A polio vaccination campaign worker was shot to death in Pakistan on Tuesday, which The New York Times wasted no time in reporting. What the Times article neglected to mention was that the killing followed a CIA operation in which agents orchestrated a fake vaccination program in order to gain entry to Osama Bin Laden\u2019s home. (The plot was based on knowledge that health workers had previously managed to enter Bin Laden\u2019s home to administer polio drops to the children.)<\/p>\n
The importance of such background information apparently eluded the Times, whose motto is \u2018All the News That\u2019s Fit to Print\u2019. It\u2019s easy to see why the details of the CIA operation were unfit for print: first, it\u2019s embarrassing to the U.S., which the paper is greatly biased toward; and second, Pakistan is an official enemy of the U.S., so it\u2019s an exercise in patriotism to imply that Pakistan is home to Muslim extremists who don\u2019t believe in vaccines or science, and therefore murder polio vaccine volunteers for sport. The nearest the Times article gets to mentioning the CIA\u2019s bogus vaccine program is a vague reference to \u201cthe Pakistani Taliban, who have criticized vaccination efforts as a cover for Western espionage.\u201d Not only does the NYT lack the integrity to recognize that \u201cvaccination efforts\u201d were in fact cover for Western espionage; they also imply that such notions are the result of some kind of sinister Taliban disinformation campaign.<\/p>\n
Like some kind of Billy Mays infomercial\u2014\u2018But wait, there\u2019s more!\u2019\u2014the Times\u2019 shameful coverage doesn\u2019t end there. They go on to say that, \u201cAlso [in addition to the Taliban], religious extremists claim that the real aim of vaccination campaigns is to sterilize Pakistan\u2019s Muslim population.\u201d The implication is again that Pakistan is populated with menacing religious zealots whose fundamentalism stands in the way of scientific progress. Characterizations such as these conform very nicely to the view that clashes between the West (i.e. NATO) and the Middle East are not rooted in any sort of real economic or political grievances (e.g., the U.S.\u2019 installation of dictators like the Shah in Iran; or the U.S.\u2019 theft of oil resources), but rather \u201ca clash of civilizations\u201d, as Foreign Affairs once put it. The view that there are irrevocable religious differences between the West and the Middle East is very useful to Western leaders seeking to justify acts of aggression, like the invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n
The Times can\u2019t plead ignorance of the CIA\u2019s false vaccination program. Just last year they published an article titled, \u201cC.I.A. Vaccine Ruse May Have Harmed the War on Polio.\u201d How NYT\u2019s own coverage didn\u2019t figure into another article on essentially the same topic is a fine illustration of the establishment media\u2019s studied obliviousness. And it\u2019s not as though they were oblivious to some marginal issue with the vaccine story. As a recent article in Scientific American states, \u201cthe CIA\u2019s fake vaccination campaign endangers us all\u201d by impeding the distribution of polio vaccines. Incidentally, Pakistan is one of the last few countries on the planet in which Polio persists.<\/p>\n