SALON

Friday, Jan 11, 2013 9:35 PM UTC

The fake vaccination scheme absent from the bin Laden hunt debates

If "ZDT" justifies torture, a new GQ exploration of the CIA vaccine ploy prompts troubling questions

By

Topics: Zero Dark Thirty, GQ, Osama Bin Laden, vaccines, hepatitis, Social Security, Pakistan,

The fake vaccination scheme absent from the bin Laden hunt debates(Credit: AP)

The fraught debate around “Zero Dark Thirty” has largely focused on whether the film justifies torture in suggesting that the CIA gleaned information relevant to the hunt for Osama bin Laden through torturing detainees. The fact that torture did not provide significant leads in the hunt is one important thing. The fact that the CIA profligately tortured under the assumption that it might is quite another.

A central point the movie raises is that the hunt for bin Laden was considered an unquestionable political good. (It still is: were it not, the depiction in a film of bin Laden’s death arising from the fruits of horrific torture could not be seen as justifying the torture). There’s a telling, underdiscussed scene in the middle of the sprawling epic in which the protagonist Maya threatens her CIA boss when he refuses to dedicate more resources to her bin Laden hunt efforts. She says she will go public and tell Congress that he had derailed the search for the world’s most-wanted terrorist. She essentially asks “Do you want to be that guy?” He gives in to Maya’s request, knowing that anything but full dedication to catching bin Laden in the public eye would be political suicide.

The scene honestly illustrates a political climate in which the end (or end goal) fully justified any means. The logic of many of the film’s critics is that “ZDT” justifies torture because it falsely suggests torture led to bin Laden. Which, of course, relies on the troubling premise that means are justified by their service to a desired end. But what about the episode, also depicted in the film, in which CIA agents recruited a local doctor to manufacture and carry out a fake hepatitis B vaccination scheme to get more information on whether the terror leader was hidden in the suspected compound?

Torture, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence stresses, did not help in the bin Laden hunt. But, as Matthieu Aikins points out in a new and excellent GQ investigation into the doctor behind the vaccination scheme, Dr. Shakil Afridi, U.S. officials have widely praised the vaccination scheme as helpful: “[Leon] Panetta had said that [Afridi] provided ‘very helpful’ intelligence, and this summer Hillary Clinton said that ‘his help, after all, was instrumental in taking down one of the world’s most notorious murderers.’”

Aikins notes that it’s unclear just how much information on the bin Laden compound Afridi’s scheme actually gleaned: “No one has been able to determine what exactly he accomplished. U.S. officials, as well as Afridi himself, have consistently claimed that he was never actually able to get inside the Big House to vaccinate a member of the bin Laden clan. But this is to be expected. Since the raid, U.S. officials have repeatedly tried to control the public narrative and cover the tracks of their assets in Pakistan.”

Afridi himself, as Aikin’s piece details, was “disappeared” by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who saw the doctor as a traitor to Pakistan. ISI documents say of Afridi, “In May 2011, in the incident of Osama bin Laden, he played a fundamental role as a result of which Pakistan was humiliated in front of the whole world” — highlighting the strained nature of U.S.-Pakistan relations following the raid.

Aikins explores Afridi’s recruitment by the CIA in 2008 after the doctor had been kidnapped, ransomed and released by a local militant warlord. Just how much the doctor was in it for the money is unclear — “the CIA paid him about $55,000 to conduct the vaccination campaign. That’s more than five times his ransom and about nine times his official annual salary,” Aikins notes.

In “Zero Dark Thirty,” the vaccination scheme is not depicted as having produced information that confirmed bin Laden was in the compound. Aikin’s report stresses that there’s no real way to know how much information Afridi actually gleaned or provided to the CIA. What is known is that the doctor did not fare well, as Aikins details. He was disappeared by the ISI, allegedly tortured, then handed back to the civilian authorities to stand trial. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison. “To his legal team’s surprise, they found that Afridi had been charged not with treason for his work with the CIA but rather, under a draconian colonial-era tribal code, with supplying Lashkar-e-Islam — the same militant group that had kidnapped and ransomed him — with money and medical treatment for its fighters … Pakistani officials — who were frank in private that Afridi was being punished for his association with the CIA — were adamant that Afridi was a traitor and his actions criminal,” Aikins wrote.

Reflecting on his discoveries about Afridi and his mission, Aikins notes that the doctor “didn’t seem to understand the serious business he had found himself in — his grinning photos on the vaccination brochures betray not a hint of worry. But now, caught up by his own imprudence and avarice, the doctor would surely rot in prison, yet another life ground in the gears of the vast machine of the war on terror, a pawn in the impenetrable spy games between the United States and Pakistan.”

But Afridi’s story and discussions about the vaccination scheme have been largely absent from the current furor over how to build a narrative around the hunt for bin Laden. Despite the fact that, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out last May:

When this fake CIA vaccination program was revealed last year, Doctors Without Borders harshly denounced the CIA and Dr. Afridi for their “grave manipulation of the medical act” that will cause “vulnerable communities – anywhere – needing access to essential health services [to] understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid.”

The children in the Abbottobad suburb who Afridi visited were given a genuine hepatitis B shot — but only a single dose, which is ineffective. “That means that numerous Pakistani children who thought they were being vaccinated against hepatitis B were in fact left exposed to the virus,” Greenwald noted.

Officials say there are no grey areas as to whether torture provided useful leads in finding bin Laden; it did not, they say. Aikins points out that the usefulness of the vaccine scheme in the hunt is in fact unknown. “ZDT” has been decried for its suggestion that torture was useful. But the film did not depict as useful administering ineffective vaccines to Pakistani children — U.S. officials have deemed this justified. It highlights the very troubling political space we still inhabit, when “it worked in getting us to bin Laden” functions as an accepted ethical justification.

Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com. More Natasha Lennard.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 4 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
339 points340 points | 284 comments
vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
266 points267 points | 23 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
226 points227 points | 31 comments
vote
Austerity Kills: Brian McArdle, a 57-year-old man who had had two strokes and could barely walk, was found "fit for work" by a government subcontractor, and had his benefits stopped. He died the next day.
110 points111 points | 12 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
81 points82 points | 16 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations