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

there&#x27;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&#x27;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).<p>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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CChristineFair" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CChristineFair</a> and of course the by-now-standard literature of looming tower &#x2F; ghost wars &#x2F; &amp;c.

&gt; “Stress does funny things to the body,” said one former senior agency official who added that “there is zero evidence” Kelton was poisoned.<p>&gt; After recovering, he was named deputy director for counterintelligence, a job that put him in charge of protecting the agency from foreign spy services.<p>Whatever the going theory of what caused it is, they didn&#x27;t see fit to give him a low-stress posting. Merely a domestic one. Hmm!<p>...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.

Maybe. Maybe not. I&#x27;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 &quot;100 Chernobyl accidents&quot; in this countries. There has been a documented dramatic increase in childhood cancers since Gulf&#x27;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.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2013&#x2F;mar&#x2F;06&#x2F;iraq-depleted-uranium-clean-up-contamination-spreads" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2013&#x2F;mar&#x2F;06&#x2F;iraq-depl...</a>

Caution: Homeland spoilers ahead &#x2F;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.

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

also -- and completely orthogonal -- while we&#x27;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&#x27;ll pull the old atlantic story and post in a few mins.