After Bin Laden raid, CIA Pakistan chief came home suspecting poisoning by ISI | Hacker News Reader

After Bin Laden raid, CIA Pakistan chief came home suspecting poisoning by ISI

washingtonpost.com

60 pointssuprgeek30 comments

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 and of course the by-now-standard literature of looming tower / ghost wars / &c.

I hope you were being sarcastic when you mentioned that Twitter account. But then the structure of your comment really leaves a lot to be desired.

If I have to go by that Twitter feed it sounds more like coming from s certain gentleman named Zaid Hamid from Pakistan.

mention it to him next time you see him in person and see what happens. be prepared @balladeer, -- he might deny it!

It's also worth noting that the Pakistani military/ISI are not under the control of the democratic government, even today (and much more so in the mid-to-late 90's)

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.

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).

"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.

rumor has it she told the general she didn't think he would be able to perform.

giving an in-depth af/pak primer would not help because most here on hn lack context. plus, if i were to recommend carlotta, or haqqani, or some such i would be accused of any number of biases. best to just give intro books and let the motivated readers dig through the footnotes and explore on their own.

Intro books != the standard literature? But more importantly there is more to Pakistani politics than the Af/Pak conflict. I dont understand why you continue to equate af/pak with the entirety of "the byzantine warren of pak politics."

Here's a recent tweet from that person:

Christine Fair ‏@CChristineFair 9h9 hours ago The more I learn about ISIS...the more I love battlefield nuclear weapons.

> “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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

( .) ( .)

>... "The Pakistani equivalent of a McMansion in Falls Church"

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...

Caution: Homeland spoilers ahead /s

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.

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?

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.

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...

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

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...

>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.

I think that it is well established that placebos, in general, that involve breaking the skin are more effective than ones that don't (ISTR this was an significant issue with some research that claimed to show acupuncture was better than a placebo, but used a placebo treatment that did not involve breaking the skin.)

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

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.

posted. 'the curious case of aq khan'.

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