This would be great if anyone could believe what the CIA says.

the Taliban in Pakistan had already opposed Western-backed vaccination campaigns, claiming that they were secret efforts to sterilize Muslim children

So they killed them because they thought the vaccinations were bad, but the SLOG are against this because the vaccinations are innocuous?

If there is a polio outbreak in Pakistan, a big cause of the problem is sanitation or the lack of sanitation. Much like leprosy, polio should be easily treated with proper sanitation and oral vaccine..

The CIA can be a bunch of criminal thugs, but these problems are more in how third world nations allocate their small resources for their huge problems...

Thank you Barack Obama and George Bush! You're just making the world love us even more!

@4 If there is a polio outbreak in Pakistan, I highly doubt that it is responsibility of the US, Unicef or the WHO. It is a huge problem that the government is not doing a good job with clean water and proper sanitation. If there is a polio outbreak, there is probably cholera problems and other water borne diseases along with parasites that are endemic in Pakistan right now. 90 million people shitting each day in bad sanitation conditions will caused huge health problems, especially with the children and the elderly..

I cannot imagine a better way to convince every last resident of Pakistan that WHO vaccination workers are, to a one, CIA spies than for the CIA to publicly declare that they will never again use vaccination workers as CIA plants.

Sometimes an embarrassed silence is a better tactic than even the most contrite press release. It was already going to take a generation or more for the memory of this disaster to fade; putting it into the public record that it happened basically ensures that it never will.

Well, the senior counterterrorism adviser has sent a letter stating that this will no longer happen, so that will be the end of that.

No more discussion needed!

No more cover as health workers? Good thing they still have Washington State IDs to fall back on.

The CIA should have known better after the USSR attacked AIDS education/prevention as being a CIA plot.

Government lies all the time they don't give a fuck. This will never end so long as they get what they want from it. The blood of those workers are on our government's hands.

Are we seriously blaming the murder of immunization workers on the CIA using them as a cover for intelligence gathering? While we're at it, we might as well blame Hideki Tojo for the internment of Americans of Japanese heritage during World War II. And how about blaming Al Qaeda for the hate crimes committed against Sikhs and Muslims in the USA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks?
Put the blame where it belongs: on the heads of the people who inflicted injustice, not on those whom they perceived as enemy infiltrators.

@11: Bullshit. The CIA had a moral responsibility not to undermine public health programs. Yes, al Qaeda and the Taliban are doing the killings, but the CIA should have know that abusing these programs for intelligence purposes could have resulted in this. If the CIA would have used alternate methods, it is likely that immunization workers wouldn't be killed and that tons of kids wouldn't be getting sick. The CIA certainly has some responsibility for these deaths.

I would argue that there needs to be a new Geneva convention that prohibits intelligence agencies from undermining public health programs. This may be the only way of restoring confidence in those programs.

@12: I'm not saying that the CIA was necessarily right to take such measures, but we're forgetting who the real enemies are here: the people who think it's acceptable to massacre aid workers.

@13: Those people will always exist. But we can't give in to "the ends justify the means" type thinking where we think it was justified to allow civilians to be killed as long as we achieved our goal. The Geneva conventions prevents a lot of this type of bullshit. You can't hide a piece of artillery as a hospital vehicle. Nor should you be able to use public health services for intelligence or military purposes.