by an armed gang, still fresh. if you choose to go back to their villages despite bliss, attempt to reassure them. the incident, a book you an anchor will not happen again, is acquaintance. this will aren't auto district and we'll continue to do our best with massive deployment in alias where we feel there are some truth with all the touch coatings. men here say they would rather live on the streets and relative safety and be killed by bandits who showed no mercy. happy to pres al jazeera nigeria. ah, the headlines analogy 0, australia's immigration minister, his council tennis starting over joker, which is visa just days ahead of the australian open shock of it has been ordered back into detention as he fights deportation. sarah clark has more from brisbin.

it's taken 4 days now of alex hall who holds the discretionary powers as he immigration minister to revoke that visa a 2nd time. now i should say that these discretionary powers means he's quite a lot of power when it comes to he can, it can't, you'll be on the grounds. he considers you a public wrist or a health risk, or even on a, on a small scenario of a, making a false claim on an immigration statement. and in a statement released by alex woke. he said he made the decision on the ground. so it's in the public interest to do so. so this is yet another twist in the saga. the visa saga that involves novak doc of it's the office of the u. k. prime minister boris johnson has apologized to the queen after to merge the party was held on the eve of her husband's funeral to gatherings were reported to taking place in downing street during a corona virus locked on. india is daily current of ours infections have risen to more than 264000 the last 24 hours driven by the unequal invariant. it comes with

hundreds of thousands of hindu pilgrims gather for a religious festival. in northern india, china is facing a test for the recovery policy at the beijing winter olympics in february, $201.00 new cases. i've been confirmed up from 190 a day earlier. the city of june, june is under a strict lockdown. the you has condemned a cyber attack on ukraine's government and it's called an emergency meeting to respond. hacker is targeted websites for the ministry of foreign affairs and other agencies. some of the web pages displayed a message alleging public data had been leaked. it's not clear yet who is behind the attack, but the foreign ministry says there has been a long record of russian cyber attacks in the past. while the news our right here, and i'll just 0 at the top of the hour, but coming up next, it's inside story, bye bye. ah

. it is a mysterious illness that is affected us diplomats worldwide attacking the nervous system. and in some cases, forcing people into early retirement, it's called the havana syndrome. but what or who is behind it? this is inside story. ah hello and welcome to the program. i'm peter darby. more than 5 years on the so called havana syndrome is back with us for american diplomats have fallen sick this week with suspected cases of the syndrome in paris and geneva,

the u. s. secretary of state antony blinkin says the federal government is working to identify the illness and who or what might be behind it. the mystery condition has affected about 200 diplomats and their family members since 2016. it's believe the element may be caused by what's called a directed energy attack. symptoms include me, grains, nausea, memory, loss, and dizziness. and it can be so bad. it's forced some victims into early retirement . we'll begin our discussion in a moment. first, let's take a closer look at how it all started. so it's called havana syndrome because the 1st cases were reported in 2016 by u. s. diplomats. in cuba. they started experiencing neurological symptoms mimicking what happens after a concussion, but they had suffered no head injuries since then. dozens, more cases have been reported by u. s. officials and their families faced around the world, including in russia and in china. a number of canadian diplomatic stuff in cuba

were also effected. a ca team searching for a cause is focused on about $200.00 cases, which do remain unexplained in september the us president joe biden signed into law a bill to compensate the victims. ah, okay, there we are. here we go. let's bring in our guests in auckland, new zealand. we have robert bartholomew on re senior lecturer in the department of psychological medicine at the university of oakland. he is also the co author of savannah syndrome, mass psychogenic, illness and the real story behind the embassy ministry. and wisteria and cultures in essex. in the u. k. we have natasha lind, stats, ortho, and specialists on us foreign policy. she's social sciences deputy dean at the university of essex and in boston, massachusetts. in the us, we have glen, call a korea cia officer, and formerly a deputy national intelligence officer. welcome to you all glen call in boston.

havana syndrome. what might it be? well, the immediate thought, i think of all of my colleagues and the institutions involved in foreign policy is that the, the russians are the most likely ones to have done this kind of activity. whether to obtain intelligence or to harass or both we don't know. and we don't know that it's the russians, but that's the, the reflexive thought there are probably only 4 countries or so that would have the capability or the interest in doing this sort of thing. assuming that what appears to be happening is happening. and that would be russia, china around north korea, but nobody knows. this is one of the big mysteries. natasha and stuff in culture. has there been anything like this in the past? not that i know of nothing like this where we have no idea what is really causing

this. i mean, there was some speculation that there were some sort of microwave attacks that it occurred to against americans in russia, in soviet union. but there's nothing like this where we don't really know what the diagnosis is. who is doing it, what it actually is. there's a lot more questions than answers, and that's what makes it so puzzling. and we don't even know if it is something real. so we're still looking for answers. i had the view that this is something that is real because we seeing that some of the victims have still been dealing with some of the after effects that they're still experiencing nada, nausea and headaches. and there was enough people describing similar symptoms is something to take really seriously. robust me in oakland, in new zealand. i've counted so far here on the program. 7 uses of the word it. we

don't know what it is, robert is the time now here to call it a covert sonic weapon. i think the evidence is overwhelming, that it is mass psychogenic illness. and the problem with this whole episode is you got politics being mixed with science, and all you need to know is recently in september of last year, the head of the, by the administration panel, looking into this, pamela scrathland, would not rule out the possibility of mass psychogenic illness and she was forced to resign and people were saying, we're not crazy. we're not suffering from a mental disorder. mass psychogenic, illness does not mean you're crazy or you're suffering from a mental disorder. they are real symptoms. this is a real condition that has been known for thousands of years, and the evidence is overwhelming. that what we're looking at here is mass psychogenic illness. but roger just to force you there for

a 2nd row. but what you're saying when you talk about as a mass psychogenic illness, psychogenic illness, aka, people think themselves into being really sick with the same symptoms because they're in the same data stream dates a group when it comes to be analyzed. but what we're talking about here is korea, diplomats, we're talking about people who are intelligent well traveled there it, that, that well educated people that presumably mature and that they're in their forties, their fifty's, they don't tear up when they're watching whole mark tv, you know, they don't tear up when they're watching a chick flick a girl movie when they're watching something that put tugs at the the heart strings . no one is immune to mass psycho genic illness because mass like a genic illness is based on a belief. think of it as the placebo effect in reverse. if i give you a sugar pill and tell you you're going to feel better often you will. it's the power of framing. but if i give you a sugar pill and tell you you're going to feel better and someone rushes in and

says, oh my god, the sugar pill i just gave you, it's been contaminated with rat poison. there's a good chance that within a few minutes, you'll get headache, stomach pain, nausea, you might even bomb it, but there's nothing physically wrong with you. think of it as a software problem, an over stimulation of the nervous system. but the reality, glenn call in boston, surely as this russia, the united states and china, you mentioned one or 2 others. they have all researched microwaves as weapons. and i don't mean they went to a supermarket. they bought a microwave and they threw it at somebody. i mean, they tried to come up with technology that used a microwave gun or a device or something that could points microwaves at an individual or as a building. yes, that's true, but 1st i think i have to correct the the 1st error that i have ever heard l g 0 make which is that ca,

officers don't cry at hallmark movies and i can contradict that. in fact, it does occur on occasion, but the need to be more serious, the deputy chief emission american diplomat who was removed from believe her position for having raised the possibility of psychogenic illness that that occur. yes. and i think that was an error to do. i think what may not be accepted or understood by the broad public and perhaps by my colleague in auckland is that it is one of the possibilities that i am certain is being analyzed. if the people who reacted are the victims, and we understand that if they feel check, they would take umbrage at having been characterized as, as loony. which is how they would they would react to it. although that's not the

case of the in the diagnosis of. but i'm certain that the state department, the ca, the military, the government as a whole, is looking at all the possibilities. the 1st step that one takes. well, we don't 11 doesn't know what's going on in science, is you categorize. because what more can one do? and i think we're, we are still stuck in that position of simply trying to gather facts to the. now we can establish that they are facts. no one knows. and i don't think any possibility should be or actually is being dismissed of but the, i would very seriously doubt that 200 colleagues and disparate countries at different times would suffer from a collected delusion. and my last comment for the moment is the working title of my book, which is about torture in this yea, and the us government was victims of delusion. and i have seen people sincerely

believe events, actions to be one thing and to personally to have observed and to know that that is not the case. and yet my colleagues are intelligence this year. so i, i'm not dismissive of the potential of delusion. i really don't believe that that's likely in this and also quinn call just to flesh out what you've just said briefly it in but 30 seconds. statistically, we're talking about $200.00 people who have operated at the, in the upper echelons of the international diplomatic service. it is highly unlikely surely that they have character traits that link them and they are given to behaving in a way where they clearly lack emotional equilibrium. and they believe that they have a certain set of symptoms. so therefore they carry on displaying their symptoms even when they are ending up working part time or they have been retired from that job early. well,

i think that's true. i think perhaps more. busy significant is that the, the reports of the syndrome came really out of the blue from people who are not some room inclined to conspiracy theory, thinking or 2 dropping to conclusions. and they said, this is what i feel. and from there, there has been an investigation and then as i understand it, independent of any reports of quote vanish syndrome having occurred that people reported this phenomenon separately and without knowledge of it having occurred elsewhere. so someone in paris felt the symptoms and said, hey, i, my brain is not working right. and so on and of, and i'm suffering from extra why. and they were independent of each other. not, not a copycat. subliminal,

lee influenced event instant natasha in cold chest. do we need to subdivide the conversation that we're having here about the technology? one remembers a package, a report that we carried on this channel. i think it was 20162017. about the have an a syndrome using microwaves slash sound delivered by some sort of sound canon device and the people we spoke to. i remember this clearly at the time they said it would have to be so big that you couldn't do it in secret because you've got to have literally speakers the size of a concert venue speakers on the back of a truck. and if you drive that up to a secure compounded type zone surrounding and embassy, every one would see you. and yet, on the other hand, the sound cannon technology is there, it is out there. and the london authorities this, this is a matter of fact, the london authorities had plans or a conversation to use it around about the lympics in 2012 for crowd control

purposes. so some of the technology is that we know about it. some of the technology is patiently fanciful. no. well, i think that's one of the vicious we don't completely understand what technology is being used and we can't rule out that it could be possible. it's a technology that we haven't discovered yet of whatever group is using this or entity or state is using this that there are so many unknowns about it. but one thing we do know what the victims have reported hearing a sound aloud sound in their head before they started having problems. so that may be something connected to that, that needs to be better explored and that, that it's not just something in their head that, that was actually a common stream amongst the victims. and just to bring back the issue of russia. this is why i think at least my gut reaction upon hearing

about this was that this couldn't involve the russian. i mean there's no evidence that it does. but this is sort of, one of their hallmarks is secretly using whether it be nerve agents or biological chemical weapons to really perforate. and that's how they use sharp power to perforate the enemy to undermine them. now using sort of conventional weapons, but to create havoc and disarray, so discontent and, and look at what the and outcome is. if we just look at the cube in case, you know, the cuban embassy used to have the u. s. in the cuban embassy in her, i used to have 54 diplomats there. now it's down to 10. and there was a real opening. there are to improve relations between the u. s. and cuban this has dissipated so that the real outcome is the thing that we also need to investigate who is really benefiting from this in addition to also exploring what is the technology. okay, what about phony will come back to that point in a 2nd. the task, if he may rub a brothel, m u in oakland, clearly you are

a skeptic. but arguably the father of havana syndrome was a thing called the moscow signal. you cannot explain from your stance why back to back consecutive us ambassadors in the sixty's into the seventy's and moscow died of cancer. the man who got the job in 1976 was diagnosed very quickly with a severe blood disorder. and then he later died of leukemia. that's 3 us ambassadors who worked in the same building in the same city in the same country. all died of a form of cancer while people die of cancer. but here's, here's my point that i want to make in that is the you of us can level she is in as care. just address my question, please, sir. back to back 3 us ambassadors to moscow die of a form of cancer. statistically, that is highly, highly unlikely. i don't know what that has to do with the van. a syndrome though,

in the way the u. s. government has treated this, for example, the f b i report has been leaked and the f. b. i concluded that it was math psycho genic illness straight up not microwaves. in 2018, there was a secret jason report, a believe scientist who examined the possibility of microwaves. and they said it was virtually impossible. because if you go back and look at the context of what's going on here, the 1st 21 people who reported their symptoms, 8 of them, recorded the attacks when they happened. those recordings were analyzed by that government classified group, and they concluded that there were the meeting sounds of the indies, short tailed cricket. so the u. s. government kept those reports secret until recently the f b, i report still hasn't been released. the 4 year document on the jason report didn't

come out until september of this past year. so the us government needs to be more open and frank about what they are doing. and the other point that's important is i've been told that i'll be 200 people globally that have been affected about a 100 of them or intelligence officers. and people say, well, how can you explain that? i can explain that from a psychological standpoint, because the 1st people who reported symptoms in cuba or intelligence officers, and then the u. s. government, the state department of the department of defense has issued alerts around the world for people to be on the lookout for anomalous health incidence in that intelligence officers may be the targets, so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. ok natasha. do we have to accept that there is clearly a political glaze on top of this debate and it's this presidents and prime

ministers from or in the affected countries need to adjudicate on what is possibly a killer condition that doesn't kill for months or years. it's loaded disables, and then it kills people. but the reality is that presidents and prime ministers don't want to adjudicate because then they have to accept the idea of culpability. that's why certain diplomats are actually suing their employer id, the government of the country where they come from. right, this is what is, what makes it so so complicated because if we admit that there is really something there, then that puts a lot of liability on the governments to take care of their employees to ensure that the particular diplomats or representatives of the state are safe or intelligence officers are, are safe. and so it puts government in a very precarious situation. now you already mentioned the new bill to try to offer better support for people who have been they can have some sort of traumatic brain

injury and they're really careful about the wording that they're using here. they don't also want to pinpoint blame on the wrong country. so you see that representatives of the u. s. government, for example, been very, very cautious and careful with the way they talk about this. but i think that they're trying to explore all options. because in one scenario, if it's nothing, if it's something that is more psychosomatic, that's one thing, but i really believe it's more likely that it is another country involved. and then that requires further investigation and pressure to understand who is capable and responsible for this glen calling boston. clearly the people directly affected by this, whether it's real imagined, whether they've thought themselves into it, or whether it is actually somebody someplace pulling the strings. it doesn't really matter to they need to have formal recognition that they have got something oh, i think well in president biden and the administration, the state department,

the national security self and have moved to, to recognize this and to take this seriously. and so that's a simple answer yesterday that should occur and it is occurring. if i can go back to a point you made before. of course, we all know that correlation is not necessarily causation. however, we do know multiple instances and multiple different ways that the russians specifically have done all sorts of things that 2 specific most, mostly intelligence, very intelligent officers that have caused harm. they have used radioactive powders that are visible, they have used different kinds of waves. i don't know the specific details of the 3 ambassadors but, but i do know that the russians have used radioactive materials against some of them call you said vine. i know and have worked with personally and closely to harass at the least to harass so it's not a

a stretch to think that the likely perpetrator or the russians. now the 2nd point i'd like to make a brief is i think our colleague in in auckland perhaps is misconstruing the process that the, the government would, would go through by focusing on the dead ends. that one will encounter in an investigation. and i don't think that things have been suppressed really at all. one wouldn't want a report that has been found to be not conclusive or leading the investigation astray or, or so on to be taken as to frame the perception of the overall investigation. when the conclusion so far is that we don't have one, i'm going to interrupt you because we are rapidly approaching into the program. let's go back to rob about all m. u in oakland. robert,

some of the people directly affected by this have not been near cuba, the island, the country, havana, the capital city, or the u. s. embassy. they didn't sleep near a colony of crickets on the other side of an open window. some of the canadians that have been directly affected by something have been transported from ottawa to halifax, nova scotia. they have been medically tested and it's being found that the left hand side of their brain does not connect properly with the right hand side of their brain. that's a matter of medical fact. on top of that, some of the canadians you shaking your head hang on, let me finish. some of the canadians are displaying the early symptoms of parkinson's out signers or general dementia. again, i've used the word to 3 times in this discussion. statistically, that is highly unlikely, and they had no conversation with the americans who were affected by this. well, that's just not true. the canadians and the americans knew what was going on because

the americans were sharing data of the individual people to each other. there wasn't some sort of his theory, a transfer done a skype line from an american diplomat to a canadian diplomat. that's exactly what was going on. it spread like wildfire, the diplomat in the american embassy that we talked to said that everybody knew it spread like wildfire throughout the embassies. and then they were told don't sleep near or stand near windows and things like this, which really hyped up the anxiety. and i also want to address the point about why not released the f b. i document because it might misconstrue things. well, why was the cdc document released? why was the national academy of sciences document release when those documents were also inconclusive? natasha very last word to you in the next 30 seconds of the program. if this is a weapon, it is an amazing weapon and i use the word amazing. advisedly. the next iteration

of this weapon, what might it be capable of doing? i think that's the scary thing is the unknown, the right be capable of being on leash on a larger population. and that would really disable a big portion of, of the public if they're able to to, to leash it on a much greater part of the population. and i think that's one of the knows that makes this so incredibly scary because we have people retiring from their jobs that they were really passionate about because they've been so disabled by this mysterious syndrome. ok, we must leave it there. thank you to, i guess they were robert bartholomew, natasha and stuff, and glen call and thank you to for watching. you can see the show again anytime bureau website out to 0 dot com and for more discussion, go to our facebook page. that's facebook dot com, forward slash ha inside story. you can also join the conversation on twitter. our handle is act page, a inside store for me, piece adobe,

and everyone on the team here. thanks for watching. i will see you very soon usual time tomorrow. bye bye. ah americans are increasingly say authoritarianism might not be so bad. there were several stuff long. the way where the chain of command it's you like try to covered up what your take on why they've gotten so long. that means political mal brooklyn, the bottom line on us politics and policies, and the impact on the world on al jazeera, for quite a few decades. casa, has been dealing with political and economic turmoil. and its people struggle to

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