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When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- almostbasic 1y agoIt really makes you wonder what other weapons they have that we don't know about.
- Qem 1y agoThere was claims of a possible cancer "gun". See https://www.ibtimes.com/hugo-chavez-says-us-could-be-giving-latin-leaders-cancer-388876 https://www.ibtimes.com/hugo-chavez-says-us-could-be-giving-...
- dmix 1y agoThere's a very silly article. The basis is old people in Latin America getting cancer and a paranoid dictator blaming the US.
- krapp 1y agoGiven the already verifiable history of the CIA in Latin America, I'd give any paranoid dictator the benefit of the doubt.
- dyauspitr 1y agoThat can’t even be that hard. Some sort of directed radiation beam will do that easily.
- nradov 1y agoYou should talk to a radiation oncologist. It is extremely hard to target a person with directed ionizing radiation at any distance in a way that would significantly increase the risk of cancer without causing very obvious surface effects.
- ilamont 1y agoAre there other ways to induce cancer? It's a remarkable coincidence that Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il died very young within two years of each other (2011 and 2013). Yes, the level of medical care in Venezuela and North Korea is poor, but these were dictators who had access to the best doctors in their own countries as well as imported experts from China, Cuba, etc.
- nradov 1y agoParanoid people find all sorts of coincidences in random events.
- lenerdenator 1y agoOr maybe it's just two older dudes dying of cancer. Happens literally all the time.
- throwup238 1y agoInjecting undifferentiated stem cells is pretty effective at causing cancer.
- lisbbb 1y ago[flagged]
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- eth0up 1y agoI'll gladly jump into the gray with you. Or hopefully that changes. My dear old friend, now on the yonder side, showed me research that showed the intravenous injection of nothing more than mineral oil consistently causing a form of cancer that I can't remember the type for. He had a low level position in the NSA via the Navy prior and was persistently interesting, to me. Foremost an exceptionally fine person who I sorely miss. I remember him being fervently berated by a few intellectual (IT inclined) adversaries for attempting to explain more than a few things that came out in the Snowden docs almost a decade later. Personally, I've no doubt cancer can be quickly, efficiently induced, albeit probably not with a mineral oil squirtgun. I've heard of things I wouldn't discuss here. I've always wondered why we've not experienced the evil terrorist version of David Hahn, say from a guy in a major food production facility. The bright side of surveillance I guess. I may be a worthless, irrelevant moron, but I think for anyone with a bit of intelligence and a big imagination, the world is a very frightening place in this regard. I try not to think of it, but many scenarios have occurred to me and I'm often surprised, quite pleasantly so, that so far as I know, only to me, for now, and indefinitely I hope.
- gosub100 1y agoIn a purely technical ponderance, I wonder if it's possible to design a stun gun that would inflict death by either increasing the current and voltage, or if a specific signal could be sent to the heart that would induce an arrhythmia. Basically the opposite of a defibrillator. A biotech maintenance guy told me that if you receive a shock when your heart is in a critical phase of the complex, it can cause it to shut off. Maybe a heart attack stun gun could attempt to read the cardiac waves and deliver the shock at the worst possible point. (I have to emphasize that no homicidal motive drew me towards wondering that. It's just the borderless free thought that causes random ideas to float through my mind. If I can think of it, certainly the people who design covert weapons also have)
- thejazzman 1y agoi have no idea if this is possible, but i have to point out that really smart people pondering out loud is heard/read by many people who may have much sinister intentions than the nerd simply pondering out loud. 1984 has become a playbook. be careful what ideas you share. the public internet is not a casual conversation among friends.
- cryptonector 1y agoFor sure, though those really sinister people in high places tend to be extremely smart too. By the time the public develops some technology that could be of great interest to those people, those people have likely already developed something along those lines. To give an obvious example (not necessarily involving sinister people): the NSA invented public key cryptography long before Diffie and Hellman.
- RajT88 1y agoTotally possible. This is why stun guns and tasers are referred to as "less lethal" by some instead of non-lethal. Lots of electricity will occasionally stop someone's heart, and they die.
- duffel_bag 1y agoWas he referring to commotio cordis? There's a window of tens of milliseconds where a blow to the chest can cause sudden cardiac death, due to the ventricular rhythm being disrupted rather than any mechanical damage to the heart.
- culi 1y agoAlmost certainly, Havana Syndrome. Caused by a (microwave-, possibly) weapon that can lead to permanent neurological symptoms. And the US is not the only country that has it but is expanding a lot of energy into making the media talk about it less. CHUPPL did a great investigation on it if you're interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqE0ltifQ2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqE0ltifQ2M
- gruez 1y agoYour linked article admits it might not even be real. >A 2023 review article written by Bartholomew and Baloh concluded that Havana syndrome was erroneously classified as a novel entity due to a moral panic based on the fear of foreign entities such as the Russians or Cubans attacking the U.S, the over-interpretation of data, misconceptions about psychogenic illness, and coverage and leaks by the media. The authors stated that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that Havana syndrome is "a socially constructed catch-all category for an array of pre-existing health conditions, responses to environmental factors, and stress reactions that were lumped under a single label".[8][9] >A 2024 review article by Connolly et al., surveying multiple peer-reviewed studies, concluded that the cause of AHIs is still unknown. The review discussed several possible causes, including mass psychogenic illness and head trauma, but did not endorse a specific cause.[6]
- DoctorOW 1y ago> Your linked article admits it might not even be real. There's no evidence of anything "we don't know about". In the same way there's no pictures of things never photographed.
- culi 1y agoThat "linked article" is Wikipedia. The second link is an actual investigation which goes into good detail debunking and investigating the source behind claims that it's a social psychogenic illness
- rurban 1y agoThose microwave attacks by spies are known since at least the sixties if you care to read some CIA leaker books. What's new is that those attacks became public, even if they didn't name and shame the attackers yet, if Chinese or Russians.
- juniperus 1y agoThere are weapons that can permanently paralyze an entire city. Not paralyze infrastructure or traffic... but permanent incurable paralysis of all the people in any area exposed to the weapon. That is still a 20th century technology.
- vopi 1y agoMind sharing some links? Curious what you are talking about.
- southernplaces7 1y agoThat's a hell of a claim, and unless you're talking about some kind of chemical spray or seeding some weaponized microbe across the city, you could at least post a link or name that explains what it is.
- aeve890 1y agoOf course there are. I learned about that reading the works of Milo Rambaldi.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hjuibflol 1y agoLike tuning frequencies on electronic devices...
- dmix 1y agoThis article is about the Church Committee, if you're interested in the heart attack gun see: https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun Also it's interesting to note how Russia doesn't use a gun like this, they spike drinks/food or spray it on surfaces like doorknobs.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella is basically the same thing and your linked article mentions the CIA stole the idea from the Russians.
- dopa42365 1y agoIsn't that more likely to be some kind of training mission for a junior agent? (make it personal, not totally clean and get away with it anyway?) When they just want to make sure to kill someone, dumping a few magazines into the body and driving over it afterwards for good measure, like that ex-pilot in Spain, appears to do the trick just fine.
- dmix 1y agoTo be fair FSB/GRU doesn’t really care about it being secret A lot of assassinations are sending a message Russia abandoned a lot of the “secret” part of their dirty ops in the past decade and just farms it out
- chasil 1y agoThey also used ricin injected by an umbrella. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella
- thimkerbell 1y agoThere's dark pattern behavior in the ad on that site, tricked me into clicking what I think was a cookies button.
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- lupusreal 1y agoBesides the Church Committee testimony, is there any evidence for the heart attack gun existing? There's part of me that wonders if they made it up for the purpose of disclosing it to Congress, to make themselves seem like they were authentically participating in the overview and accountability proceedings. Kind of like the way murder suspects in police interrogations might give unprompted and quite possibly fake confessions to minor crimes, to manipulate the police into believing the suspect is being open about everything and doesn't have anything to hide. Part of my doubt stems from my confusion about how a traceless dart gun would actually work. The dart guns I know of fire darts with fletchings, they can't be discrete. If you removed the fletchings, the darts would almost certainly tumble. If they said it was a BB gun that fired poisoned BBs then I wouldn't think twice about it, but they say it shot darts..
- Alive-in-2025 1y agoThere's a zillion ways to kill people in slow ways. Put poison that is slow acting in restaurant food - that's harder than just a single shot with some gun. Cancer causing substances in their house water that you later remove the source of (let's not figure millions of people have unsafe drinking water just on the ordinary day in the us).
- cryptonector 1y agoProbably much easier than using the heart attack gun! That thing did not have a very long range, and almost certainly did not have great accuracy, so its use would have been conspicuous. Sure, it's not easy to arrange to have an agent as a server or cook at some restaurant, but it surely is easier.
- lupusreal 1y agoAnother problem I have with the heart attack gun; why did they make it look like a gun? I agree that the assassin would have to be close to the target to use it, so making it look like an obvious gun risks somebody getting a glimpse of it and immediately raising an alarm. A more discrete shape would make infinitely more sense.
- johnea 1y agoThe information in the article is shocking and disturbing, and largely known to most informed people. So I'm not sure what's meant by the "got away with" part. It's hard to call it "getting away with", when it's the standard operating procedure of the agency. What is it exactly that they don't get away with? With people being routinely killed worldwide. When I saw a little old lady, literally in a doily hat, in the BWI airport, looking terrified as she was forced to sit in the stainless steel seat, with her feet in the marked feet positions, as she was being questioned, because TSA had found a nail file in her bag 8-/ I knew the gangsters were out of the closet. Cornering, questioning, and roughing up the public, in public, was now fair game for the federal government. Dick Chaney's wet dream come true. All of this is now massively superseded by the cheeto administration. Masked people, in unmarked cars, dragging people off of the streets for shipment to foreign country's dark prisons. But the democratic administrations have also been eager user's of the "Fascist State United Act". Terrorism is functionally defined as anyone impeding the revenue stream of a large powerful organization. And once designated, there are many avenues of intimidation, up to and including murder. Which isn't usually needed, but is always available as an option. Recreating the Church commission today wouldn't be just difficult, it is completely impossible. The two dominant poitical parties have no interest in reform, and no one is going to stop them.
- Alive-in-2025 1y agoThere are individuals in the parties who are interested though. Not everyone is a sycophant willing to do whatever their party leaders say, fearing the president's call to be primaried or something. It will take people with strong reputations to do it though.
- themafia 1y ago> So I'm not sure what's meant by the "got away with" part. The agency still exists, in the exact same form, with no additional oversight. Did you think it just meant remaining obscured from the public? Shouldn't someone have gone to jail for this? > Recreating the Church commission today wouldn't be just difficult, it is completely impossible. The CIA has literally taken "ex-employees" and run them into the House and the Senate. It's far worse than you imagine. They "got away" with it and they continue to "get away" with it. Schlesinger was right. The CIA needs to be divided into two separate firms. One responsible for research which reports directly to the civilian administration and the other responsible for operations which reports directly to the military administration.
- ChrisNorstrom 1y ago[flagged]
- SR2Z 1y ago> Yet completely ignores how the Biden administration tried to force every American into getting experimental mRNA vaccines with no long term safety data, or else you lose your job. And you weren't allowed to sue the vaccine manufacturer. And now Americans just sort of forgot about all that. This is because of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which provides compensation to people who are injured by vaccines in exactly the situation you're describing. I would encourage you to Google it. You don't sue the vaccine manufacturer, you file a claim and get a payout. RFK is trying to end this program, which would basically make it impossible to develop new vaccines. Americans did not "forget" about that, because most Americans have no clue this program even exists. They also lack the expertise to individually verify that a vaccine is safe, or even weight long-term potential health risks against the short term necessity of a vaccine. By the time the vaccines were approved for public use, they were also no longer "experimental" because the FDA HAD experimented with them and deemed them safe.
- hacknewslogin 1y agoWasn't this only possible because Trump enacted "Operation Warp Speed?"
- mikestew 1y agoShh, quiet; those narratives aren’t going to support themselves. That’s an awful lot of whataboutism crammed into GP’s comment.
- hydrogen7800 1y agoI also remember during the 2020 VP debate when Kamala was asked if she would take the Trump vaccine. That sure turned around when it became the Biden vaccine.
- dfxm12 1y agoThere's so much misplaced anger based on not knowing who was president in 2020 (and the start of 2021).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago> a weapon designed to deliver untraceable assassinations using shellfish toxin darts. How is that untraceable? Gee, we found an extremely sophisticated shellfish toxin dart in the victim, must be nothing! What a stupid article
- dyauspitr 1y agoIce needle projectile maybe
- yupyupyups 1y agoThat one was so famous that people actually tried it out and eventually debunked it. The US establishment, just like any other state engages in propaganda. Like the whole thing about Russia being able to nuke the entire world 1337 times over. All of these claims need to be taken with a grain of salt.
- lyu07282 1y ago> "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" I think they succeeded awhile ago already with that
- yupyupyups 1y agoSure, then you should provide evidence for that. Otherwise, anyone could claim anything.
- lyu07282 1y agoYou wouldn't believe it obviously, that's the point. It's like who started the cuban missile crisis? It was the US placing nukes in Italy and Turkey, how many Americans know that? Everything is like that. Why did 9/11 happen? They just hate our freedom. Et al
- imchillyb 1y ago
- idiomat9000 1y agoAh, the feared CIA, that did nothing while the us imploded - my guess is the heart attack gun did never work, but the agency ordered several mansions worth of it. AntiImperial russians, innocent brown people, white colonizers, the mighty dark cabals of the CIA.. is that all whats left of this story?
- Arturo525 1y agoThe Church Committee investigated excesses at CIA. The article deals mainly with creating agitprop which the administration creates regularly on its own.
- Scipio_Afri 1y agoNearly everything controversial about them can be simplified to most entirely being before the existence of the Church committee. The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do
- cryptonector 1y ago> The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do Whew! What a relief! Now all the nasty rogue intel agency things are only done at the behest of elected officials! (And if you believe that I have a number of bridges to sell you. And if you believe that's a good state of affairs, well, elected officials come and go, and someday there will be one you really don't like, if there hasn't been one already.)
- slt2021 1y agoAmerica is occupied and the most powerful entities are not accountable one bit to the people, but have been captured by the small circle of "elites"
- colinb 1y agoI cannot tell if you’re being randomly vague or dog whistling here. Who do you think is occupying? Ahem., “occupying”?
- ProAm 1y agoThe CIA has done much worse than a heart attack gun. How about giving someone LSD everyday for 18 months for science.
- zosima 1y agoI think tolerance builds up fast enough for that to be a rather boring experiment.
- gentooflux 1y agoYeah, it's exponential. You'd have to double the dose each day to achieve the same result as the day before. Otherwise they're just gonna have some mildly distorted thoughts and a nasty headache.
- ProAm 1y agoThis is also just one example of what the CIA does. They killed an elephant with a single dose of LSD. Used it on foreigners, US citizens, etc... The Rest Is Classified did a great series about it (1,2) 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0bQGf3uH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0bQGf3uH8 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnoZhbqTfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnoZhbqTfM
- bawana 1y agoProbably inspired by the Nazi geniuses we rescued as part of operation paperclip
- lenerdenator 1y ago"got away with" that's... that's what they're hired and paid to do.
- modeless 1y agoYeah this seems like exactly what they should be doing. Developing weapons that kill a single targeted person is better than developing weapons that kill dozens or hundreds at a time. I'd much rather world leaders focus on assassinating each other instead of sending thousands of their teenagers to die fighting.
- coderatlarge 1y agoand here is a real-deal medical device literally intended to liquify cells at a distance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9404673/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9404673/
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- ushtaritk421 1y agoI hear they even have a gun that makes a big hole in you that makes you die
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- mannanj 1y ago"theres no evidence" they say. The ones who would gather and fairly portray the evidence, are in fact the ones who we are looking for the evidence on.