06/15/12 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, everybody.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest fill-in host, Zoe Greif, and I am happily, pleasantly, in a good way, surprised and pleased to welcome to the show our guest, Kelly Vlahos.
I don't have your bio in front of me, Kelly.
I apologize for that.
I'll get to that in the next segment.
Bad radio host.
But more importantly than that, let's talk about your latest article up at AntiWar.com, and you writing up the whole situation as far as the CIA in Pakistan with their phony vaccination program, trying to gain intelligence on the whereabouts of bin Laden, and you write about how that was a really bad idea that's going to have really bad consequences for a long time.
First of all, welcome to the show, Kelly.
Well, thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Okay, it's my pleasure to talk to you.
Believe you, me.
But let me just say that I was born in the 70s, and so all that I know about polio is the fact that my parents have identical matching dents in their shoulders where they, scars where they received the vaccine.
What is polio?
Is it a virus?
How is it spread?
What are the effects?
I literally don't even know.
Well, the polio is a virus, and at the time in the 50s, in the 1940s and 50s when it was spreading, they didn't know what was causing it.
So it was, as you can imagine, a huge scare in this country.
Parents and public health officials were warned not to go into public swimming pools.
They believed that sanitation was, hygiene was, bad hygiene was the cause.
You know, so because they didn't have a good handle on how it was spreading, and it was creating, what it did though, we're talking about the virus itself, what it did was it paralyzed young children, typically at a very young age, five, you know, five to 12 year olds were being hit hardest.
And what it did was it attacked the nervous system, and children would become paralyzed almost immediately, and stopped breathing.
That was the worst effect though.
About 12,000 children had succumbed to polio over a course of 10 years between 1950 and 1960.
Others were left, many others, countless others, were left with paralyzation in their legs, mainly.
And so you see many pictures of children with those heavy metal braces around their legs from that era.
Oh yeah, I should mention real quickly, Kelly, that my best friend in the world, his stepfather, Limps, to this day walks with a cane because of polio.
That's the only other thing I know about polio.
So sorry to interrupt you, but please continue.
No, that's okay.
I mean it really, it struck middle America very hard because there was really no rhyme or reason as to who it would hit.
So it wasn't any particular race, it wasn't a particular status group.
Kids would catch this.
Many survived.
Many had recovered from it without the paralyzation.
But those that didn't, either, like I said, ended up in these painful braces.
Or the iron lung.
Tell them about the iron lung, Kelly.
Yeah, even worse, ended up in these iron lungs, which were breathing machines of the era, and would basically assist these children to breathe, and which would be the worst fate of all.
You know, I read these books of children who grew up at the time, and like you said, that you and I would never, would not be able to relate to this, but fearing that this virus would strike their family or themselves, and they'd end up in these dreaded iron lungs.
And in the course of researching this story, I came across a couple stories where Americans in this country are still living in iron lungs because they contracted this virus back in the 1950s at a very young age.
And this poor woman, I want to say it was, I don't have my computer in front of me, I want to say it was somewhere in the South, like Alabama or Mississippi, had just died because she had been living in this iron lung, and there was a power outage in her county, and the backup generator wasn't working, and her family worked feverishly to get this machine up and operating again, and she died before they could do that.
And just reading how this poor woman had been living in this contraption, if you look it up, and the pictures are just, you know, just devastating of just thinking of somebody living in this, and basically she was able to, you know, see people and communicate with them by a mirror, like, you know, like you would have a rearview mirror, you know, fixed to the top of it, and that's, you know, she, I mean, she lived, you know, as a productive life as she could, but I mean, just the legacy of this is still with us, as you said, your friend's father is still limping, and this fear is remembered, but it's slowly receding into history.
So, you know, they found a cure, they were able to develop a vaccine, they were able to develop a vaccine that they could disperse to the rest of the world, and so it's largely been wiped off the map, except for three countries, according to the World Health Organization, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, and that leads us to our story today.
Yeah, and speaking of which, it's a really excellent write-up, it's long, it's juicy, it's detailed, I enjoyed reading it, and I'm re-skimming it right now.
There's so many different angles we could talk about, but let's just go ahead and tell the story of who did what, and for why, and how, all those journalism things.
This Pakistani doctor was a shill for the CIA, collecting DNA, trying to find bin Laden, something like that?
Why don't you explain it better for the listeners?
A doctor in Abbottabad, which is where Osama bin Laden was eventually killed in his compound in Pakistan, a doctor, Shaquille Afridi, and he was hired by the CIA to basically set up a hepatitis B vaccination program, or I'm sorry, a vaccination clinic, outside the walls of this compound, in this Pakistani town, with the intent of collecting DNA samples, and including DNA samples of the children that lived within the compound.
So it was basically a cover so that they could get the DNA samples, and the CIA could, in fact, confirm who was living in that, confirm their suspicions that the Obama family was in there.
And according to the New York Times, he was never able to secure these DNA samples, but after Osama, the CIA contends that he did help them.
We don't know exactly what the help was if he didn't get the DNA samples.
But we know that within a year, Osama was dead, and somehow it leaked out that this doctor had helped the CIA in its surveillance of the bin Laden family.
So we don't even know exactly how he helped, we just know that the CIA sort of publicly doomed him by thanking him for helping him?
And from what I understand, all this news came out as part of a leak, you know, the leaks that we're debating about today in the Obama administration, as details had sort of dripped out about the whole Osama bin Laden raid, and how the SEAL Team Six found him, killed him, included in all of these details dribbling out.
Now, are these the leaks involving the filmmaker Catherine Bigelow, or is this some other set of leaks?
There's so many leaks, Kelly, I'm getting confused.
I'm not sure.
But from what I understand, and I'm not sure what set of leaks, but I think in detail of how the bin Laden family was tracked to this compound, this information had come out.
One way or another, yeah.
One way or another.
And from what I'm reading, is that it created quite an uproar within the community there, because even his colleagues, this doctor's colleagues, did not know what he was up to.
So they had been sort of pulled in to this farce.
Oh wow, so it wasn't just one guy doing it, he was misleading a whole team of doctors doing it?
He was leading a team, a local team of doctors who have since lost their jobs because of this.
I would imagine.
From what I understand, because they...
Oh wow, there's the music.
I'm sorry to be asking you questions, and then here comes the break sneaking up on me.
We're talking with Kelly Vlahos.
I'll announce her bio at the top of the next segment.
We're talking about her article at Antiwar.com about the CIA fake vaccinating Pakistanis and all the fallout that that's sure to cause.
It's Antiwar Radio, more on the other side.
Kelly Vlahos is our guest.
Hey, welcome back to the show, everybody.
It's Antiwar Radio, and I am pleased to be talking to Kelly Vlahos.
Let me do a quick bio here, because I didn't do that before.
Kelly Bjokar Vlahos has spent over a decade as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
Currently, she is a contributing editor for the American Conservative Magazine and its daily weblog, Ampersand TAC.
She is also a Washington correspondent for the D.C.
-based Homeland Security Magazine, Homeland Security Today, a longtime Political Writer for FoxNews.com and Weekly Communist for Antiwar.com, and it goes on from there.
But right now, we're talking about your wonderful article concerning the CIA and the fake vaccination program in Pakistan, trying to find bin Laden, trying to make sure that when they dropped the high explosives, it was actually going to blow up Osama bin Laden and not just a bunch of other people kind of thing.
We got interrupted by the break.
I don't even remember what we were talking about.
Kelly, where were we?
Well, we were talking about when this information leaked, the public health officials that worked with this doctor, Dr. Shaquille Freedie, lost their jobs and were pretty shocked that they had been used in this way.
From what I understand, that the hepatitis B vaccination was not altogether a valid or bona fide vaccination program, because in order to complete the vaccination, they have to go back and give them a second and a third shot.
And they didn't do that.
So they didn't even actually vaccinate against the hepatitis B that they claim to be vaccinating, correct?
Exactly.
So anyway, so the doctor was arrested for his compliance with the CIA for crimes against the state.
He was tried in a tribal court as opposed to a national court and sentenced to 33 years in prison.
If he had been tried in a national court, according to the New York Times, he might have gotten the death penalty.
Because that is treason to work with the CIA against your own government, sovereign state, what have you.
That is what treason is, right, Kelly?
Well, in this country, to aid an enemy by working with the enemy against your country, yes, it is.
The funny thing about what he was actually charged with, after all that had been done, was working, is colluding with a militant group.
The CIA is a militant group?
But the militant group being Lashkar-I-Islam, which I think was just an out for them to get this guy without going exactly head-to-head with the CIA.
But the damage is done.
The guy is in prison for his collusion with the CIA.
The troubling aspect of this is that Pakistanis already believe that the CIA has contaminated their health program.
There's a million conspiracies about the CIA tampering with public health.
And then right here is a big, fat, hairy kernel of truth to it all, is it not?
Right, exactly.
And many health officials, you know, public health officials across the world have now weighed in on this, saying, listen, you know, there is a polio problem in Pakistan.
It's one of three countries where there still is a polio endemic.
And one of the reasons is because Muslim imams in places like Africa and even Afghanistan and Pakistan have spreading the word not to get vaccinations for things, including polio, because somehow the CIA is behind it and somehow that they are contaminating the shots.
And you can imagine the wild theories out there.
Well, yeah, I've read and heard people saying, oh, it's going to sterilize you.
It's going to give you HIV.
I mean, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories out there, right?
And so people stay away.
And that's one of the reasons why there's still polio in places like Pakistan.
So for this to have, like you said, if there is even a kernel of truth to that, that the CIA, not that it was pursuing some sterilization program, but at least tampering with vaccination by creating a false one in order to go after Osama bin Laden, then this is going to set back the efforts, the real genuine efforts that public health officials were having in that country.
So there's been a big uproar about the ethics and the morality of the CIA using a doctor, having him compromise his Hippocratic oath and his responsibility to the health and well-being of people, just to pursue Osama bin Laden and greater anti-terrorism goals.
Well, let me ask you, Kelly, do you have any sense of how bad the damage, how serious is this fallout?
Does this just mean that public health workers are just going to get the cold shoulder from now on in Pakistan?
Or what do you think?
Well, personally, I think it's going to do a lot of damage, but I can't gauge how much.
I don't think anybody has a crystal ball.
But when you have coalitions of international health programs weighing in on this saying, oh my goodness, we've been trying so hard to eradicate polio, we're almost there.
India just announced for the first time that it's had no cases of polio in the last 12 months, which is a major big deal.
And then this happened.
And the number of polio cases have been creeping up in Pakistan, mostly from the frontier provinces, where it is almost impossible to get public health vaccinations out there.
And when they do, there is, like we said, this suspicion of vaccines complicating the issue.
So this just has a negative effect.
We just don't know how negative.
Now, our members of Congress have weighed in, but in a completely different way.
They're outraged that this doctor has been arrested and he's in prison right now, and they are calling him a hero for what he did.
Well, that's what happens when people commit treason and get convicted of it is they go to prison, right?
Right, but they don't see it as that.
They see him as a hero because he worked with our government to go after Osama bin Laden, and they see him as doing the right thing, going after, you know, they have ascribed this motive to him that he just thought this is a way to help his own country to go after al-Qaeda.
From what I've been reading, there's a question of whether he even knew who the CIA was going after.
I think he was just told that there were some al-Qaeda terrorists in the area, and he was asked to help to try to find them.
There's a question about whether he even knew that Osama bin Laden was being targeted in this operation.
But if you go back and you read the transcripts of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I mean, this guy is, you know, he is a hero times 10 because he was doing our bidding in this global war on terror.
There may be no reason why he should be in prison right now, and they failed to even mention the fake vaccination program at all.
The only mention that was made was by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who said it was a bona fide vaccination program, and that he was actually helping, you know, make Pakistan safer.
So I think that, you know, even our own members of Congress, our own leaders, will not admit to the consequences here.
I guess we'll just have to wait to see what those consequences are, but I just find it very ironic that in this country, you know, 60 years ago, you know, we were able to get rid of polio, which was just a horrific scourge on the families and children of this country.
And here we are, and are, you know, selfishly pursuing, you know, this global war on terror, and not, you know, with without regard that...
For the long-term consequences, so many long-term consequences.
Yeah, the long-term consequences.
It's the same thing with the drone war.
We pursue, we're pursuing terrorists, we're pursuing the bad guys, raining bombs from the sky with no regard for the collateral damage that it's causing.
There's complete denial from our own administration, which says there's very few civilians killed in these drone attacks.
Well, that's because they redefined what a civilian is, to mean not anybody that we killed.
Right, and so that makes them sleep better at night, fine, but there's plenty of evidence out there that there are many children being killed by these drone attacks.
And I assure you, their surviving family members are not caring if any American officials are making any, you know, word distinctions as far as anything like that.
They're looking at their dead relatives, and they're mad.
Right, exactly.
But we tend to be very myopic in our global war on terror.
We see what our goals are, we go for them no matter, you know, who gets in our way or who we have to compromise along the way.
And sadly, there are a lot of good people in Pakistan who are trying to eradicate things like polio or hepatitis B, and now this is going to make their job a lot harder.
It's going to set them back so far, we don't even know how far.
Well, there's the music, top of the hour break, we're out of time.
Thank you so much for your time, Kelly Vlahos.
Check out the article on antiwar.com about CIA Pakistan vaccinations and lies.
Thanks again, Kelly.
Thank you.