Wikileaks has gained notoriety in the past few weeks for leaking confidential journals regarding the war (that was supposed to be over by now) in Afghanistan.  I moseyed on over and checked out the documents myself.   Boring.  I supposed I should have dug deeper, because nestled in the controversy was this gem of a story.  One of my least favorite newspapers has the scoop.

Mortars, Guns, Machettes….egh, the insurgents just find them all too boring of tools for killing invasive American Geologists.  Poison beer, now that’s fun!  That’s right, apparently the Wikileak documents purport that the ISI (Afghan spy agency) and insurgents actually intended on using the method with regularity.  Americans do love them some beer, after all.  And one American Geologists claims to have been a victim:

James Yeager, an American geologist who advised Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines, tells the Monitor he returned to his residence in Kabul to find it had been burgled. The intruder took money from a drawer and left behind a bottle of Corona beer.

The Corona bottle sat on his counter for the next two weeks Yeager says, because Corona is one of his least favorite beers. He finally opened it during a going away party as the other drinks began to run low.

“I pulled it out and when I popped it there was no fizz and the cap was loose,” says Yeager. “Because this one didn’t have fizz you wonder if it went rancid or not, and I just kind of sniffed it and I went ‘Oh, that doesn’t smell like beer.’ ”

Yeager, a geochemist familiar with acids, realized it smelled like sulfuric acid – otherwise known as battery acid. He called a friend over who had the same reaction to the smell. Yeager poured the “beer” into the toilet and it foamed and fizzed, leaving “no question” in his mind it was sulfuric acid.

Interestingly, the plan seems to have fouled up a bit at the beer choice.  Had it not been a disgusting Corona and perhaps a nice IPA, Yeager would have quaffed the beer without hesitating. Silly insurgents.  They didn’t even leave a lime?  Lucky for Yeager, his discriminating taste buds saved him from an esophagus full of Sulphuric Acid.

This puts a whole new spin on the term, “Alcohol Poisoning.”

In case anybody wonders, I will not be visiting Afghanistan any time soon.