Collateral damage from the hunt for Bin Laden

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2011/jul/13/cia-vaccines

The CIA has been a byword for dirty tricks since President Truman created the agency in 1947. Its more notorious covert operations have involved undermining legitimate governments the US did not care for, aiding assassinations and encouraging armed insurrections in foreign states. No doubt there are, and always have been, many good and patriotic men and women working for the CIA, but it doesn't exactly have a squeaky clean reputation.

Nonetheless, the latest wheeze to be exposed - in my own paper here - takes one's breath away. It is tiny in the scale of covert CIA ops and even sounds a little bit ludicrous, but it has the potential to cause massive collateral damage.

I'd like to think that the scam to collect DNA from children living in Abbottabad through a fake vaccination campaign to discover whether any of them was related to Osama bin Laden was an piece of idiocy from somebody on the ground, which was not sanctioned in Washington. Who knows - but for an intelligence agency, it was not very intelligent.

Vaccines are some of the most effective health tools we have. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Save the Children, the GAVI Alliance and everybody else who successfully campaigned recently for more funding for vaccines have spent a lot of time and effort telling us that. But vaccines can only succeed if children are vaccinated. And that depends on the confidence their families have in the vaccines. Mounting a fake vaccination campaign could potentially undermine that critical faith. A number of well-respected global health bloggers have already pointed this out very eloquently - such as Tom Paulson at Humanosphere, who himself links to Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch and others. There is also a powerful and well-informed piece on PLoSBlogs.

[indepat]

1. Enough to cause one to wonder if some operatives don't give a diddle-dy-fu*k how much

collateral damage they inflict so long as they are not caught inflicting such. :shrug: :patriot:

[xchrom]

2. when i first found out about the phony vaccination program/dna hunt --

i thought the cia must be a stranger place than i can know.

nderlines that -- in a bright red marker.