
After Bin Laden raid, CIA Pakistan chief came home suspecting poisoning by ISI - suprgeek
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-bin-laden-raids-shadow-bad-blood-and-the-suspected-poisoning-of-a-cia-officer/2016/05/05/ace85354-0c83-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html
======
SocksCanClose
there's a long history of a sort of multi-faced foreign policy pursued by the
disparate factions that exist amongst pakistani leadership. from the ISI to
the military to the various political parties, there's just many folks who
each have their own set of priorities. surely some of them were friendly to
UBL, and they believed could be set as a tool against India, and other
regional powers (cf mumbai and illyas kashmiri).

your best source of information on the byzantine warren of pak politics is the
indomitable professor chris fair of georgetown university, whose twitter is
here: [https://twitter.com/CChristineFair](https://twitter.com/CChristineFair)
and of course the by-now-standard literature of looming tower / ghost wars /
&c.

~~~
dfc
I dont share the other commenter's criticism of the structure of your comment,
but I have to admit to being a little unimpressed with the twitter suggestion.
The US/Pakistan relationship is something that I find very interesting and
confusing. Maybe the most recent tweets are not indicative of the normal
quality? You have to hope that the linked twitter account is not the best
source out there. The books you mentioned are certainly part of the standard
literature as far as Af-Pak politics goes, but they say little to nothing
about the India/Pakistan relationship or the multitude of Pakistan's domestic
conflicts.

~~~
sremani
Dr. Fair is an interesting character, she is well versed in Urdu and Punjabi
and has travelled Pakistan. Probably few people in US who knows Pakistan very
intimately. She is not a political scientist but I think she is into studying
languages. Many policy makers including State department do not have depth, at
least are more exposed to English press in foreign countries which tend to be
"liberal" than their native counterparts, ex. Al Jazeera English is not as
loco as Al Jazeera Arabic. So, they get a filtered liberal view, Dr. Fair was
able to access the "Greenbook" that military publication by Pak Army for Pak
Army consumption, and translate it, and there are major major gaps between the
narrative told to the state department vs, what Pakistani Generals and Cadre
are talking among themselves.

To dismiss Dr. Fair as some kind of wing-nut, conspiracy theorist (say Zaid
Hamid) is insane. You may disagree with her conclusions, but that woman has
put some major major work in the field.

She has become such a threat that she was banned from entering Pakistan and
one General actually threatened her with Gang Rape (according to her).

~~~
dfc
"To dismiss Dr. Fair as some kind of wing-nut...is insane."

Lucky me, I gave you no reason to doubt my sanity? I think you replied to the
wrong comment.

------
maxander
> “Stress does funny things to the body,” said one former senior agency
> official who added that “there is zero evidence” Kelton was poisoned.

> After recovering, he was named deputy director for counterintelligence, a
> job that put him in charge of protecting the agency from foreign spy
> services.

Whatever the going theory of what caused it is, they didn't see fit to give
him a low-stress posting. Merely a domestic one. Hmm!

...Really though, the author of the article probably put those bits in
specifically for smartasses like us to find, because news is entertainment
these days and its fun to feel clever.

------
fiatmoney
Bin Laden hanging out for years in the Pakistani equivalent of a McMansion in
Falls Church should raise some pretty major suspicions of everyone involved.

~~~
qq66
The Cleveland kidnapper kept 3 women forcibly imprisoned in his house for 10
years before someone noticed. It's definitely possible to "hide in plain
sight."

~~~
dfc
Its possible you missed the Falls Church reference, as you are missing the
other half of the comment. There is hiding in plain sight, and then there is
hiding in plain sight in the center of a country's defense establishment.

~~~
superuser2
The DC area isn't necessarily under any more scrutiny than the rest of the
country. It contains more than its share of physically secure compounds under
armed guard, and some important people with bodyguards at home, but other than
the increased likelihood of being spotted by a CIA analyst at the grocery
store I'm not sured how they'd have an easier time finding someone there.

~~~
fiatmoney
It's not even necessarily about "easier to find"; it's about "more convenient
to keep track of".

------
pvaldes
Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not trying to plainly reject the idea, but the sad fact
is that people can get very ill in war zones just by bad luck even if not
directly poisoned by the enemy (as a lot of gulf war soldiers could tell us).
Of course, scavengers in isolated and small villages never reach the first
page of newspapers when get poisoned by toxic bomb remains and die. Deplected
Uranium munition (DU) was profusely fired and it seems that more than 300
places in Iraq are still contaminated with toxic waste and DU spreading by
army was comparised to having "100 Chernobyl accidents" in this countries.
There has been a documented dramatic increase in childhood cancers since
Gulf's war for example. Nobody can predict after a entire life of endless war
where this metal scraps are now; if your work is to go to this villages and
talk for hours with local people when sipping tea, you could sadly end sharing
the same fate just by chance.

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/06/iraq-
depl...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/06/iraq-depleted-
uranium-clean-up-contamination-spreads)

------
peteretep
Caution: Homeland spoilers ahead /s

------
Aelinsaar
Interesting, but it sounds entirely speculative to me. A poison that
presumably damaged something that was repaired through surgery, but which left
no trace seems... possible, but unlikely.

~~~
nitrogen
Also known to make people double over in pain, attack suddenly, and be
relieved with abdominal surgery: appendicitis. I read a few paragraphs of the
article, but did not continue. Was there any explanation of why poisoning is a
likely possibility?

~~~
exhilaration
Surprisingly the article does the opposite:

    
    
      “Stress does funny things to the body,” said 
       one former senior [Central Intelligence] 
       Agency official who added that “there is 
       zero evidence” Kelton was poisoned.

~~~
a_bonobo
There's also evidence that "placebo surgery" works with pain-related
conditions - you essentially fake a surgery and in some cases it's as good as
actually performing the surgery, which would explain why a surgery would heal
stress-related pain problems in this case.

Source:

>Last week the New England Journal of Medicine published yet another trial
showing that fake surgery can be as good as the real thing. This time the
subjects were candidates for knee surgery, with a torn meniscus and
debilitating pain. When they arrived in the operating room, study surgeons in
Finland performed either a meticulous repair of the torn cartilage, or a
charade. Incisions were made, and closed, with no other intervention. In case
anesthetized patients could hear or understand, the doctors and nurses passed
instruments, made surgical sounds, and pretended to do surgery for as long as
the procedure would normally take.

>Both surgeries worked.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-h-newman-md/placebo-
surg...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-h-newman-md/placebo-
surgery_b_4545071.html)

~~~
nitrogen
Is it possible that making the incision caused the body to repair the damage
itself?

~~~
a_bonobo
It's certainly possible - but there are other sham/placebo operations with no
incision that work equally well too, such as this laser operation:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109705...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109705019297)

>After completing the LV mapping procedure and deciding on the potential DMR
treatment zones, the patients were randomized to placebo (mock procedure, 102
patients), low-dose (98 patients), or high-dose (98 patients) DMR treatment.
If the patient was randomized to placebo, the laser (already in the room) was
turned on but no further procedure was performed. If the patient was
randomized to receive the Biosense DMR treatment, a laser catheter was
introduced and advanced to the LV (left ventricle).

This sounds (not 100% sure) as if there was no incision at all in the placebo
group.

------
coderdude
Alright, may the most meta intelligence service win. Inter-? Count me aboard.

------
SocksCanClose
also -- and completely orthogonal -- while we're on the subject of strange
pakistan doings, check out the curious tale of abdul qadir khan, the father of
the pakistani nuclear bomb. i'll pull the old atlantic story and post in a few
mins.

~~~
SocksCanClose
posted. 'the curious case of aq khan'.

