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.
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.
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
It shoots an ice pellet, which can stay perfectly intact for a range of 100m(!), yet leaves a “tiny red prick on the victim” (implying it’s maybe a ~1mm in diameter), yet also instantly melts when it hits the victim?
And the gun has a ginormous scope, on top of a “modified colt m1911” that was made electric? How and why would you modify a non-electric handgun with a large internal barrel for this?
Every description of it is ludicrous.
>here, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired.
The device held up by Senator Frank Church was not a modified Colt M1911. It was an air pistol with absurd rifle sight attached.
That device has no mechanism for cooling the pellets. The second a frozen pellet is inserted into that device it will begin melting.
Very few handguns, to the point that "none" is accurate ENOUGH, have an effective range of more than ~50 meters. There are some calibers, not nearly-silent ice pellets, that can travel further but their ballistics out of short barrels are so poor that demos at 100 yards and beyond are exercises in exhibition and bragging rights.
No known combinations of mechanisms needed to propel a projectile 100 meters are virtually noiseless. Even air rifles that can fling a metal pellet several hundred yards as their "maximum range" but operate in 50-60 yards as their "effective range" make a shit ton of noise.
Any small dart-like ice pellet would immediately disintegrate into dust at the forces needed to travel even a fraction of 100 meters with enough energy to pierce human skinned clothing.
Any large .45 caliber ice pellet would shatter and if it struck a target with enough force to penetrate skin it would leave way more than "a tiny red dot"'s worth of signature.
Saxitoxin is not, and has never been since its isolation, undetectable. It doesn't "disappear" from the body after death (indeed the mechanisms that would cause its distruction cease upon death) and can be detected with simple tests.
This doesn't make sense except as a distraction from things the CIA really didn't want investigators to see.
Is anyone surprised a organization focused on disinformation is... good at disinformation? I'm sure they sold tons of fantasies to Church and made the best of the situation. That Church quote (If a dictator took charge) seems like the greatest publicity the CIA could ever hope for. They wanted the Russians to be paranoid and really everyone to be paranoid. And here is a US senator saying the CIA can get you wherever you are and you'd never know? That's exactly what they want you to believe! That they are omniscient and omnipotent.
The problem I have with all these conspiracies is that they don't take a second to realize that these agencies want you to believe in conspiracies. We talk all the time about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation yet when something fancifulness like UFOs or untraceable weapons pop up everyone is all too happy to believe. It is especially true for those who believe the government is lying to us. Why does no one ever consider that just another lie is being told? The problem with intelligence agencies is you can't believe anything they say, you need strong proof and to always be second guessing. Which is the entire point, to overload you and get you to believe a lie.
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..
skimming this article is also seems based on a false premise…the church committee did not hold the CIA accountable. they openly destroyed documents, fairly openly murdered their own employees, broke laws, etc.
see “Legacy of Ashes”
You have to assume the CIA are the absolute masters of layered deception.
I just listened to Anna Paulina Luna on Joe Rogan drone on about the CIA and remote viewing. I just assume that is all some kind of booby trap nonsense to fall into. I actually think the whole interview was Anna telling the bullshit the CIA showed her to keep her from finding anything that matters.
Same way with classifying the JFK assassination docs for decades even though there is absolute nothing in them.
It is brilliant. Something far beyond gas lighting.
Objectively, I have no idea what to believe with the CIA and that obviously is the strategy.
It's why releasing more documents never reveals anything: it's stuff that wasn't worth trying to declassify because it's irrelevant, but it might contain a bunch of random names of people who are still alive and did things like sign for lunch that day.
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.
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.
Unless you want to be completely clandestine about it. Then it is very hard. My understanding is this is why the CIA exists, to perform work, and remain unknown.
> Doesn't exactly take a lot of research to do either.
You're basing this off of years of experience within or with the agency? You've reviewed many CIA political assassinations over the years and came to a careful conclusion on this point?
> it doesn't actually increase capabilities
Yea. The world is static. So developing new techniques is just "for funsies." It's not like cameras, cell phones, and advanced sensors haven't made this more difficult or anything.
> doesn't it just mean they're bored?
Doesn't it just mean they no longer have a reason to exist?
How is that untraceable? Gee, we found an extremely sophisticated shellfish toxin dart in the victim, must be nothing! What a stupid article
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.
I think they succeeded awhile ago already with that
> When fired into a target, the frozen dart would immediately melt and release its poisonous payload into the victim’s bloodstream. Shellfish toxins, which are known to completely shut down the cardiovascular system in concentrated doses, would spread to the victim’s heart, mimicking a heart attack and causing death within minutes.
> All that would be left behind was a tiny red dot where the dart entered the body, undetectable to those who didn’t know to look for it. As the target lay dying, the assassin could escape without notice.
I have no doubt they researched it but I highly doubt it was effective or used.
No, the point blank range of such a weapon would be very short, perhaps not even 20m, and presumably it was meant to be used in public, which would be weird because the gunman would be very conspicuous.
Ah yes, a gun which can send a chunk of ice fully intact 100m yet it will still puncture the victim unnoticeably and immediately melt
So is polonium. It's nonetheless not exactly that difficult to pinpoint if someone just drops dead.
AntiImperial russians, innocent brown people, white colonizers, the mighty dark cabals of the CIA.. is that all whats left of this story?
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.)
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0bQGf3uH8 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnoZhbqTfM
that's... that's what they're hired and paid to do.
almostbasic•5mo ago
Qem•5mo ago
dmix•5mo ago
krapp•5mo ago
dyauspitr•5mo ago
nradov•5mo ago
ilamont•5mo ago
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•5mo ago
lenerdenator•5mo ago
throwup238•5mo ago
eth0up•5mo ago
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•5mo ago
(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•5mo ago
1984 has become a playbook. be careful what ideas you share. the public internet is not a casual conversation among friends.
cryptonector•5mo ago
To give an obvious example (not necessarily involving sinister people): the NSA invented public key cryptography long before Diffie and Hellman.
RajT88•5mo ago
duffel_bag•5mo ago
Melatonic•5mo ago
Defib is for patients with hearts that are beating incorrectly - and now are mostly automated.
Heart stopped and zapped with electricity makes for better movies though!
zeroCoolMD•5mo ago
culi•5mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqE0ltifQ2M
gruez•5mo ago
>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•5mo ago
There's no evidence of anything "we don't know about". In the same way there's no pictures of things never photographed.
culi•5mo ago
rurban•5mo ago
juniperus•5mo ago
vopi•5mo ago
southernplaces7•5mo ago
aeve890•5mo ago