Did The US Use A Sonic Weapon In The Venezuela Raid?

Senior Airman Katelynn Jackson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As I wrote earlier, the Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acquired a foreign-made backpack-portable pulsed energy device that may have been used against U.S. spies, diplomats, and military personnel overseas.

Now, we are also being told that our own forces may have employed a sonic weapon in our recent raid to capture Venezuela’s narco dictator, Nicolás Maduro.

This raises some serious questions.

First, is the device we acquired the source of horrible, long-term, debilitating Havana Syndrome symptoms among our U.S. personnel? Second, did we use a sonic weapon against Venezuelan and maybe also Cuban security forces protecting Maduro?

Third, is this weapon used in Venezuela the same or similar to the device we acquired in 2024?

Finally, if that device we acquired in 2024 is the type that has caused Havana Syndrome and we used it or something similar in Venezuela, are we guilty of the same type of “terrorism” that we may soon accuse others, like the Russians, of conducting against us?

Well, based on the timing of recent events, some are quickly jumping to that conclusion. But not so fast!

The story broke when a Venezuelan guard who supposedly witnessed the U.S. assault on Maduro’s heavily defended compound on Jan. 3 claimed the group defending the narco dictator was hit by some kind of “sonic weapon.”

“Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” the unnamed individual said in an interview shared by a conservative influencer over social media.

“We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.”

But the story gained worldwide traction when Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, shared the interview on X with the caption: “Stop what you are doing and read this.”

The Venezuelan soldier mentioned a lot of U.S. drones, and the defenders’ radars suddenly shut down without explanation.

He made the 20 U.S. troops who dropped from eight helicopters seem like high-tech super soldiers employing such speed, firepower, and precision that the defenders, who numbered in the hundreds, had no chance against them.

He claimed that U.S. troops killed hundreds of the defenders without suffering a single casualty themselves. Later reports point to 32 Cubans and several dozen Venezuelans being killed with no U.S. casualties, so he may have been a bit off on that.

But it was what he called a “sonic weapon” that produced a “very intense sound wave” that totally immobilized him and others with him, saying they couldn’t even stand up after being hit by it, which is most intriguing.

As The Telegraph reported, Thomas Withington, a researcher with the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said it was “entirely plausible” that U.S. commandos had used a sonic device to take down Maduro’s bodyguards.

However, he noted he had never heard of such extreme reactions to similar weapons.

Withington has previously experienced one of those sonic devices and described it as “horribly uncomfortable.”

“But having those sorts of nosebleeds and horrible physiological results is new to me,” he added.

So, what could produce those effects? The Telegraph continues:

Iain Boyd, director of the centre for national security initiatives at the University of Colorado, said a weapon combining radio and sonic waves could have a similar effect.

“If you had a person in a room, and you exposed them at close range to powerful waves (radio and sonic), then… vomiting and nose bleeding could be resultant effects,” he told The Telegraph.

“The radio waves can interfere with brain activity (causing nausea and vomiting) and the sonic waves can increase pressure internally (causing a nosebleed).”

However, Dr Boyd said it was “not technically feasible” that the effect would work over a large area or that a weapon requiring “an enormous input of electrical power” could have been transported by the US to Venezuela.

But what if the Pentagon, after much testing, was able to reverse-engineer and somehow employ miniaturized technology from their recently acquired device? This is possible, and the timing is auspicious following disclosure of the backpack-portable device DHS acquired, but how likely is it?

The Telegraph notes that the Venezuelan account could be intended to distract from and downplay their own weaknesses; others claim this is just the White House amplifying propaganda, but it is still extremely plausible.

The Pentagon has been experimenting for years with less-than-lethal weapons.

One such “weapon,” an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), a specialized loudspeaker often called a “sound cannon,” is used as a powerful deterrent, capable of emitting painful, high-frequency tones for crowd control.

Another is the Active Denial System (ADS) that uses non-lethal electromagnetic energy to create a burning sensation without the actual damaging effects.

Maybe we used upgraded versions of these weapons never publicly acknowledged before, and/or a modified version of the device recently acquired by DHS. There is still a lot we don’t know.

Either way, using a non-lethal weapon like this in combat against armed enemy troops, regardless of long-term effects (which we don’t know yet), is totally legitimate and a far cry from using them as a weapon of terror against civilians at U.S. embassies or even inside the United States.

Those attacks are terrorism, pure and simple. The sonic or other non-lethal weapon U.S. forces allegedly used in our military raid in Caracas is not.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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Paul Crespo

Paul Crespo is the Managing Editor of American Liberty Defense News. As a Marine Corps officer, he led Marines, served aboard ships in the Pacific and jumped from helicopters and airplanes. He was also a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at U.S. embassies worldwide. He later ran for state and federal office, taught political science, wrote for the editorial board of a major newspaper and had his own radio show. A graduate of Georgetown, London and Cambridge universities, he brings decades of experience and insight to the issues that most threaten our American liberty – at home and from abroad. To read more go to: paulcrespo.com.

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