Pakistan to charge citizen for Treason....

[Thoughtful Thug]

Hitchens nailed it, as usual:

That is quite a damning piece of information. Kinda remade me think about some of the things about Pakistan in a different perspective.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Am I the only one to draw the most obvious conclusion, which is that, since this Pakistani doctor is accused of committing treason against the State of Pakistan, then that implies that Osama bin Laden was an agent of Pakistan?

 

[GoodGame]

Rick Perry wanting to vaccinate all Texas girls makes sense now - he was huntin' for terrists.

That's really some ridiculous spin JR. I mean, I detest Perry, but that is really in lost in left field.

 

[classical_hero]

GG, it's called satire.

I certainly agree with Nano's assessment. This makes Pakistan part of the Axis of Evil.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

GG, it's called satire.

I certainly agree with Nano's assessment. This makes Pakistan part of the Axis of Evil.

I don't endorse Bushism as a foreign policy, but it's quite obvious to me and many foreign policy experts that Pakistan isn't really an American ally. They only pretend to cooperate just enough to avoid the ire of the US, but their true foreign policy aims run counter to ours. The Pakistani foreign policy has always been to keep Afghanistan either weak or in their back pocket. If they were to allow the US to peacefully occupy Afghanistan, it would lead to stability that might make Afghanistan strong. In the least, it puts another powerful neighbor on their western flank, the US. Pakistan already has India on its eastern flank to deal with. So they secretly support proxy efforts, such as endorsing terrorists, to keep Afghanistan unstable. (They also appear to support the same efforts in India, as the recent Mumbai attacks suggest.) The civilian government of Pakistan is almost certainly hollow, with most of the real power in the hands of the military and intelligence service (which are really one and the same there).

The Pakistanis are eager to prosecute this doctor, as it offers a convenient scapegoat to distract attention from their true nefarious activities. It would also be a public relations boon.

 

[Formaldehyde]

That is quite a damning piece of information. Kinda remade me think about some of the things about Pakistan in a different perspective.

Only the Pakistani government didn't "harbor" bin Laden. They had just as much reason to see him brought to justice as anybody given the number of Pakistanis who have died as a result of the al-Qaeda's actions. After all, there have been more Pakistani civilians killed by al-Qaeda than there have been American ones, and those acts are continuing instead of being done over 10 years ago now.

In the meantime, the continuing direct contributions of Pakistan against the al-Qaeda are being largely ignored:

Fox News: Pakistan Arrests Al Qaeda Suspects, Stops Asking for End to CIA Drone Strikes

WASHINGTON – In what could mark a turning point in U.S.-Pakistani relations, Pakistani forces have arrested a handful of Al Qaeda suspects at the CIA's request and allowed the U.S. access to the detainees, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

Pakistan has also stopped demanding the CIA suspend the covert drone strikes that have damaged Al Qaeda's militant ranks in Pakistan's tribal areas, officials on both sides say -- though the Pakistanis say they have simply put this on the back burner for now. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic matters.

Only one of the Al Qaeda figures who was arrested is considered senior, but U.S. and Pakistani officials called the combined moves a trend in the right direction.

"They are doing things to cooperate and be helpful," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press.

As they always have despite constantly being labeled as directly contributing to that terrorism:

Pakistan considered halting some of the increased cooperation after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen accused Pakistan's spy shop of complicity with the militant Haqqani network's attack on the U.S. embassy in neighboring Afghanistan. Mullen levied that charge, the most serious U.S. allegation against Pakistan since the 9/11 attacks, within a few days of leaving his post last month.

There may very well be a few individuals in the Pakistani government who are actually helping the al-Qaeda. But the government itself obviously isn't. Instead of blaming them all, the US should provide any actual evidence it has to the proper Pakistani authorities so these individuals can be criminally charged. If nothing happens as a result, then the US government would have a reason to complain.

 

[Colonel]

I say we just get it over already and start our bombing campaign of Pakistan. Perhaps somewhere in there we break the doc and any others out and bring them to safety.

 

[Winner]

Just don't forget to take out their nukes first, please.

 

[NickyJ]

Of course, that is one way to spin it. The other would be that the doctor aided and abetted a foreign intelligence agency without notifying his own government about it. If he had been an American doctor who conspired with the Mossad in a targeted assassination in this country without informing the US government, similar charges could very well be brought against him.

If we were harboring a terrorist, then I would hail the spy and Mossad as heroes.

Why wasn't this guy given asylum in the US?

A very good question. And not only for worries about the Pakistani government, but also for protection against any Al-Qaeda retaliations.

I wonder for how much longer will the Americans delude themselves that Pakistan is an ally.

It's your enemy, and increasingly so.

So true...

I say we just get it over already and start our bombing campaign of Pakistan. Perhaps somewhere in there we break the doc and any others out and bring them to safety.

Just don't forget to take out their nukes first, please.

Spoiler :

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb Pakistan
Let's take a stand
Bomb Pakistan
Our country's got a feelin'
Really hit the ceilin', bomb Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Pakistan

Went to Islamabad, gonna throw some rocks
Tell the Prime Minister, "Gonna put you in a box!"
Bomb Pakistan. Bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb Pakistan
Our country's got a feelin'
Really hit the ceilin', bomb Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Pakistan

Ol' Uncle Sam's gettin' pretty hot
Time to turn Pakistan into a parking lot
Bomb Pakistan. Bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb Pakistan
Our country's got a feelin'
Really hit the ceilin', bomb Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Pakistan

Call the volunteers; call the bombadiers;
Call the financiers; better get their themselves in gear
Bomb Pakistan. Bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb Pakistan
Our country's got a feelin'
Really hit the ceilin', bomb Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Pakistan
(Let's nuke 'em! Whoo!)

Call on our allies to cut off their supplies
Get the doctors hands untied, and bring him back alive
Bomb Pakistan. Bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb Pakistan
Our country's got a feelin'
Really hit the ceilin', bomb Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Pakistan

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,
Bomb Pakistan
Let's take a stand
Bomb Pakistan
Our helpers you been stealin'
Now it's time for "keelin", bomb Pakistan
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Pakistan

Source.

Sounds good to me.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

Only the Pakistani government didn't "harbor" bin Laden. They had just as much reason to see him brought to justice as anybody given the number of Pakistanis who have died as a result of the al-Qaeda's actions. After all, there have been more Pakistani civilians killed by al-Qaeda than there have been American ones, and those acts are continuing instead of being done over 10 years ago now.

In the meantime, the continuing direct contributions of Pakistan against the al-Qaeda are being largely ignored:

Fox News: Pakistan Arrests Al Qaeda Suspects, Stops Asking for End to CIA Drone Strikes

As they always have despite constantly being labeled as directly contributing to that terrorism:

There may very well be a few individuals in the Pakistani government who are actually helping the al-Qaeda. But the government itself obviously isn't. Instead of blaming them all, the US should provide any actual evidence it has to the proper Pakistani authorities so these individuals can be criminally charged. If nothing happens as a result, then the US government would have a reason to complain.

I think the article that Winner had provided was more about the ups and downs of US and Pakistan relations way back before the US have even planned on invading Afghanistan. I see the article's timeline being peculiar only because of the complexities of many conflicting regional interests and domestic power struggles in that region (as well as US intermingling), and how it may be the reason why there is a lot of confusion and different perspectives on how to make sense of a land so vast that it stretch from Iran all the way to the north west of India.

I have to say I don't know how to make sense of that. I bet that it may be because the reality on the ground is that the United States is losing their power over there.

I also begin to wonder that what may be another element of friction between US and Pakistan is the bureaucratic battles inside not only the former's intelligence community, but also the latter too. There is no way I can know that since it is all conducted in secret.

 

[MobBoss]

Am I the only one to draw the most obvious conclusion, which is that, since this Pakistani doctor is accused of committing treason against the State of Pakistan, then that implies that Osama bin Laden was an agent of Pakistan?

No, you're not the only one at all.

 

[Glassfan]

I wonder for how much longer will the Americans delude themselves that Pakistan is an ally.

It's your enemy, and increasingly so.

I don't endorse Bushism as a foreign policy, but it's quite obvious to me and many foreign policy experts that Pakistan isn't really an American ally. They only pretend to cooperate just enough to avoid the ire of the US, but their true foreign policy aims run counter to ours. The Pakistani foreign policy has always been to keep Afghanistan either weak or in their back pocket. If they were to allow the US to peacefully occupy Afghanistan, it would lead to stability that might make Afghanistan strong. In the least, it puts another powerful neighbor on their western flank, the US. Pakistan already has India on its eastern flank to deal with. So they secretly support proxy efforts, such as endorsing terrorists, to keep Afghanistan unstable. (They also appear to support the same efforts in India, as the recent Mumbai attacks suggest.) The civilian government of Pakistan is almost certainly hollow, with most of the real power in the hands of the military and intelligence service (which are really one and the same there).

The Pakistanis are eager to prosecute this doctor, as it offers a convenient scapegoat to distract attention from their true nefarious activities. It would also be a public relations boon.

This, and this too.

There are good allies and bad. Pakistan is itself a country that supports terrorism, it's intelligence service, the ISI, is believed to be backing numerous violent acts such as the 2006 Varanasi bombings, the 2008 Indian embassy bombing in Kabul, and the decades long insurgency against Kashmir.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

I seem to recall a recent statement by someone in the State Department that the US will continue to pursue drone strikes within Pakistan, as it sees fit, despite Pakistan's protestations, because, after all, what is Pakistan going to do about it?

 

[Formaldehyde]

After all, as the article I posted above clearly shows, Pakistan is no longer objecting to drone strikes despite the numerous innocent civilians who typically die in "collateral damage". Of course, this is just going to foment more terrorism. But many people don't seem to care about that little detail which was even eventually criticized by Patreaus for that very reason.

There is a war of propaganda being waged against Pakistan by some in the Pentagon. But that certainly isn't novel for military brass to falsely condemn even our allies if it furthers their own partisan stance.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

After all, as the article I posted above clearly shows, Pakistan is no longer objecting to drone strikes despite the numerous innocent civilians who typically die in "collateral damage". Of course, this is just going to foment more terrorism. But many people don't seem to care about that little detail which was even eventually criticized by Patreaus for that very reason.

There is a war of propaganda being waged against Pakistan by some in the Pentagon. But that certainly isn't novel for military brass to falsely condemn even our allies if it furthers their own partisan stance.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see many comments favoring US involvement in Pakistan on their internet social media websites. Like that sock puppetry thread to name a few.

 

[El_Machinae]

What's kinda missed in this discussion is how frustrating it's been to have vaccination campaigns linked with the CIA ...

 

[MobBoss]

What's kinda missed in this discussion is how frustrating it's been to have vaccination campaigns linked with the CIA ...

It wasnt a CIA program though, but this guys own idea voluntarily?

 

[Formaldehyde]

That is an excellent point. But what are the eradication of polio or the vaccination of highly susceptible groups against hepatitis when the execution of OBL is clearly so much more important:

Here is an article from Wired about that particular danger:

File Under WTF: Did the CIA Fake a Vaccination Campaign?

Late that night, over whiskey-sodas served without ice because of the water quality, a longtime local health worker explained what he thought was going on. Hypothetically, protecting against polio requires four rounds of drops. But in tropical temperatures, with inadequate sanitation and endemic diarrheal diseases, it can take many more rounds of immunization to ensure a child is immune. That unplanned-for reality had combined with the longstanding distrust between Hindus and Muslims to produce a situation that no one had foreseen.

“We come back to their neighborhoods, month after month, telling them that these drops will protect their children from being paralyzed,” he said. “We come 10, 11, 12 times and the kids become paralyzed anyway. They start to think we’re doing this for some other reason, and they suspect us, and they don’t want to bring the kids out any more.”

And that is why the CIA’s decision to use a fake vaccination program in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, if that story is true, is such an appallingly, idiotically bad idea.

In the fall of 2003, a group of imams in the northern Nigerian state of Kano — the area that happened to have the highest rate of ongoing polio transmission — began preaching against polio vaccination, contending that what purported to be a protective act was actually a covert campaign by Western powers to sterilize and kill Muslim children. The president of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Sharia Law said to the BBC: “There were strong reasons to believe that the polio immunisation vaccine was contaminated with anti-fertility drugs, contaminated with certain virus that cause HIV/AIDS, contaminated with Simian virus that are likely to cause cancers.”

The rumors caught like wildfire, and they were spread further by political operatives who saw an opportunity to disrupt a recent post-election power-sharing agreement between the Muslim north and the Christian south. Three majority Muslim states — Kano, Kaduna and Zamfara — suspended polio vaccination entirely. Vaccination acceptance in the rest of the country fell off so sharply that the national government was forced to act. It ordered tests of the vaccine by Nigeria’s health ministry and empaneled a special commission to visit the Indonesian labs where the vaccine administered in Nigeria was made. The WHO convened emergency meetings.

And polio began to spread. At the end of 2003, when the boycott began, there had been only 784 known polio cases in the entire world. By the end of 2004, there had been 793 new cases just in Nigeria. Polio leaking across Nigeria’s borders reinfected Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan and Togo. Nigerian strains appeared in Yemen, site of the largest port on the Red Sea, and in Saudi Arabia, imperiling the millions of pilgrims coming to the country on hajj. (Here’s a 2004 round-up of the consequences from the South African publication Science in Africa, and one that I wrote in 2005.)

The last holdouts in Kano did not fully accept polio vaccination until the end of 2004. By then, so many children had gone unprotected that when Nigeria experienced the random bad luck of a vaccine-virus reversion to wild type in 2006, it ripped through the country in weeks — and further fueled lingering suspicions that had never really gone away.

The accusations that polio vaccination was a Potemkin cover for anti-Islamic activities almost ruined the international eradication of polio when they were false. Now, on the basis of the CIA’s alleged appalling ruse in Pakistan, they may be made again. And they will be much more believable, because this time they might be be true.

Notable reactions, among many: Longtime global-health reporter Tom Paulson says this will “undermine global health” and expands on the possible consequences; Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus, calls it a “horrible move with potentially dangerous consequences“; infectious-disease physician Kent Sepkowitz says it’s a “paranoid’s dreamy nightmare“; and blogger Brett Keller bluntly calls it “despicable.” Update: The Guardian’s Sarah Boseley adds: “a black day for medical ethics and a one-off crazy scheme.” And James Fallows at The Atlantic warns this has “tremendously damaging implications that must be addressed.”

And the effect is already being felt:

Update: And here we go. The Associated Press reported this afternoon:

Pakistani health officials held meetings about the alleged CIA scheme on Tuesday and expressed concern that it could have a negative impact on immunization programs in other areas of the northwest, especially in Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region along the Afghan border, said a Pakistani official involved in polio eradication efforts…

One of the Pakistani Taliban’s top commanders, Maulvi Faqir Mohammed, recently called on people in the northwest to avoid vaccines offered by the international community, claiming they were made with “extracts from bones and fat of an animal prohibited by God — the pig.”

“Don’t fall prey to these infidel NGOs and this U.S.-allied government and its army,” said Mohammed over the illegal radio station he transmits from his sanctuary in eastern Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials and their international partners have pushed back against these claims, but the CIA’s reported activities in the country may have made their job that much harder. “The medical mission has to be immune from manipulation for political and military purposes and health care workers generally must not be compelled to conduct activities contrary to medical ethics,” said [Michael O'Brien, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Pakistan].

Update 2: Wednesday evening, US sources acknowledged that the vaccine campaign did happen. They insisted that real hepatitis vaccine was used. They did not address that, since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless. From the Washington Post:

U.S. officials on Wednesday defended a tactic used by the CIA to attempt to verify the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden — the covert creation of a vaccine program in Abbottabad, the town in Pakistan where he was later killed in a U.S. raid…

A senior U.S. official said the campaign involved actual hepatitis vaccine and should not be construed as a “fake public health effort.”

“People need to put this into some perspective,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else. If the United States hadn’t shown this kind of creativity, people would be scratching their heads asking why it hadn’t used all tools at its disposal to find bin Laden.”

…The senior U.S. official declined to say whether DNA from bin Laden’s relatives was collected as part of the vaccine program.

Update 3: Thursday, Doctors without Borders (know in most of the world as MSF for Medecins sans Frontieres), which has teams in a number of Pakistani and border provinces, released a statement saying the fake campaign interferes with health care and endangers health workers:

“The mere suggestion that the provision of medical care was carried out under false pretenses damages public perception of the true purpose of medical action,” said Dr. Unni Karunakara, MSF’s international president. “With all populations in crisis, it is challenging enough for health agencies and humanitarian aid workers to gain access to, and the trust of, communities—especially populations already skeptical of the motives of any outside assistance… The risk is that vulnerable communities—anywhere—needing access to essential health services will understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid. The potential consequence is that even basic health care, including vaccination, does not reach those who need it most.”

The US government apparently suspected bin Laden was at that location many months before they finally took action. Instead of going through absurd tactics such as this which will continue to add plausibility to the already existing conspiracy theories which plague their efforts, all the US government really had to do was to surround the compound and notify the Pakistani authorities they had evidence that at least one al-Qaeda operative was inside. But that probably would not have led to the summary execution of OBL and all the other adult males present.

 

[MobBoss]

But the Taliban have been saying such things since forever. Thats not a result of any intel program using vaccines as an intel gathering tool - thats just the taliban being the taliban and lets be honest here, they've been spreading around such propaganda for a long, long time now.

 

[JollyRoger]

they've been spreading around such propaganda for a long, long time now.

So we've been told for quite a while now.