This was one story from our open-ended war: Last year, in a remote area of Afghanistan, 10 medical aid workers were ambushed and killed by militants. The New York Times Magazine and Slate published moving remembrances of some of the victims: Karen Woo, a British doctor who wanted to make a documentary about the lives of people in remote areas of Afghanistan; Tom Little and Dan Terry, who had spent decades bringing health care and other aid to the country. President Obama awarded Little the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a posthumous ceremony earlier this year. After the killings, the Taliban reportedly added a final insult. The victims, they claimed, were not really medical personnel. They were spies ‘on a clandestine mission against mujahideen in the area.’

Only: How do we know this was a vicious insult? The question should be obscene and unthinkable. Yet this month, the Obama administration admitted that the Central Intelligence Agency had staged a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan as American intelligence closed in on Osama Bin Laden. Health care workers were used on a clandestine mission-not in the paranoid imagination of America-hating fanatics but as part of the deliberate policy of the United States government.

As […]