Jessica Firber of CBS News reports CIA says it will not use vaccine programs for spying" Todd Ebitz, a spokesperson for the CIA told CBS news that the CIA will no longer use international NGO vaccination programs as "covers" for spying operations after concerns and protests have been raised by international public health organizations that their workers were being attacked and people in some regions were resisting vaccination programs after news of the CIA's practices has spread, especially in Pakistan as I have reported here previously describing the reason for the major outbreak of polio there this last year.
"The CIA will make no operational use of vaccination programs, which includes vaccination workers. Similarly, the agency will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs," she wrote in the letter obtained by CBS News.
In May 2012, a Pakistani doctor helped in the operation to track down Osama bin Laden by providing polio vaccinations as cover while attempting to obtain DNA samples from children in the Abbottabad compound where the terrorist leader was believed to be hiding. Shakil Afridi was sentenced to 33 years in prison for conspiring against the state; the verdict that was later overturned and he is facing a retrial. ...
Last month I posted an article about the resurgence of polio which seems to have been centered in Pakistan because of strong local resistance to vaccination programs, as well as attacks on heath workers since the "Afridi - Osama bin Laden - CIA incident."
Many have said Dr. Afrida's involvement in the operation has spurred widespread militant attacks on vaccination workers in Pakistan. However, Ebitz disputes this claim.
Earlier this month the World Health Organization issued a report that found a majority of polio incidences in Middle East region occurred in Pakistan. It warned that of a growing threat to public health and said Pakistan is largely responsible for the resurgence of the virus , which causes paralysis but can be effectively prevented with vaccines.
Well better late than never. This is an example of the "Fixes that Backfire", aka "Fixes that Fail" Systems Thinking Archetype that occurs when ones solution to a problem creates an unintended side-effect which is accumulated in a delay that eventually makes the problem worse. This is the most simple archetypes and the first we teach in the first morning of a three - day introductory course. Any organization with the word Intelligence capitalized in its name ought to have been able to anticipate this.
In this case in an effort to reduce the number of terrorists in a region they use NGO heath workers vaccination programs as a cover for covert operation. This works in the short-term creating at balancing feedback loop (aka negative feedback loop in control theory mathematics) which stabilized and reduces the number of terrors producing the hoped for "goal seeking behavior."
Unfortunately, the unintended side-effects which is going on, is that as the local population discovers this fraud, they distrust and reject all NGOs, and health workers, as well as western governments, hatred for the west increases, and sympathy for the "terrorists" goes up. In the eyes of the local people these are now the "freedom fighters and we must rename this variable as "rebel forces" to handle positive or negative valences, (this is also a mathematical integration when expressed mathematically.)
The increased number of terrorists, combined with increased hatred of the west, and sympathy for the "rebel forces" creates three reinforcing feedback loops (aka positive feedback oops in control theory or engineering lingo) all increasing the amount terrorism to a higher level than it was before. Reinforcing feedback loops produce the behavior pattern of exponential growth or collapse, so the very intervention the CIA enacted to to stabilize this system the CIA accomplished the opposite and destabilized it.
Now in his case, they may have anticipated this, calculated the benefit/cost ratio and figured whatever outbreaks of epidemics, or escalation of global terrorism was worth it for locating OBL but I wouldn''t be surprised it they did not give this the full proper strategic assessment. The children paralyzed for life with polio may have a different opinion about this calculation.
While it is encouraging to see the CIA has learned his simple lesson after a year and a half in Pakistan, the more relevant questions with these archetypes is to apply them to see the deeper patterns in one thinking so you can avoid these errors in advance before one makes them. Given the professionalism, and caliber of these organizations and their importance and given the numbers of this same class of errors we see the CIA, the DEA, the NSA, and the CIA and DEA making in their recently discussed joint operations lets hope they get a hold of a basic introductory training workshop for a 3 of 5 day course A.S.A.P and conduct an internal strategic feedback audit of their ways of thinking, their strategic paradigms, and our nations foreign national security policies.
It not just that a 'mind is a terrible thing to waste," as the DEA likes to say," but a nation's international credibility, reputation, perceived legitimacy, foreign policy leverage and opportunities should not be wasted either. Surely we can do better than this.
But, let's encourage and congratulate positive steps in the right direction and acknowledge this is good news after a misstep. The agency was under tremendous internal and external pressure to find Osama bin Ladin. It is not possible not to make errors in a world this complicated. We should be encouraged that the CIA owned this error, corrected, publicly contacted the health organizations involved, and announced their action to the public media. This is an example of a "fundamental solution" of the second Systems Thinking archetype, "Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor." They successfully avoided the blunder of the "Symptomatic Solution" which would have been to try to keep this secret to avoid short-term embarrassment.
Maybe I have to retract my snarky comments above. They may have already taken such a workshop and are just warming up. If so bravo! Let's hope for more improved performance. We are going to need it in an increasing unstable world challenged with global warming.
6:49 AM PT: Hannah's comment identified another significant and highly consequential FtB aka FtF archetype that I should have noticed and pointed out here. Thank you for call it to our attention Hannah. I have to rush off to a meeting so I'm just going to copy her comment and my reaction here.
And the Central Intelligence Agency is to be (2+ / 0-)
believed why?
There is nothing intelligent about spying. Spying is a voyeuristic act whose veracity is dubious for the simple reason that appearances are misleading. Superficial optics rarely provide intelligence -- i.e. evidence of what is inside. Moreover, it seems likely that people, who are inclined towards observing what other people do, do so because they themselves can't act. That is, they have no initiative because their creative juices are somehow lacking. Perhaps that's because their brains do not compute processes. But, if that's the case, then no amount of observation will reveal what the observed are actually doing.
It's sort of like listening to someone speaking a language one doesn't understand.
http://hannah.smith-family.com
by hannah on Tue May 20, 2014 at 02:55:24 AM PDT
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You've identified another unintended side effect here that creates another fixes that backfire archetype that I should have seen Hannah. The credibility of the CIA and the USA is damaged so fewer believe what we say.
Also our perceived relative legitimacy compared to that of alternative groups such as al Qaeda is reduced. Every person in the world has there own perception of this. "Reality" is in the eye of the beholder.
Moderate Arabs may no longer be able to have coffee sitting outside in a cafe and speak of the possibility of America being a force of good because public opinion in an area has swung so far against us.
This public opinion is made up not just of this one incident but include drone strikes where we kill a wedding party of 80 including women an children to kill one identified terrorist and then count them all as unidentified enemy combatant because their bodies were laying next to the "terrorists" in the afteraction review.
Thanks for commenting Hannah.
7:17 AM PT: Thanks to Pluto for this link to an excellent Washington Post Article
CIA: No more vaccination campaigns in spy operations
Responding to a letter from the deans of 12 U.S. public health schools, Lisa Monaco, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, informed them last week that the CIA will no longer conduct such campaigns, White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.
The deans wrote to President Obama in January 2013 to protest the precedent set when the CIA used Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani surgeon, to seek information about bin Laden under the guise of conducting a hepatitis immunization survey in the northwest city where the al-Qaeda leader was later killed in a raid. The goal of the immunization survey was to obtain fluid containing DNA from relatives living near the bin Laden residence. The effort failed, and Afridi was convicted of treason in Pakistan. He has been sentenced to 23 years in prison.
“This disguising of an intelligence-gathering effort as a humanitarian public health service has resulted in serious collateral consequences that affect the public health community,” the deans wrote.
The administration’s response Friday said that under CIA policy, established by CIA Director John Brennan in August 2013, “the Agency will make no operational use of vaccination programs, which includes vaccination workers.” The letter also said the agency “will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs.”
7:38 AM PT: This is turning out to be a rather dramatic example of the Fixes that Bacfire Archetype, maybe the most consequential I've seen in a long time. I must ge a graphic package because you have to see these drawn out and visualized to really "see" them (obviously.) Samanthab calls our attention to another unintended consequence of this raid, the enormous damage we've done to our relationship with Pakistan which we've now compounded by cutting off $800 million in aid because they will no longer cooperate with our "anti-terrorism" program. Remember Pakistan has nuclear bombs which we wish to keep out of the hands of terrorists.
CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden's family DNA
As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents. ...The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.
Relations between Washington and Islamabad, already severely strained by the Bin Laden operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor's arrest has exacerbated these tensions. The US is understood to be concerned for the doctor's safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf.
Pakistan is furious over being kept in the dark about the raid, and the US is angry that the Pakistani investigation appears more focused on finding out how the CIA was able to track down the al-Qaida leader than on how Bin Laden was able to live in Abbottabad for five years.
Over the weekend, relations were pummelled further when the US announced that it would cut $800m (£500m) worth of military aid as punishment for Pakistan's perceived lack of co-operation in the anti-terror fight. William Daley, the White House chief of staff, went on US television on Sunday to say: "Obviously, there's still a lot of pain that the political system in Pakistan is feeling by virtue of the raid that we did to get Osama bin Laden, something the president felt strongly about and we have no regrets over."