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"Polio still persists in Taliban-controlled regions, after the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign to try to catch Osama bin Laden. Vaccination workers are now

"Polio still persists in Taliban-controlled regions, after the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign to try to catch Osama bin Laden. Vaccination workers are now killed as potential spies." That sounds like an effective tactic if your goal is to cause random wide scale death and misery. If it was actually only to catch one man, it would be just for the people responsible to become vaccine test subjects.

crakenzak 3y ago
The CIA is one of the most wicked organizations I’ve ever heard of. And that’s just from the small amount of info we know about them.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Think about the fact that this [1] only did not happen because a single person intervened - just a single person along the long line of custody from inception to proposal. And the person who refused to let it happen was JFK. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    And look what happened to him.
    - westmeal 3y ago
      But it was TOTALLY not the CIA. There is NO WAY the CIA could've done that.
  - lawn 3y ago
    Wow, I've somehow missed this.
    - jonhohle 3y ago
      I’m not sure if it’s sarcasm or not, but The Devil’s Chessboard lays out a case for the CIA acting as the military arm of the rich and powerful starting basically at its inception. All of the “communist” overthrows in the 50s and 60s happen to coincide with nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps. This typically resulted in actual dictators replacing them that allowed the businesses to continue to exploit while at the same time severely oppressing the locals. Some of the evidence is compelling, others is speculative, but a lot of the same bad actors show up in a lot of very similar global (and local) affairs.
      - masfuerte 3y ago
        Not just the CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps This is an old geopolitical problem: rich democracies tended to surround themselves with alliances of despots. Athens, Rome and America. The corporate interests hypothesis is interesting. But the resilient one is that dictators reliably deliver foreign policy goals that electeds' voters value.
      - petsfed 3y ago
        I'll add that book to my reading list. I think, more broadly, that American, British, and French "anti-communist" foreign policy has consistently been about ensuring that American, British, and French companies continue unfettered access to a colonized nation's resources. Your actual governmental or economic structure is irrelevant, so long as Shell Oil or United Fruit Company are only answerable to their shareholders, and not the people of the country they're exploiting. Anti-communism, colonialism, nation-building, all these justifications eventually become just rationalizations for protecting specifically the colonizer's economic interests. The Great Hunger, the Bengal Famine, the Banana Massacre, the excesses of the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, the Mandate for Palestine, the Belgian fucking Congo, all of these result from optimizing for foreign economic interests without any regard for local social interests.
  - diggan 3y ago
    Worth noting that while that those proposed self-inflicted terrorist attacks were rejected, other terrorist attacks in Cuba by CIA were approved: > The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose Whenever one falls down the CIA rabbit-hole, it never continues surprise just how much pain they have inflicted on the world.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - instagib 3y ago
    The list of ‘see also’ on the site is a fun read. I never read about the “fog of war” incident before related to the Vietnam war inception which never happened. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
- piva00 3y ago
  The CIA absolutely fucked Latin America, staging coups, pushing US businesses interests, putting military dictatorships in power and assisting them while in power. The damage runs deep and I think it's quite overwhelming hearing from ignorant and/or naïve Americans about the issues China may cause, or the deaths that dictatorships brought into the world. The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though, since winners write history the US is not currently seen as one of the major sources of instability and social strife in so many countries it involved itself in. When Americans look at Latin America and see the mess it exists in there's no self-reflection about their part in causing it. American needs trumped over all the rights to self-determination of these peoples, be it assisting United Fruit Company to destroy Guatemala, the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, etc. And all the aftermath of the USA forcing countries in its "sphere of influence" to abide by what the USA wanted, if you attempted to go out of line there'd be a CIA team taking your government down in no time. It's just wishful thinking but I wish to see the USA reckoning with all the misery it caused in my lifetime. It's personal to me since one of my relatives was killed during the Brazilian dictatorship, he was simply trying to be an active part of an union.
  - ribosometronome 3y ago
    >issues China may cause ...The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though Under wraps, and yet here you are talking about it on an American website, seemingly without much fear of repercussions or being censored for it. Is it as easy or welcome to talk about Chinese committed atrocities on Chinese websites?
    - piva00 3y ago
      Under wraps from general American society, yes. Go right now on the streets of your USA city and ask about the atrocities the USA has committed in Latin America, check what % of the people even know about that. My comment about China is meant more in relation to the boogeyman created out of China to push USA's interests, I don't condone authoritarianism at all (it should be pretty clear after I mention a dead relative by the hands of a dictatorship) but I do have very high reservations about whatever the USA pushes for manufacturing consent across the globe, right now it's the China boogeyman. The whole play of the USA is also to keep the veil of a freedoms' paragon as a misdirection for its transgressions, it's layered in misdirection using language such as "defense of freedom", "free market", "business interests" while behaving schizophrenically by supporting dictators who align to its interests (e.g.: Saudi Arabia, multiple dictatorships in Latin America). It's all bullshit. Owning that it's all bullshit won't ever happen, it needs to keep the discourse to keep the façade of a force for good. At least China is more honest, they are dicks, they are ruthless, they can be aggressive, but no one else was misled to believe otherwise. That's not the case with the USA. And my rant over your "whatabout" point ends here.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  The CIA has definitely committed some pretty heinous acts, but the only reason they appear worse than your average national intelligence service is that the US has a habit of declassifying operations and documents after they're no longer active and/or relevant, forcing them to confess to a subset of their crimes. Most national intelligence services are allowed to freely and happily cover up the vast majority of their crimes indefinitely, and there's much less opportunity to hold them accountable unless they actually get caught.
  - jesusofnazarath 3y ago
    [dead]
- tootie 3y ago
  The CIA is the covert agency of American foreign policy. They don't act independently.
  - jesusofnazarath 3y ago
    [dead]
aqme28 3y ago
"The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred" Doesn't really make sense to measure tragedies in terms of 9/11s, but I wonder how many 9/11s the US has caused in the name of killing Bin Laden.
- deepsun 3y ago
  Or prevented.
- samatman 3y ago
  That estimate is pretty insane. There were 374 polio cases in 2023, six of which were in Pakistan. Half were in DR Congo, where I don't believe the mission to find bin Laden has affected eradication efforts. Twenty more years of that rate would be 7,480 cases, not 100,000. It's also risible to suggest that any of that nonsense has seriously hindered eradication, caseloads in that region remain very low, the hotspots are elsewhere. https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2023-statement-following-the-thirty-seventh-meeting-of-the-ihr-emergency-committee-for-polio#:~:text=In%202023%20to%20date%2C%20there,%2C%20northern%20Yemen%20and%20Somalia https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2023-statement-following...).
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    While I don't know where the 100,000 number comes from, I believe most of the cases that occur outside Pakistan and Afghanistan are caused by the vaccine. Wikipedia lists those two countries as the only place polio is still endemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2023
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > I believe Why?
      - boomboomsubban 3y ago
p0w3n3d 3y ago
[flagged]
vvvvvvvvvvvv 3y ago
This is ridiculous and bordering on misinformation, polio was already prevalent in AF before the 2014 revelation, in large part BECAUSE of the talibans. "In Afghanistan and Pakistan, fears that the vaccine contained contraceptives were one reason given by the Taliban in issuing fatwas against polio vaccination.[47][43][48]" Even outside of that, the talibans would have shot those health workers eventually like they did with the 9 year old girl that wanted education, they do not like outsiders showing people their environment can be better.
snakeyjake 3y ago
>"Polio still persists in Taliban-controlled regions, after the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign to try to catch Osama bin Laden. Vaccination workers are now killed as potential spies." The connection is bullshit. Afghanistan has a long and proud history of killing polio vaccination workers. Also, any other aid worker. Especially women. https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/analysis-attacks-aid-challenge-afghan-reconstruction https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/analysis-attacks-ai... (2008) I was in Afghanistan for over two years over two deployments. Outside of the cities Afghans: 1. Don't know who Osama Bin Laden is. 2. Don't know that he was killed. 3. Don't know that the CIA ran a (not fake, real) vaccination campaign to locate Bin Laden. Or what the CIA is for that matter, or what or who the US is. 4. Barely know that there is a central government, who runs it, or what city is the capital. They only know their local clan and the immediate local leader. They're not running around scared of CIA agents they are scared of all outsiders and any outsider who can provide relief or comfort that the local leader cannot instantly becomes the enemy of the local leader. This is also true in Pakistan and several African nations.
- joshuaissac 3y ago
  > Don't know that the CIA ran a (not fake, real) vaccination campaign to locate Bin Laden. This Lancet editorial suggests that the vaccination campaign was fake: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... This is the campaign that is usually referred to when people talk about the fake vaccination campaign to locate bin Laden, but it was conducted in Abottabad, Pakistan. Are you referring to a different campaign that was conducted in Afghanistan?
  - lukan 3y ago
    He is saying, there is not much difference between tribal people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  I'm more than willing to believe what you say about the local leaders, but the article you linked says aid workers were being killed because the Taliban associated them with US military reconstruction and the Karzai government.
michaelmrose 3y ago
Maybe you should assign some portion of the blame to the murderous cultists who are killing medical professions and consider the reason they are so worried about spies is that they were celebrating, supporting, and hiding mass murderers.
JCharante 3y ago
did they give placebo vaccines or real ones?

crakenzak 3y ago

The CIA is one of the most wicked organizations I’ve ever heard of. And that’s just from the small amount of info we know about them.

somenameforme 3y ago
Think about the fact that this [1] only did not happen because a single person intervened - just a single person along the long line of custody from inception to proposal. And the person who refused to let it happen was JFK. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  And look what happened to him.
  - westmeal 3y ago
    But it was TOTALLY not the CIA. There is NO WAY the CIA could've done that.
- lawn 3y ago
  Wow, I've somehow missed this.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    I’m not sure if it’s sarcasm or not, but The Devil’s Chessboard lays out a case for the CIA acting as the military arm of the rich and powerful starting basically at its inception. All of the “communist” overthrows in the 50s and 60s happen to coincide with nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps. This typically resulted in actual dictators replacing them that allowed the businesses to continue to exploit while at the same time severely oppressing the locals. Some of the evidence is compelling, others is speculative, but a lot of the same bad actors show up in a lot of very similar global (and local) affairs.
    - masfuerte 3y ago
      Not just the CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps This is an old geopolitical problem: rich democracies tended to surround themselves with alliances of despots. Athens, Rome and America. The corporate interests hypothesis is interesting. But the resilient one is that dictators reliably deliver foreign policy goals that electeds' voters value.
    - petsfed 3y ago
      I'll add that book to my reading list. I think, more broadly, that American, British, and French "anti-communist" foreign policy has consistently been about ensuring that American, British, and French companies continue unfettered access to a colonized nation's resources. Your actual governmental or economic structure is irrelevant, so long as Shell Oil or United Fruit Company are only answerable to their shareholders, and not the people of the country they're exploiting. Anti-communism, colonialism, nation-building, all these justifications eventually become just rationalizations for protecting specifically the colonizer's economic interests. The Great Hunger, the Bengal Famine, the Banana Massacre, the excesses of the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, the Mandate for Palestine, the Belgian fucking Congo, all of these result from optimizing for foreign economic interests without any regard for local social interests.
- diggan 3y ago
  Worth noting that while that those proposed self-inflicted terrorist attacks were rejected, other terrorist attacks in Cuba by CIA were approved: > The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose Whenever one falls down the CIA rabbit-hole, it never continues surprise just how much pain they have inflicted on the world.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- instagib 3y ago
  The list of ‘see also’ on the site is a fun read. I never read about the “fog of war” incident before related to the Vietnam war inception which never happened. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
piva00 3y ago
The CIA absolutely fucked Latin America, staging coups, pushing US businesses interests, putting military dictatorships in power and assisting them while in power. The damage runs deep and I think it's quite overwhelming hearing from ignorant and/or naïve Americans about the issues China may cause, or the deaths that dictatorships brought into the world. The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though, since winners write history the US is not currently seen as one of the major sources of instability and social strife in so many countries it involved itself in. When Americans look at Latin America and see the mess it exists in there's no self-reflection about their part in causing it. American needs trumped over all the rights to self-determination of these peoples, be it assisting United Fruit Company to destroy Guatemala, the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, etc. And all the aftermath of the USA forcing countries in its "sphere of influence" to abide by what the USA wanted, if you attempted to go out of line there'd be a CIA team taking your government down in no time. It's just wishful thinking but I wish to see the USA reckoning with all the misery it caused in my lifetime. It's personal to me since one of my relatives was killed during the Brazilian dictatorship, he was simply trying to be an active part of an union.
- ribosometronome 3y ago
  >issues China may cause ...The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though Under wraps, and yet here you are talking about it on an American website, seemingly without much fear of repercussions or being censored for it. Is it as easy or welcome to talk about Chinese committed atrocities on Chinese websites?
  - piva00 3y ago
    Under wraps from general American society, yes. Go right now on the streets of your USA city and ask about the atrocities the USA has committed in Latin America, check what % of the people even know about that. My comment about China is meant more in relation to the boogeyman created out of China to push USA's interests, I don't condone authoritarianism at all (it should be pretty clear after I mention a dead relative by the hands of a dictatorship) but I do have very high reservations about whatever the USA pushes for manufacturing consent across the globe, right now it's the China boogeyman. The whole play of the USA is also to keep the veil of a freedoms' paragon as a misdirection for its transgressions, it's layered in misdirection using language such as "defense of freedom", "free market", "business interests" while behaving schizophrenically by supporting dictators who align to its interests (e.g.: Saudi Arabia, multiple dictatorships in Latin America). It's all bullshit. Owning that it's all bullshit won't ever happen, it needs to keep the discourse to keep the façade of a force for good. At least China is more honest, they are dicks, they are ruthless, they can be aggressive, but no one else was misled to believe otherwise. That's not the case with the USA. And my rant over your "whatabout" point ends here.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
The CIA has definitely committed some pretty heinous acts, but the only reason they appear worse than your average national intelligence service is that the US has a habit of declassifying operations and documents after they're no longer active and/or relevant, forcing them to confess to a subset of their crimes. Most national intelligence services are allowed to freely and happily cover up the vast majority of their crimes indefinitely, and there's much less opportunity to hold them accountable unless they actually get caught.
- jesusofnazarath 3y ago
  [dead]
tootie 3y ago
The CIA is the covert agency of American foreign policy. They don't act independently.
- jesusofnazarath 3y ago
  [dead]

aqme28 3y ago

"The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred" Doesn't really make sense to measure tragedies in terms of 9/11s, but I wonder how many 9/11s the US has caused in the name of killing Bin Laden.

deepsun 3y ago
Or prevented.
samatman 3y ago
That estimate is pretty insane. There were 374 polio cases in 2023, six of which were in Pakistan. Half were in DR Congo, where I don't believe the mission to find bin Laden has affected eradication efforts. Twenty more years of that rate would be 7,480 cases, not 100,000. It's also risible to suggest that any of that nonsense has seriously hindered eradication, caseloads in that region remain very low, the hotspots are elsewhere. https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2023-statement-following-the-thirty-seventh-meeting-of-the-ihr-emergency-committee-for-polio#:~:text=In%202023%20to%20date%2C%20there,%2C%20northern%20Yemen%20and%20Somalia https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2023-statement-following...).
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  While I don't know where the 100,000 number comes from, I believe most of the cases that occur outside Pakistan and Afghanistan are caused by the vaccine. Wikipedia lists those two countries as the only place polio is still endemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2023
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > I believe Why?
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago

p0w3n3d 3y ago

[flagged]

vvvvvvvvvvvv 3y ago

This is ridiculous and bordering on misinformation, polio was already prevalent in AF before the 2014 revelation, in large part BECAUSE of the talibans. "In Afghanistan and Pakistan, fears that the vaccine contained contraceptives were one reason given by the Taliban in issuing fatwas against polio vaccination.[47][43][48]" Even outside of that, the talibans would have shot those health workers eventually like they did with the 9 year old girl that wanted education, they do not like outsiders showing people their environment can be better.

snakeyjake 3y ago

>"Polio still persists in Taliban-controlled regions, after the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign to try to catch Osama bin Laden. Vaccination workers are now killed as potential spies." The connection is bullshit. Afghanistan has a long and proud history of killing polio vaccination workers. Also, any other aid worker. Especially women. https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/analysis-attacks-aid-challenge-afghan-reconstruction https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/analysis-attacks-ai... (2008) I was in Afghanistan for over two years over two deployments. Outside of the cities Afghans: 1. Don't know who Osama Bin Laden is. 2. Don't know that he was killed. 3. Don't know that the CIA ran a (not fake, real) vaccination campaign to locate Bin Laden. Or what the CIA is for that matter, or what or who the US is. 4. Barely know that there is a central government, who runs it, or what city is the capital. They only know their local clan and the immediate local leader. They're not running around scared of CIA agents they are scared of all outsiders and any outsider who can provide relief or comfort that the local leader cannot instantly becomes the enemy of the local leader. This is also true in Pakistan and several African nations.

joshuaissac 3y ago
> Don't know that the CIA ran a (not fake, real) vaccination campaign to locate Bin Laden. This Lancet editorial suggests that the vaccination campaign was fake: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... This is the campaign that is usually referred to when people talk about the fake vaccination campaign to locate bin Laden, but it was conducted in Abottabad, Pakistan. Are you referring to a different campaign that was conducted in Afghanistan?
- lukan 3y ago
  He is saying, there is not much difference between tribal people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
whatshisface 3y ago
I'm more than willing to believe what you say about the local leaders, but the article you linked says aid workers were being killed because the Taliban associated them with US military reconstruction and the Karzai government.

michaelmrose 3y ago

Maybe you should assign some portion of the blame to the murderous cultists who are killing medical professions and consider the reason they are so worried about spies is that they were celebrating, supporting, and hiding mass murderers.

JCharante 3y ago

did they give placebo vaccines or real ones?