Lamenting the murder of Pakistani aid workers working in polio eradication campaigns the New York Times editors show some breathtaking imperial arrogance:
On Wednesday, there were reports that local police had promised extra protection for aid workers who are planning to conduct a polio vaccination campaign on Saturday in Peshawar and other cities in northwest Pakistan. That move is clearly necessary, though far from sufficient. The federal authorities need to make sure that the killers are brought to justice and make clear that murdering health workers is a terrorist act against the nation itself.
The real terrorists and killers of these aid workers and of the children that will die for lack of vaccination are the idiots in the CIA that abused a fake polio campaign to go after Osama Bin Laden and his family. It was them who committed the real crime.
When that fake CIA campaign was made public in a report in the Guardian it was immediate obvious and clear to me as to many other people that this would kill children:
So far the Taliban cooperated
with such vaccination campaigns. From now on they will not trust these
anymore. The abuse of such medical services for spying operations will
be deadly for many children.
Why would the CIA run such a campaign, and later even brag about it, when anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge about the area could easily predict that it would have deadly consequences for many innocent people? The first victims of distrust into aid workers the CIA sowed were already reported on more than a year ago. Being very late behind the news the NYT plays down the role the CIA campaign had:
No one has claimed responsibility for the most recent attack, but suspicions point to the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups that have opposed the vaccination drives, calling them a cover for government or international spies, or part of a plot to sterilize Muslim children. Those conspiracy theories intensified when the Central Intelligence Agency used a vaccination team, led by a Pakistani doctor, to visit Osama bin Laden’s house in 2011.
How can the believes that such vaccination campaigns get abused by the CIA be called "conspiracy theories" when the editors, in their very next sentence, acknowledge that that is exactly what happened?
And while there were "suspicions" about such campaigns before the CIA admitted abusing them aid workers were warned off, but not killed, when the local warlords did not want them in their areas. There is now a new quality of hostilities against such campaigns solely because the CIA abused them.
What the NYT is now calling for is military protection for the vaccination workers. How is that supposed to work? Coming in gun blazing to "do good"?
A responsible editorial would call out the CIA for screwing up an important public health issue and would ask for the obvious solution we presented 18 month ago:
By law U.S. agencies are not allowed to use journalist covers for spying. The same should apply for medical personal.
Instead the editors in their imperial arrogance call for more killing. In their mind set that is always the solution. Then, having more victims, the can again lament about them the thereby soothe their bad conscience.