Cuba (merged thread)

[AdamG]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Mysterious incidents affecting the health of American diplomats in Cuba continued as recently as August, the United States said Friday, despite earlier U.S. assessments that the attacks had long stopped. The U.S. increased its tally of government personnel affected to 19.
The new U.S. disclosures came the same day that the union representing American diplomats said mild traumatic brain injury was among the diagnoses given to diplomats victimized in the attacks. In the most detailed account of the symptoms to date, the American Foreign Service Association said permanent hearing loss was another diagnosis, and that additional symptoms had included brain swelling, severe headaches, loss of balance and "cognitive disruption."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-01-18-40-29
..

[AdamG]

Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 U.S. victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top U.S. diplomat has called them "health attacks." New details learned by The Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling U.S. officials who say the facts and the physics don't add up.

"None of this has a reasonable explanation," said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA official who served in Havana long before America re-opened an embassy there. "It's just mystery after mystery after mystery."

Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-14-06-04-28

[AdamG]

Behind the scenes, though, investigators immediately started searching for explanations in the darker, rougher world of spycraft and counterespionage, given that so many of the first reported cases involved intelligence workers posted to the U.S. embassy. That revelation, confirmed to the AP by a half-dozen officials, adds yet another element of mystery to a year-long saga that the Trump administration says may not be over.
The State Department and the CIA declined to comment for this story.

https://apnews.com/d0fa8db258bf4c549...etwork-in-Cuba

[AdamG]

Tangentially related -

A newly revealed incident reported by a USAID officer who is based at the American embassy in Uzbekistan is raising suspicions Russia may have been involved and could have had a hand in bizarre attacks targeting U.S. diplomats in Cuba, according to American sources.
In September, the officer and his wife reported, according to one source familiar with the incident, what may have been at least one acoustic attack similar to those experienced by the diplomats in Havana.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uzbekis...-cuba-attacks/

[AdamG]

HAVANA — Republican Sen. Jeff Flake says the U.S. has found no evidence that American diplomats in Havana were the victims of attacks with an unknown weapon.
Flake, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, met with high-ranking Cuban officials in Havana on Friday. He spoke with The Associated Press on Saturday morning.
The Cubans told Flake the FBI has told them its agents found no evidence that mysterious illnesses suffered by U.S. diplomats resulted from attacks, despite the Trump administration’s description of the incidents as attacks. Flake says classified briefings from U.S. officials have left him with no reason to doubt the Cuban account. The U.S. has pulled most of its staff from Havana in response to the incidents.

https://nypost.com/2018/01/06/jeff-f...tacks-in-cuba/

[AdamG]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-01-18-40-29
..

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...l=1#post208890
This was originally a seperate thread for a reason - the story is about the potentially new weapons system, not necessarily the location.

The US Embassy in Beijing learned on May 18 that the clinical findings of the evaluation matched that of a "mild traumatic brain injury," an embassy spokeswoman told CNN.
The alert will raise comparisons with a series of unexplained incidents in Cuba that led to the withdrawal of most US personnel from the embassy in Havana. The cause of those incidents, reported in late 2016 and early 2017, still remains a mystery.
US officials did not publicly drawn a link between the incident in China and the events in Cuba.
According to the alert issued by the US State Department on Wednesday, the cause of the injuries to the employee in China remains unknown, but officials were not aware of other similar symptoms among the diplomatic community in the country.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/23/asia/...ntl/index.html

[AdamG]

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...l=1#post208890
This was originally a seperate thread for a reason - the story is about the potentially new weapons system, not necessarily the location.



https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/23/asia/...ntl/index.html

Doctors and scientists say that microwave weapons are the main suspect behind the mysterious ailments of dozens of American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China. Douglas Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times that microwaves were likely behind the health incidents, some of which likely resulted in brain injury. Smith was the lead author of a study that examined 21 affected U.S. diplomats from Cuba. The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in March, did not mention microwaves.

http://thehill.com/policy/internatio...sed-mysterious