After bin Laden backlash, CIA promises: No more vaccination campaigns for spying

Yahoo News ^ | Oliver Knox

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After bin Laden backlash, CIA promises: No more vaccination campaigns for spying

Amid a deadly backlash again vaccinations and a resurgence of polio in Pakistan, the White House has promised that the CIA will never again use an immunization campaign as a tool of spycraft...

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The Central Intelligence Agency had enlisted a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to collect intelligence under the guise of an immunization effort in the city of Abbottabad as part of planning for the high-risk May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound there.

The agency aimed to confirm intelligence that bin Laden was at the compound by comparing DNA obtained from children living there to a sample from the fugitive al-Qaida chief’s late sister, the Guardian newspaper reported in July 2011.

Even before those revelations, the Taliban in Pakistan had already opposed Western-backed vaccination campaigns, claiming that they were secret efforts to sterilize Muslim children. But the CIA’s actions helped fuel an armed backlash against immunization workers, reportedly killing 56 people between December 2012 and May 2014. The victims include not just medical workers but police officers assigned to guard them.

Another result of the CIA’s actions was to lead many Pakistani parents to forgo vaccinations for ailments like polio. The crippling and sometimes fatal illness has no known cure – but there are several safe and effective vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Of the 77 documented new cases of polio worldwide in calendar year 2014, 61 were in Pakistan, mostly from the remote and restive Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region, which serves as a Taliban stronghold...

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the CIA’s actions helped fuel an armed backlash against immunization workers, reportedly killing 56 people between December 2012 and May 2014. The victims include not just medical workers but police officers assigned to guard them.

That might have made the news if Bush was still president.

[Dr. Pritchett]

Just more of the 2nd and 3rd order effects of our retarded foreign policy experts, BO and Biden, explaining everything in detail after the raid. So many absurd security leaks they created while trying to take all the credit personally for other men’s work...

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Yet they won't explain why they do nothing to secure the release of the doctor who helped us locate and execute bin Laden.

He still rots in a Pakistani prison while we send billions of dollars every year to Pakistan for their assistance in the war on terror.

[upchuck]

Zero Dark Thirty

[Lazamataz]

This messes up the legitimate vaccination efforts by local and USA-based orgs. This sucks, CIA. You went full-retard. Never go full-retard.

[treetopsandroofs]

“Yet they won’t explain why they do nothing to secure the release of the doctor who helped us locate and execute bin Laden. He still rots in a Pakistani prison”

Somehow I’m reminded of an alleged producer of a “disgusting” video, especially since we have only the Liar-in-Chief’s word that a doctor “helped us locate and execute bin Laden.”