Sonic Inversions-- Reflections and Report: US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: Review of the CIA's Efforts to Provide Facilitated Medical Care and Benefits for Individuals Affected by Anomalous Health Incidents: Audits and Projects Report 24-01

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In sum, the absence of a clear case definition for AHIs, uncertainty surrounding the origin of
AHIs, and CIA’s evolving organizational position have greatly complicated CIA’s ability to
consistently and transparently facilitate medical care, provide compensation and other benefits, and communicate clearly about AHIs to the workforce. These challenges will be detailed throughout the remaining findings in the report.

 Perhaps nothing serves as a better harbinger of the inversion of power relationships in the emerging systems of governance by techno-bureaucratic caste collectives than the meandering story around what was for a time called Havana syndrome and is now known by its more appropriately banal name: Anomalous Health Incidents (my essays on this long story here: Cuba Sonic Weapons Affair).  Future generations may come to understand this episode for an important instance in the movement from a political to a bureaucratic state organization in which liberal democratic institutions shift the locus of their power relations from that between popular sovereigns and their elected officials, t that between the administrative apparatus of a state and the political organs that serve as disciplinary appendages to their operation. This will come to haunt both liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist systems, though in different ways; and it will ultimately transform that techno-bureaucracy as well, as it transitions from one driven by human cliques to one in which human caretakers serve the virtual systems created to make techno-bureaucracy both more efficient and less "biased." 

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 The turn, or better the inversion of the relationship between the political and administrative apparatus might be gleaned usefully from a recent report distributed (in a public version) by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: Review of the CIA's Efforts to Provide Facilitated Medical Care and Benefits for Individuals Affected by Anomalous Health Incidents: Audits and Projects Report 24-01. The Report is worth a careful read, if only for the careful language used to gently describe the power relations around one of the most innocuous areas of the sonic weapons tale--treatment. 

According to the 18-page report, titled "Review of CIA's Efforts to Provide Facilitated Medical Care and Benefits for Individuals Affected by Anomalous Health Incidents [AHIs]," the CIA's response has been marred by inadequate communication and "messaging challenges," inconsistent medical support, delayed compensation and a dismissive attitude toward affected individuals. These failures have hindered efforts to provide proper treatment and left many victims struggling to access benefits. "CIA has provided benefits and compensation to many AHI reporters, but ease of access to these programs has been inconsistent and affected by CIA's organizational position on AHIs," the report states. * * * The report revealed that despite a growing number of cases, the agency was slow to standardize protocols for identifying and treating victims. The report stated that the CIA facilitated AHI-related medical care for nearly 100 CIA-affiliated incidents, but many individuals faced obstacles to timely and sufficient care. (Newsweek)

Perhaps nothing sums up the techno-bureaucratic contradictions  into which the apparatus of state is now inevitably  than the notion of consumption: for a techno-bureaucracy with collective objectives, individuals are productive forces that must be consumed in order for the apparatus to attain its objectives. Those who are to be consumed may embrace their fate willingly; many, however are taught a valuable lesson about the relationship of the individual to the techno-bureaucratic mass organization. Those who are about to be consumed produce a residual element that eventually will consume the consuming apparatus--distrust.

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Distrust of CIA has been a common theme among AHI reporters the Committee interviewed.
Many of the AHI reporters with whom Committee staff spoke for this review expressed some
degree of distrust of the Agency, including some who perceived that their career was negatively impacted for reporting an AHI or seeking support related to their AHI. AHI reporters’ distrust took many forms. For example, many AHI reporters who spoke to Committee staff did not trust CIA to act toward them in good faith, which led to them frequently question the motives behind CIA's actions. This distrust was further reinforced by poor communication and a lack of transparency. AHI reporters’ distrust also stemmed from their concerns that CIA’s analytic effort on AHls has not been objective. More than a dozen individuals who spoke to Committee staff questioned the objectivity of CIA’s analytic line on AHIs, its analytic trade craft, or the soundness of its findings. Finally, AHI reporters have also cited “stigma” or fear associated with reporting or talking about AHIs, which could have a chilling effect on future AHI reporting. The Committee assesses that (_’IA could benefit from an examination of how its response t o AHIs has impacted its workforce, to include issues of morale and trust. Report, p. 14).

As compliance oriented cultures become more deeply embedded as the emerging driver of government and the State, and where the political branches increasingly become instruments that are managed by the organs they created to manage objectives and compliance based systems. These systems, in turn represented an innovation that sought to move from the more ancient and personal forms of government--by commands enforced through an apparatus of investigation, prosecution, and judgment, to one that internalized behaviors through systems of punishments and rewards administered  through systems overseen by technically proficient "experts". That change, momentous in hindsight, also required a willingness to devolve authority from political to technical organs, and to permit these technical organs to further devolve the burdens of fulfillment to the objects against which they were created. Security, secrets, efficiency and the universalization of policy driven social relations not merely changes power dynamics within government, and between government and those governed, but it also changes the way in which each of these factors in the production of collective order and stability are conceptualized, treated and ordered within a collective. The Sonic Weapons adventure suggests some of the detritus of this transformation--in this case a product of the increasing disjunction between the way things are and the way we used to think they were. 

The Report follows below. 

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