security within their territory would have failed massively in providing such a service, especially after spending more than four years searching for a commissioner, constructing possible scenarios, and imagining non-existent technological devices.
On the other hand, there are increasingly more fingers pointing towards Moscow, where speculation ranges from alleged state responsibility to the possible involvement of Russian “criminal” groups. And here one might also ask why only people outside the law of that origin would be interested in harming US officials, given the existence of much more powerful and closer cartels and mafia groups, even within federal borders.
This month, as perhaps never before, demands have been reiterated, not to the previous administration, but to the current one to find an explanation and “take action.”
As if by magic, several “think tanks” gave some of their academics the task of recycling old arguments and, with nothing new to contribute, repeating ad nauseam the words “sonic attacks,” “microwaves,” “brain damage,” and above all, Cuba, Cuba, Cuba.
On October 24, three long-time CIA officers came out of anonymity and wrote a text in Cipher Brief, a digital media outlet related to security issues, in which they stated that “more than 200 US officers (not officials) have been persecuted around the world and targeted by an adversary using a mysterious weapon that causes permanent brain damage. It is time to get serious about fighting back.“
The text logically cites the ‘studies’ that contribute most to the confusion and not those related to science, in order to reach a dangerous conclusion: ”Regardless of their form, the weapons used in these attacks are nothing less than weapons of terror, designed to injure non-combatants.”
Amid the deliberately created confusion, the opinions of CIA officials are reiterated, but paradoxically, no space is given to the FBI, which visited Cuba on four separate occasions, to defend its findings, which coincided with those of Cuban experts.
At this time, the battle continues between those who advise restraint and dialogue (who are not few) and those who insist on keeping the issue alive and finding false positives at all costs.
As the debate between the two factions continues, Cuba once again asks: why are the measures taken solely against the island for these events still in force? What are today’s arguments for maintaining personnel restrictions on the respective embassies in Washington and Havana? Who benefits from the reduction of consular services for Cuban nationals in Havana to almost zero?
Source, Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English