Interesting memo issued by the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation in the 1960s. "Doubt is our product," they argued. What does that mean? You don't need to convince someone something is true, you only need to introduce them to the possibility the opposing info might not be.
The tobacco industry manufactured "controversy" around the subject of smoking by astroturfing bad science. They created front groups like the Center for Indoor Air Research to fund fake scientific studies arguing smoking doesn't cause cancer.
I'm not saying that our government has astroturfed fake research on the subject of Havana Syndrome, I'm simply pointing out that the information coming from grant-funded universities and government agencies might not be accurate
For example, government agencies like the CIA *have* established front groups in the past to fund private research, notably orgs like The Human Ecology Fund which subsidized MKUltra research
Whoa. Haven't seen this reported before: the first Havana Syndrome victim was a CIA officer. He then introduced the idea to another CIA officer by playing a recording of a noise, who then introduced it to another CIA officer, and so on...
Patient Zero also appears to be the source of the chirping noise leaked to the AP in 2017, whether directly or otherwise. It is significant that a CIA officer is responsible for initiating all claims, rather than regular embassy staff.
Here's a sneaky thing journalists do when they don't want to acknowledge new information: they refer to only the earlier claims. As I've mentioned many times now, German officials have dropped all investigations into Havana Syndrome due to a lack of evidence.
Relman's report also does not prove anything. It simply repeats old information first identified in the 2020 NAS report, a study chaired by Relman. He's hardly an impartial party.
There's actually a very weird New Agey '70s movie about this that references the JFK assassination and, inexplicably, recreates Christine Chubbuck's suicide
It also pops up occasionally in '70s pseudodocumentaries on New Age and faith healing, although I forget which ones. I'll upload a bit of later if I can remember where I saw it.
lol found it, the documentary is called The Unknown Force. Jack Palance hosts for some reason.
One of the things that gets overlooked when discussing the spookiness of The National Enquirer is that its creator, Generoso Pope Jr., literally worked for the CIA's psychological warfare unit in the 1950s.
According to Jack Vitek's "The Godfather of Tabloid", Pope's mob-connected family had an in through the Office of Naval Intelligence, landing him the psyop officer job.
He allegedly left his job after only one year because he "got really fed up with government bureaucracy." Yup, the CIA just let him quit.
This is even better when you consider that, historically, California has been an incubator for the Sovereign Citizen and paramilitary movements, American anticommunist conspiracism, and the militarization of police forces (all of which are tied to that capitalist experiment)
LAPD chief William Parker even worked with the Birchers to form his own private oppo research/propaganda organization, the Fire and Police Research Association. It functioned as an extension of the LAPD's red squad.
The LAPD would aid private right-wing groups in various capacities, creating a public-private intelligence partnership. In the 1980s, a detective was found to be sharing intelligence with far-right Congressmen Larry McDonald's Western Goals Foundation.
Do conspiracies exist? People will argue that they can't because it would take an impossible level of cooperation among large groups of people. Let's consider detainee torture by the US military and the CIA for a moment.
Guantanamo Bay, for example, was established in 2002 with the purpose of "detaining" enemy combatants and interrogating them. What is an enemy combatant? Primarily a classification created by the Bush admin to avoid affording detainees POW status.
Dropping POW status allowed the Bush admin to ignore Article III of the Geneva Convention, which governs treatment of prisoners, specifically: "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture..."