Three bomb blasts targeting Pakistan polio team kill 12

[muriel_volestrangler]

Source: AFP

At least twelve people were killed and 11 injured when three roadside bombs targeting a polio vaccination team in Pakistan's restive northwest exploded on Saturday, officials said.

The blasts near the Afghan border were the latest attack on efforts to stamp out the crippling disease in Pakistan, which is one of only three countries where polio remains endemic.

Eleven paramilitary troops and one child died when the bombs detonated in the Lashora area of Jamroud Tehsil in Khyber Agency, 30 kilometres (miles) southwest of Peshawar, senior official Jahangir Khan told AFP.

The troops were protecting a convoy of anti-polio campaigners, Khan said, adding that two vehicles belonging to the medical team were damaged in the explosions.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gB6ACey2WVK6wzFIvk_2xL2eWrSQ?docId=9b2592ca-2e78-4997-bc81-50914bd02145

[MysticHuman]

1. Damn!

Sometimes I wonder how mankind made it this far.

[heaven05]

10. I'm with you

it is a miracle.

[JI7]

2. stupid conspiracy theory murdering thugs

[cosmicone]

3. Pakistan has perfected the science of shooting itself in the foot. n/t

[Lasher]

5. It's not just their own feet they are shooting. They endanger the whole herd.

Failure to eradicate polio could result in as many as 200,000 new cases every year within 10 years, all over the world.

[cosmicone]

9. Polio is generally not a very mobile disease

Epidemic clusters generally occur locally. Very unlike flu which can spread across the globe rapidly.

This is so because polio is an enterovirus which has a water borne mode of communication whereas flu is catarrhal.

[Lasher]

15. But it's highly contagious and it's been spreading.

It's recently showed back up in Syria. There's a push going on to totally eradicate it, as has been done with smallpox. Wouldn't that be great?

[dipsydoodle]

4. Had a friend working out late sixties.

He mentioned then that some were paying doctors to not give them the jab - thought they'd lose there soul through the needle hole.

[SamKnause]

6. I wonder if the CIA could be partly to blame ????

I tried to post two links to separate articles in The Guardian.

I could not get either one to work.

Just google The CIA uses fake polio vaccination scheme to catch Osama Bin Laden.

This has been reported in the mainstream news.

[truth2power]

7. You said what I was going to post. This is blowback. It's been known for some time time that

the US govt used fake polio vaccination programs to find the whereabouts of OBL.

The people to blame are the "geniuses" in US intelligence. Most sane people already knew that that bright idea was going to come back and bite us in the ass. Only a matter of time.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. So, you won't blame the people setting the bombs

You know - the murderers? Or that Muslim clerics spent years before bin Laden was killed saying it was a western plot?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/15/pakistan.topstories3

You go for 'Blame America', instead.

[SamKnause]

12. Did I type that ? NO

I specifically typed partly.

Sorry, I replied to the wrong person !!!

I didn't want to delete my post because I didn't want anyone to think I posted something hateful.

Hope you have a great weekend.

[truth2power]

18. One does not preclude the other. But thanks for the strawman...

And, yes, I'll blame America, (or the American Intelligence community) when it deserves blame.

Working to eradicate Polio in parts of the world where it is still endemic is an essential and worthwhile endeavor. But we do ourselves no good by contaminating a vaccination program with some hare-brained scheme perpetrated by the CIA. Those promoting vaccination campaigns must be scrupulously honest in their intentions.

The peoples in that part of the world have enough reasons, religious and otherwise, to resist vaccination programs. Why should we hand them another reason, on a silver platter?

C.I.A. Vaccine Ruse May Have Harmed the War on Polio

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/cia-vaccine-ruse-in-pakistan-may-have-harmed-polio-fight.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

In Pakistan, where polio has never been eliminated, the C.I.A.’s decision to send a vaccination team into the Bin Laden compound to gather information and DNA samples clearly hurt the national polio drive. The question is: How badly?

After the ruse by Dr. Shakil Afridi was revealed by a British newspaper a year ago, angry villagers, especially in the lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border, chased off legitimate vaccinators, accusing them of being spies.

And before someone jumps in to point out that the OBL-related vaccination program was about Hepatitis B and not Polio, it's all the same in the minds of villagers who see the medical personnel arrive and know they can't be trusted.

It's about ethics as well as practicality.

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. You said 'The people to blame are the "geniuses" in US intelligence'

so, no, it wasn't a strawman.

[truth2power]

25. I was responding to your subject line, "So you won't blame the people setting the bombs?"...

That's an unfounded and absurd assumption. It's not about either/or. It's about blowback.

It could have been predicted that if medical personnel were found to be spies, then someone was bound to start "offing" them. In that regard, the blame rests not only with the bombers but with the US intelligence agencies who were also culpable, if not legally, then morally.

[muriel_volestrangler]

27. You said 'The people to blame are the "geniuses" in US intelligence'

You didn't say 'they take some of the blame'. You said 'The people to blame are the "geniuses" in US intelligence'. You didn't say 'Some of the people to blame are...'. You said 'The people to blame are the "geniuses" in US intelligence'.

They attacked the vaccine workers long before bin Laden was identified. From the Guardian link above, 2007:

Aid workers fear they are being pushed into the frontline of the struggle between the government and tribal militants, some linked to the Taliban and al-Qaida. Last weekend a grenade was lobbed into a Red Crescent compound in Peshawar, damaging vehicles but killing nobody.

Some linked the attack to a fatwa issued in Dara Adam Khel, a lawless town famous for its gunsmiths, just before Christmas. A cleric named Mufti Khalid Shah declared a fatwa on employees of the UN, WHO and all other foreign organisations. "Killing their employees is in line with the teachings of jihad in Islam," said a notice.

"We are very worried," said Mr Khan, of the Human Rights Commission. "You have to be very careful about admitting to working for an NGO these days."

Recently aid workers in Bannu, near North Waziristan, were sent a letter and a 500 rupee (£4.50) note, he said. "The letter said they had a choice. They could either stop work or buy their own coffin."

You're just making excuses for murderous religious extremists.

[truth2power]

28. I have said it in many different ways..

"One does not preclude the other."

"It's not about either/or."

"Blame rests not only with the bombers, but with the US Intelligence agencies who are also culpable."

I'll say again...it's about blowback - when you do something shitty to someone and, down the road, another someone decides to even the score and you can't figure out why.

This all started because you accused me of holding the bombers blameless, which is absurd on its face.

I am finished with this conversation because I think you are being deliberately obtuse.

[aquart]

16. Did they give them real polio shots or not?

[Cali_Democrat]

22. Coming back to bite us in the ass?

It's the Pakistanis that are biting themselves in the ass with these bombings.

[truth2power]

24. Those who were bombed were bitten in the ass, so to speak. n/t

[Beacool]

26. Excuse me, but it's not our butts that are being bitten.

I personally don't give a hoot about their polio problem, since they are too ignorant or uncaring enough to vaccinate their children. Although I do feel for the kids, they always pay the price for the stupidity of the adults.

There were people opposed to vaccination even before the Osama Bin Laden issue. The Taliban is not exactly known for their progressive ideas.

[Igel]

11. This isn't new.

This kind of hatred dates from before the single known CIA use of a doctor inside Rawalpindi to try to nail down UBL's location. The only difference *after* that incident is it made for great PR by people with insufficient information to know that it was happening before that incident or that the incident in question was elsewhere, low key, and really not important to the people in Pakhtunkhwa.

Sorry, we have to blame the guilty in this case and can't find a local, domestic political enemy to heap all of crimes of the world on. Even if the worst thing in the world that could happen happens--we find ourselves on the same side as our ideological enemies.

[SamKnause]

13. I am aware.

That is why I typed partly.

U.S. drone attacks killing innocent people probably doesn't boost any trust for outsiders either.

[JackRiddler]

14. So this justifies what the CIA did?

No.

Amazing what excuses people will come up with.

And on a predominantly American board about U.S. politics, U.S. policy is always fair game - on every thread.

[aquart]

17. If we didn't give real shots and people thought they were protected...

Then you are right. Nothing justifies it.

If we gave real shots, then who cares what else they were hoping to get out of it?

But fake shots? Evil.

[truth2power]

19. You said, " If we gave real shots, then who cares what else they were hoping to get out of it?" ...

Because it's about trust and credibility. Did we think no one would ever find out about the hidden agenda?

By being duplicitous we impugned our very reason for being there. And as I said above, medical personnel must be scrupulously honest.

But I guess this is what comes from treating people in that part of the world like untermenschen, tools for U.S interests.

[aquart]

21. You still haven't said if the shots were real.

And I remain awed by the magical thinking naivete I see daily on this board.

I suggest starting a commune or free love monastery or someplace where such faith and purity of heart can live forever.

Everyone in EVERY nation is a tool for US interests. You think the British aren't? Or that they aren't doing the same thing as best they can with their diminished sovereignty?

Do you think WE aren't tools with the screeching cancer rates near nuclear facilities? With our fracking poisoned water?

Arghhh! I have no patience. None. Where do you live? Will you be a coastal refugee or will you take one in? Will you open your doors to the half-drowned from New York or Boston or Miami?

How about Syrians? Will you sponsor a Syrian family that has lost everything? How about Rohingya orphans? Will you rescue them from the sex trade? A widow and her children from CAR?

I'm not interested in purity. I want my country to survive the horror that's coming with constitution intact. That's going to be a bitch of a balancing act to achieve. Will we do STUPID things trying to survive? You betcha. But will we stand together or fall apart into little Somalias?

I want as many of us to come through it as possible and I fear for refugees everywhere because resources are tightening and all the wealth in in the hands of idiots. And people may not want to share what little they have but we have to. We have to.

Now answer the question: Were the shots real?

[truth2power]

23. "Were the shots real?" You can Google as well as I can. Go look it up...

But that's not the point.


You said:

"I'm not interested in purity. I want my country to survive the horror that's coming with constitution intact. That's going to be a bitch of a balancing act to achieve. Will we do STUPID things trying to survive? You betcha. But will we stand together or fall apart into little Somalias? "

The problem is that doing STUPID things and exploiting people around the world for our own ends is more likely than not to work to our detriment over the long haul. The arc of justice and all that.

Read Chalmers Johnsons' "Blowback", written 13 years ago. Actually, read the entire trilogy.

[seveneyes]

29. The results of allowing the teaching of hate and religious dogma

Allowing the taliban types to raise children to hate and remain ignorant will foster these kinds of atrocities. This should not be happening in this day and age.