US Military Now Changes Its Story on Bombing A Hospital: They Were Terrorists; Doctors Without Borders calls US bombing a war crime

[Exarch]

MSF has issued this statement:

“Today the US government has admitted that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff. Their description of the attack keeps changing—from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government. The reality is the US dropped those bombs. The US hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff. The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical.”

.

The U.S. seems to have picked the wrong group this time to attack from the air

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.This obfuscation tactic is the standard one the U.S. and Israel both use whenever they blow up civilian structures and slaughter large numbers of innocent people with airstrikes. Citizens of both countries are well-trained – like some tough, war-weary, cigar-chomping general – to reflexively spout the phrase “collateral damage,” which lets them forget about the whole thing and sleep soundly, telling themselves that these sorts of innocent little mistakes are inevitable even among the noblest and most well-intentioned war-fighters, such as their own governments. The phrase itself is beautifully technocratic: it requires no awareness of how many lives get extinguished, let alone acceptance of culpability. Just invoke that phrase and throw enough doubt on what happened in the first 48 hours and the media will quickly lose interest.
But there’s something significantly different about this incident that has caused this “mistake” claim to fail. Usually, the only voices protesting or challenging the claims of the U.S. military are the foreign, non-western victims who live in the cities and villages where the bombs fall. Those are easily ignored, or dismissed as either ignorant or dishonest. Those voices barely find their way into U.S. news stories, and when they do, they are stream-rolled by the official and/or anonymous claims of the U.S. military, which are typically treated by U.S. media outlets as unassailable authority.
In this case, though, the U.S. military bombed the hospital of an organization – Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)) – run by western-based physicians and other medical care professionals. They are not so easily ignored. Doctors who travel to dangerous war zones to treat injured human beings are regarded as noble and trustworthy. They’re difficult to marginalize and demonize. They give compelling, articulate interviews in English to U.S. media outlets. They are heard, and listened to.
MSF has used this platform, unapologetically and aggressively. They are clearly infuriated at the attack on their hospital and the deaths of their colleagues and patients. From the start, they have signaled an unwillingness to be shunted away with the usual “collateral damage” banalities and, more important, have refused to let the U.S. military and its allies get away with spouting obvious falsehoods. They want real answers. As the Guardian‘s Spencer Ackerman put it last night: “MSF’s been going incredibly hard, challenging every US/Afgh claim made about hospital bombing.”
In particular, MSF quickly publicized numerous facts that cast serious doubt on the original U.S. claim that the strike on the hospital was just an accident. To begin with, the organization had repeatedly advised the U.S. military of the exact GPS coordinates of the hospital. They did so most recently on September 29, just five days before the strike. Beyond that, MSF personnel at the facility “frantically” called U.S. military officials during the strike to advise them that the hospital was being hit and to plead with them to stop, but the strikes continued in a “sustained” manner for 30 more minutes. Finally, MSF yesterday said this:

The hospital was repeatedly & precisely hit during each aerial raid, while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched #Kunduz
— MSF International (@MSF) October 4, 2015

All of these facts make it extremely difficult – even for U.S. media outlets – to sell the “accident” story. At least as likely is that the hospital was deliberately targeted, chosen either by Afghan military officials who fed the coordinates to their U.S. military allies and/or by the U.S. military itself.
Even cynical critics of the U.S. have a hard time believing that the U.S. military would deliberately target a hospital with an airstrike (despite how many times the U.S. has destroyed hospitals with airstrikes). But in this case, there is long-standing tension between the Afghan military and this specific MSF hospital, grounded in the fact that the MSF – true to its name – treats all wounded human beings without first determining on which side they fight. That they provide medical treatment to wounded civilians and Taliban fighters alike has made them a target before.
In July – just 3 months ago – Reuters reported that Afghan special forces“raided” this exact MSF hospital in Kunduz, claiming an Al Qaeda member was a patient. This raid infuriated MSF staff:

The French aid group said its hospital was temporarily closed to new patients after armed soldiers had entered and behaved violently towards staff.
“This incident demonstrates a serious lack of respect for the medical mission, which is safeguarded under international humanitarian law,” MSF said in a statement.
A staff member who works for the aid group said, “The foreign doctors tried to stop the Afghan Special Operations guys, but they went in anyway, searching the hospital.”

The U.S. had previously targeted a hospital in a similar manner: “In 2009, a Swedish aid group accused U.S. forces of violating humanitarian principles by raiding a hospital in Wardak province, west of Kabul.”

News accounts of this weekend’s U.S. airstrike on that same hospital hinted cryptically at the hostility from the Afghan military. The first NYT story on the strike – while obscuring who carried out the strike – noted deep into the article that “the hospital treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked Afghan security forces.” Al Jazeera similarlyalluded to this tension, noting that “a caretaker at the hospital, who was severely injured in the air strike, told Al Jazeera that clinic’s medical staff did not favour any side of the conflict. ‘We are here to help and treat civilians,’ Abdul Manar said.”
As a result of all of this, there is now a radical shift in the story being told about this strike. No longer is it being depicted as some terrible accident of a wayward bomb. Instead, the predominant narrative from U.S. sources and their Afghan allies is that this attack was justified because the Taliban were using it as a “base.”
Fox News yesterday cited anonymous “defense officials” that while they “‘regret the loss’ of innocent life, they say the incident could have been avoided if the Taliban had not used the hospital as a base, and the civilians there as human shields.” In its first article on the attack, The Washington Postalso previewed this defense, quoting a “spokesman for the Afghan army’s 209th Corps in northern Afghanistan” as saying that “Taliban fighters are now hiding in ‘people’s houses, mosques and hospitals using civilians as human shields.'” AP yesterday actually claimed that it looked at a video and saw weaponry in the hospital’s windows, only to delete that claim with this correction:

The New York Times today – in a story ostensibly about the impact on area residents from the hospital’s destruction – printed paragraphs from anonymous officials justifying this strike: “there was heavy gunfire in the area around the hospital at the time of the airstrike, and that initial reports indicated that the Americans and Afghans on the ground near the hospital could not safely pull back without being dangerously exposed. American forces on the ground then called for air support, senior officials said.” It also claimed that “many residents of Kunduz, as well as people in Kabul, seemed willing to believe the accusations of some Afghan officials that there were Taliban fighters in the hospital shooting at American troops.” And this:

Still, some Afghan officials continued to suggest that the attack was justified. “I know that there were civilian casualties in the hospital, but a lot of senior Taliban were also killed,” said Abdul Wadud Paiman, a member of Parliament from Kunduz.

So now we’re into full-on justification mode: yes, we did it; yes, we did it on purpose; and we’re not sorry because we were right to do so since we think some Taliban fighters were at the hospital, perhaps even shooting at us. In response to the emergence of this justification claim, MSF expressed the exact level of revulsion appropriate (emphasis added):

“MSF is disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack on its hospital in Kunduz. These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present.
“This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimize the attack as ‘collateral damage.’
“There can be no justification for this abhorrent attack on our hospital that resulted in the deaths of MSF staff as they worked and patients as they lay in their beds. MSF reiterates its demand for a full transparent and independent international investigation.”

From the start, MSF made clear that none of its staff at the hospital heard or saw Taliban fighters engaging U.S. or Afghan forces:

To be clear; not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside #Kunduz hospital compound prior to US airstrikes Saturday morning
— MSF International (@MSF) October 4, 2015

But even if there were, only the most savage barbarians would decide that it’s justified to raze a hospital filled with doctors, nurses and patients to the ground. Yet mounting evidence suggests that this is exactly what the U.S. military did – either because it chose to do so or because its Afghan allies fed them the coordinates of this hospital which they have long disliked. As a result, we now have U.S. and Afghan officials expressly justifying the consummate war crime: deliberately attacking a hospital filled with doctors, nurses and wounded patients. And whatever else is true, the story of what happened here has been changing rapidly as facts emerge proving the initial claims to be false.
* * * * *
Just as this article was being published, NBC News published a report making clear that even the latest claims from the U.S. and Afghan governments are now falling apart. The Pentagon’s top four-star commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. John Campbell, now claims that “local Afghans forces asked for air support and U.S. forces were not under direct fire just prior to the U.S. bombardment” of the hospital. As NBC notes, this directly contradicts prior claims: “The Pentagon had previously said U.S. troops were under direct fire.”
See also from today: CNN and the NYT Are Deliberately Obscuring Who Perpetrated the Afghan Hospital Attack

In line with the UN condemning the attack on a hospital as a war crime, the MSF has come out and declared the bombing to be a war crime as well

Why did the US launch an airstrike on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan, killing 22 people, including three children?

The Pentagon changed its story today, and the humanitarian group demanded an independent international inquiry.
Doctors Without Borders is calling the incident a war crime, an assertion that rankles some experts.
“Under the rules of international humanitarian law, a hospital is a hospital and the people inside are patients — to target a medical facility in this way is a violation of that, whatever the circumstances,” Vickie Hawkins, executive director of the UK branch of Doctors Without Borders, tells The Takeaway. “The statements that have been coming out of the Afghan government in the past 24 hours would lead us to believe that there was some kind of intent behind the attack. We can only presume, on this basis, that that constitutes a war crime.”
The US says the strike in Kunduz, which is under investigation, was issued after Afghan forces came under fire near the hospital and then called for help.
“An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat and several civilians were accidentally struck,” the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, said during a press briefing Monday. “This is different from the initial reports which indicated that US forces were threatened and that the airstrike was called on their behalf.”
Though the aid group repeatedly said that there had been no fighting around the hospital, the building was hit over and over again, despite the fact that Doctors Without Borders sent the US military the precise GPS coordinates so the hospital could be avoided.
“When the bombing started, we were indeed in contact with military representatives in both Kabul and in Washington, but the bombing continued for another half hour to 40 minutes after those initial calls were made,” says Hawkins.
The hospital is the only facility of its kind in the northeast region of Afghanistan, and Hawkins says the compound where it sits was “precisely targeted,” adding that the intensive care unit and the emergency room were hit the worst. For four years, Doctors Without Borders has been using this facility to provide free high level trauma care to civilians in the area.
“For our medical staff, it was an absolutely terrifying experience,” says Hawkins. “The hospital itself had been very busy over the previous days [before the airstrike] — there’s been an uptick in the conflict around Kunduz, and we’ve had 400 patients over the last four days or so.”
According to Doctors Without Borders, more than 22,000 patients received care at the hospital in 2014, and more than 5,900 surgeries were performed during the same time period. When the hospital was hit, medical workers were in midsts of caring for patients.
“After the attack was over, we found one of our patients that was killed still on the operating table,” says Hawkins. “You can imagine for the medical staff that’s going about their night’s work, this is an absolutely a devastating experience for them.”
The group is now planning to leave the area, something that could be devastating to civilians in the area — Hawkins describes the trauma center as a “vital lifeline” for the community.
“A hospital should represent a place of sanctuary — it’s where people come when they’re at their most vulnerable,” she says. “Given the fact that the intensive care unit was targeted, we can presume that the most sick and vulnerable of our patients have been killed.”
But a war crime?
“I don’t think we know yet,” says Charlie Dunlap, a former Deputy Judge Advocate General for the US Air Force. He’s now a professor and director of the Center for Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University’s Law School. He says even in war time there should be a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
“What surprises me,” says Dunlap, “about what Doctors Without Borders is saying — an organization I previously had a lot of respect for — is they’re making conclusions before the facts have even been gathered.”
“In war zones there’s a lot of complexity about the application of force,” adds Dunlap, “and (about) what’s going on on the ground. We’ve all heard about the chaos, and fog and friction of war. And that’s what’s going on.”
“We need to assemble the facts before we start making very, very serious accusations against people.”
Doctors Without Borders says there were repeated attacks, about every 15 minutes, over the course of more than an hour. Neighboring buildings were unharmed. “That would seem to indicate that they were deliberately targeting that building,” says Dunlap. “But I don’t know if that means they’re deliberately targeting because it was a hospital.”
“International law does not prohibit conducting an attack, even when you know for an actual fact that civilian casualties will occur. What international law only prohibits is that they not be excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated. And that’s to preclude incentivizing parties to actually use civilians as human shields. Unfortunately though we’ve seen adversaries who nevertheless do it, and I think that is really one of the complications of 21st century warfare.”
“One of the things we need to look at, is of course whether it (the hospital) was being used in any way by the Taliban as a military position to shoot or launch attacks against Afghan and other allied forces.”
“Then we also have to explore whether a mistake was made,” says Dunlap. “In other words, it’s not a war crime if people are acting reasonably and doing the best they can in what we would all agree would be a very chaotic and difficult situation, and something you don’t want to happen, happens.”
“If a hospital is being used for military purposes, it can become a target. You still have to do a proportionality analysis. In other words, you have to make a determination that the anticipated military advantage you’re going to gain will not cost excessive civilian casualties.”
This report was based upon an interview onWhen news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.
This obfuscation tactic is the standard one the U.S. and Israel both use whenever they blow up civilian structures and slaughter large numbers of innocent people with airstrikes. Citizens of both countries are well-trained – like some tough, war-weary, cigar-chomping general – to reflexively spout the phrase “collateral damage,” which lets them forget about the whole thing and sleep soundly, telling themselves that these sorts of innocent little mistakes are inevitable even among the noblest and most well-intentioned war-fighters, such as their own governments. The phrase itself is beautifully technocratic: it requires no awareness of how many lives get extinguished, let alone acceptance of culpability. Just invoke that phrase and throw enough doubt on what happened in the first 48 hours and the media will quickly lose interest.
But there’s something significantly different about this incident that has caused this “mistake” claim to fail. Usually, the only voices protesting or challenging the claims of the U.S. military are the foreign, non-western victims who live in the cities and villages where the bombs fall. Those are easily ignored, or dismissed as either ignorant or dishonest. Those voices barely find their way into U.S. news stories, and when they do, they are stream-rolled by the official and/or anonymous claims of the U.S. military, which are typically treated by U.S. media outlets as unassailable authority.
In this case, though, the U.S. military bombed the hospital of an organization – Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)) – run by western-based physicians and other medical care professionals. They are not so easily ignored. Doctors who travel to dangerous war zones to treat injured human beings are regarded as noble and trustworthy. They’re difficult to marginalize and demonize. They give compelling, articulate interviews in English to U.S. media outlets. They are heard, and listened to.
MSF has used this platform, unapologetically and aggressively. They are clearly infuriated at the attack on their hospital and the deaths of their colleagues and patients. From the start, they have signaled an unwillingness to be shunted away with the usual “collateral damage” banalities and, more important, have refused to let the U.S. military and its allies get away with spouting obvious falsehoods. They want real answers. As the Guardian‘s Spencer Ackerman put it last night: “MSF’s been going incredibly hard, challenging every US/Afgh claim made about hospital bombing.”
In particular, MSF quickly publicized numerous facts that cast serious doubt on the original U.S. claim that the strike on the hospital was just an accident. To begin with, the organization had repeatedly advised the U.S. military of the exact GPS coordinates of the hospital. They did so most recently on September 29, just five days before the strike. Beyond that, MSF personnel at the facility “frantically” called U.S. military officials during the strike to advise them that the hospital was being hit and to plead with them to stop, but the strikes continued in a “sustained” manner for 30 more minutes. Finally, MSF yesterday said this:

The hospital was repeatedly & precisely hit during each aerial raid, while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched #Kunduz
— MSF International (@MSF) October 4, 2015

All of these facts make it extremely difficult – even for U.S. media outlets – to sell the “accident” story. At least as likely is that the hospital was deliberately targeted, chosen either by Afghan military officials who fed the coordinates to their U.S. military allies and/or by the U.S. military itself.
Even cynical critics of the U.S. have a hard time believing that the U.S. military would deliberately target a hospital with an airstrike (despite how many times the U.S. has destroyed hospitals with airstrikes). But in this case, there is long-standing tension between the Afghan military and this specific MSF hospital, grounded in the fact that the MSF – true to its name – treats all wounded human beings without first determining on which side they fight. That they provide medical treatment to wounded civilians and Taliban fighters alike has made them a target before.
In July – just 3 months ago – Reuters reported that Afghan special forces“raided” this exact MSF hospital in Kunduz, claiming an Al Qaeda member was a patient. This raid infuriated MSF staff:

The French aid group said its hospital was temporarily closed to new patients after armed soldiers had entered and behaved violently towards staff.
“This incident demonstrates a serious lack of respect for the medical mission, which is safeguarded under international humanitarian law,” MSF said in a statement.
A staff member who works for the aid group said, “The foreign doctors tried to stop the Afghan Special Operations guys, but they went in anyway, searching the hospital.”

The U.S. had previously targeted a hospital in a similar manner: “In 2009, a Swedish aid group accused U.S. forces of violating humanitarian principles by raiding a hospital in Wardak province, west of Kabul.”

News accounts of this weekend’s U.S. airstrike on that same hospital hinted cryptically at the hostility from the Afghan military. The first NYT story on the strike – while obscuring who carried out the strike – noted deep into the article that “the hospital treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked Afghan security forces.” Al Jazeera similarlyalluded to this tension, noting that “a caretaker at the hospital, who was severely injured in the air strike, told Al Jazeera that clinic’s medical staff did not favour any side of the conflict. ‘We are here to help and treat civilians,’ Abdul Manar said.”
As a result of all of this, there is now a radical shift in the story being told about this strike. No longer is it being depicted as some terrible accident of a wayward bomb. Instead, the predominant narrative from U.S. sources and their Afghan allies is that this attack was justified because the Taliban were using it as a “base.”
Fox News yesterday cited anonymous “defense officials” that while they “‘regret the loss’ of innocent life, they say the incident could have been avoided if the Taliban had not used the hospital as a base, and the civilians there as human shields.” In its first article on the attack, The Washington Postalso previewed this defense, quoting a “spokesman for the Afghan army’s 209th Corps in northern Afghanistan” as saying that “Taliban fighters are now hiding in ‘people’s houses, mosques and hospitals using civilians as human shields.'” AP yesterday actually claimed that it looked at a video and saw weaponry in the hospital’s windows, only to delete that claim with this correction:

The New York Times today – in a story ostensibly about the impact on area residents from the hospital’s destruction – printed paragraphs from anonymous officials justifying this strike: “there was heavy gunfire in the area around the hospital at the time of the airstrike, and that initial reports indicated that the Americans and Afghans on the ground near the hospital could not safely pull back without being dangerously exposed. American forces on the ground then called for air support, senior officials said.” It also claimed that “many residents of Kunduz, as well as people in Kabul, seemed willing to believe the accusations of some Afghan officials that there were Taliban fighters in the hospital shooting at American troops.” And this:

Still, some Afghan officials continued to suggest that the attack was justified. “I know that there were civilian casualties in the hospital, but a lot of senior Taliban were also killed,” said Abdul Wadud Paiman, a member of Parliament from Kunduz.

So now we’re into full-on justification mode: yes, we did it; yes, we did it on purpose; and we’re not sorry because we were right to do so since we think some Taliban fighters were at the hospital, perhaps even shooting at us. In response to the emergence of this justification claim, MSF expressed the exact level of revulsion appropriate (emphasis added):

“MSF is disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack on its hospital in Kunduz. These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present.
“This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimize the attack as ‘collateral damage.’
“There can be no justification for this abhorrent attack on our hospital that resulted in the deaths of MSF staff as they worked and patients as they lay in their beds. MSF reiterates its demand for a full transparent and independent international investigation.”

From the start, MSF made clear that none of its staff at the hospital heard or saw Taliban fighters engaging U.S. or Afghan forces:

To be clear; not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside #Kunduz hospital compound prior to US airstrikes Saturday morning
— MSF International (@MSF) October 4, 2015

But even if there were, only the most savage barbarians would decide that it’s justified to raze a hospital filled with doctors, nurses and patients to the ground. Yet mounting evidence suggests that this is exactly what the U.S. military did – either because it chose to do so or because its Afghan allies fed them the coordinates of this hospital which they have long disliked. As a result, we now have U.S. and Afghan officials expressly justifying the consummate war crime: deliberately attacking a hospital filled with doctors, nurses and wounded patients. And whatever else is true, the story of what happened here has been changing rapidly as facts emerge proving the initial claims to be false.
* * * * *
Just as this article was being published, NBC News published a report making clear that even the latest claims from the U.S. and Afghan governments are now falling apart. The Pentagon’s top four-star commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. John Campbell, now claims that “local Afghans forces asked for air support and U.S. forces were not under direct fire just prior to the U.S. bombardment” of the hospital. As NBC notes, this directly contradicts prior claims: “The Pentagon had previously said U.S. troops were under direct fire.”
See also from today: CNN and the NYT Are Deliberately Obscuring Who Perpetrated the Afghan Hospital Attack producer for The Takeaway. Christopher Woolf is a producer for PRI's The World. Listen to host Marco Werman's interview with Charlie Dunlap, former Deputy Judge Advocate General for the US Air Force here.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/...justification/

but what i want to know is when after MSF already gave the US their co-ordinates, and already informed the US military that they were being bombed, why the US kept bombinb the hospital for the next 60+ minutes?!

and now the Pentagon is changing its story; shameless, that's all i gotta say. It's disturbing how common the killing of civilians and bombing of hospitals has now become in today's US military. Seems like you get a My Lai every other week.

[snuggans]

i don't see any bombing damage to the hospital. it looks like a fire to me. an unfortunate accident. anybody else like the Russians or Chinese would have probably leveled half of Kunduz by now. this topic can be reasonably discussed in the Kunduz thread which seems to be the mainstay Afghan thread at the time, where the discussion on the hospital has already begun days ago.

[Heathen Hammer]

That's right, kids: When Assad bombs somebody he is doing it on purpose, when Obama is doing it, it is an "unfortunate accident". And then people wonder why most of the world views America as the biggest threat.

[Exarch]

i don't see any bombing damage to the hospital. it looks like a fire to me. an unfortunate accident. anybody else like the Russians or Chinese would have probably leveled half of Kunduz by now. this topic can be reasonably discussed in the Kunduz thread which seems to be the mainstay Afghan thread at the time, where the discussion on the hospital has already begun days ago.

this has become a seperate issue with respect to Kunduz, especially given the growing international condemnation of US Modus Operandi which considers hospitals and aid workers to be legitimate targets;

the bombing of a hospital falls under a war crime but i think it's highly revealing how apologists would like to squirrel away this war crime in a bland thread and hope noone else talks about it

[Roma_Victrix]

Wait a minute...didn't you just suggest in that refugee thread that male Muslim refugees in Europe should be sterilized and/or euthanized? Now you've taken up the cause of hospitals treating wounded Taliban insurgents? My God man, at least be consistent!

This isn't anywhere near as bad as My Lai, where that Vietnamese village was raped and slaughtered indiscriminately and without the "fog of war" and at least believable claims of making mistakes that can be applied to nearly all aerial assaults. That being said, the hospital did repeatedly provide its coordinates, so I'm not sure how this mistake was made. There's also the claim that Taliban fighters were using the hospital as a shield while taking up positions to fire at the Afghan army. The hospital has denied those allegations:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/do...it-air-n438251

[Exarch]

This isn't anywhere near as bad as My Lai, where that Vietnamese village was raped and slaughtered indiscriminately and without the "fog of war" and at least believable claims of making mistakes that can be applied to nearly all aerial assaults.

i do recall reading about how the one US officer who ordered his men to train guns on other US soldiers who were going to continue raping and slaughtering vietnamese villagers got court martialed and dishonourably discharged whereas that prick Calley only got a slap on the wrist.
Apparently, this creates a culture in the US military that demonstrates that My Lai is acceptable to US soldiers.

That being said, the hospital did repeatedly provide its coordinates, so I'm not sure how this mistake was made. There's also the claim that Taliban fighters were using the hospital as a shield while taking up positions to fire at the Afghan army. The hospital has denied those allegations:

ah yes, the hospital has 'denied those claims' like a shameful schoolboy being caught in class; man, the american propaganda is in full swing today, in the mass media AND the fora

[snuggans]

ok.. where is the bombing damage? you said in the OP that the hospital was subjected to bombing for 60+ minutes. why does it look like a fire instead?







also you should fix your OP, it looks to be poorly assembled due to the rush of excitement or zeal or something. like there are pastes of the same thing multiple times in spoilers and stuff

[Exarch]

ok.. where is the bombing damage? you said in the OP that the hospital was subjected to bombing for 60+ minutes. why does it look like a fire instead?






also you should fix your OP, it looks to be poorly assembled due to the rush of excitement or zeal or something. like there are pastes of the same thing multiple times in spoilers and stuff

two different articles which cite a similar occurence back in 2009; i spoilered Glenn Greenwald's article because i'd already quoted him.

But in any case, the fact that the MSF said the US continued bombing the hospital even after being told they had already been hit and it's on record as having occurred, then you can get your snazzy britches there's gonna be war crime indictments to be had.

Maybe some lowly US soldier will have to be the whipping boy, but hopefully there wont be any more bombings of hospitals to be had

[Heathen Hammer]

This isn't a 90s RTS where bombed buildings disappear from the map. You can clearly see heavy damage on the building. Here is a picture of building right after US attack:



In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds.

is very likely that whoever authorized the air strike will get away with no punishment, much like US military got away after massacring Vietnamese villages.

[snuggans]

.. uhmm you posted the same photo i did. showing no structural damage.

anyway, i'm raising the bullcrap card here on MSF's witness testimony. if you look at close-up pictures or videos of the hospital exterior you will notice that some walls are literally covered in bullet holes.

so i'm going to ask this MSF nurse something: before or after you witnessed this US airstrike hitting the hospital and causing no structural damage, did you notice any really loud gunfire and rounds pelting the exterior? maybe did you notice the several dozen taliban scum around the hospital?

something's off here for sure.

[Heathen Hammer]

And now we are uncovering MSF conspiracy to badmouth the Great US of A.
Next stop: blame victims of air-strike on "terrorists", or better yet, claim that victims themselves were terrorists.

you will notice that some walls are literally covered in bullet holes.

Shrapnel. There was no evidence that Taliban was present in the area.

[Adar]

How exactly have USA changed it's story on the MSF bombing?

Three days ago immediately after the bombings they stated:

A spokesman for the US military admitted they might be responsible for the air strike, which killed at least three people at a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan.
Colonel Brian Tribus, spokesman for international forces in Afghanistan, said: “US forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz city at 2:15am (local), 3 October, against individuals threatening the force.
“The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility. This incident is under investigation.”

Two days ago they stated that:

Pentagon chief Ash Carter also offered condolences but did not say whether a US aircraft responsible, saying: “a full investigation into the tragic incident is underway in coordination with the Afghan government.”

So step by step the US military investigates the bombing just like they said they would. Given the fact that we have a large number of stake holders and a pretty complicated command structure it really isn't surprising that this is not an instantaneous thing to do, especially as every individual stake holder among the organizations involved are likely to try to make themselves look as innocent as possible.

[ElvenKind]

I wonder how intelligent the "U.S Intelligence" is. Hospital is a hospital, that's a war crime.

World, it's about time to sanction these stupid motherers.

[Exarch]

How exactly have USA changed it's story on the MSF bombing?
.

Photo: Richard Drew/AP

CNN and the NYT Are Deliberately Obscuring Who Perpetrated the Afghan Hospital Attack

Glenn Greenwald
Oct. 5 2015, 10:41 p.m.

Much of the world spent the last 48 hours expressing revulsion at the U.S. airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. It was quite clear early on that the perpetrator of the attack was the U.S., and many media outlets and other organizations around the world have been stating this without any difficulties.
“U.S. Airstrike Kills 19 at Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan,”states the straightforward Wall Street Journal headline, under which appears this equally clear lede: “A U.S. airstrike in the Afghan city of Kunduz killed at least 19 people at a hospital run by international medical-aid organization Doctors Without Borders early Saturday, prompting condemnation from humanitarian groups and the United Nations.”

Human Rights Watch chose this as its headline: “US Airstrike Hits Kunduz Hospital.” And so on. Even the media outlets that early on took a more cautious approach nonetheless prominently identified right from the start — in their headline and/or lede — the key fact: namely, who was the likely perpetrator. This Vice headline states: “19 Dead After Apparent US Airstrike Hits MSF Hospital in Afghanistan”; USA Today’s headline read: “19 killed after Afghan hospital hit in suspected U.S. airstrike”; while NPR in its first sentence definitively stated that the hospital was hit by “an aerial attack carried out by U.S. forces.”
But not CNN and the New York Times. For the last 36 hours, and up through this moment, this is the extraordinary opening paragraph in the featured article on the attack from the cable news network:

We’re bravely here to report that these two incidents perhaps coincidentally occurred at “about” the same time: There was a hospital that blew up, and then there was this other event where the U.S. carried out an airstrike. As the blogger Billmon wrote: “London 1940: Civilians throughout the city were killed at about the same time as a German air strike, CNN reports.”
The entire article is designed to obfuscate who carried out this atrocity. The headline states: “Air attacks kill at least 19 at Afghanistan hospital; U.S. investigating.” What’s the U.S. role in this incident? They’re the investigators: like Sherlock Holmes after an unsolved crime.

The article itself repeatedly suggests the same: “The United States said it was investigating what struck the hospital during the night.” It’s a fascinating whodunit and the U.S. is determined to get to the bottom of it. Offering a tantalizing clue, CNN notes that “the circumstances weren’t immediately clear, but the U.S. military was conducting an airstrike in Kunduz at the time the hospital was hit, U.S. Army Col. Brian Tibus said.” So the U.S. commits a repugnant atrocity that, at the very best, was reckless, and CNN can’t bring itself to state clearly who did it.
In its own special way, the New York Times has been even more craven. Its original article on the attack opted for this bizarrelyagent-less formulation:

Some airstrike, traveling around on its own like a lost tourist, ran into a hospital in Afghanistan (admittedly, for sheer propagandistic obfuscation, nothing will ever top the repellent missile-tourism headline chosen by theNYT when Israel bombed a Gaza cafe in 2014 and killed 8 people: “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup”).
The article in the NYT’s Sunday print edition illustrated the pains the paper was suffering to avoid framing the story as what it was: a U.S. airstrike on a hospital. This is what readers of that paper saw on Sunday morning:

In fairness, this is a modest improvement from the day before, as it at least constitutes an acknowledgment that there are some people in the world who are blaming the U.S. for what happened — but none who are at the New York Times of course! That led Kade Crockford, in exasperation, to offer this obvious editorial suggestion:

Even as of this morning, more than 48 hours later, the NYT continues to obscure who perpetrated this attack. In a long article about the effects on the region’s residents from the destruction of their only hospital capable of advanced care, one reads and reads some more without any mention of who actually did this:

Note the lovely claim in the first paragraph that things have become so very “precarious for residents caught between government troops and Taliban militants after the withdrawal Sunday of an aid group that was one of the last providers of medical services there.” In addition to “government troops and Taliban militants,” they’ve also sort of been “caught between” massive American firepower that destroyed the hospital in question, though this unpleasant fact has been vanished from the NYT’s narrative of this event.
It’s not as though these media outlets have any doubt about who did this. Both the NYT and CNN eventually get around to acknowledging that it was the U.S. who did it. In today’s NYT article, for instance, the paper generously acknowledges in the third paragraph that “the Pentagon … has said it may have inadvertently struck the hospital during a military operation”; grants anonymity to a “senior U.S. military official” in the fourth paragraph tojustify why “American forces on the ground then called for air support”; and then, all the way down in the 10th paragraph, finally gets around to acknowledging that “the attack … appeared to have been carried out by American aircraft.”
The U.S. and its allies — in both the Afghan government and its own media — have now switched course from the “it was a collateral damage mistake” cliché to the proud “yes we did it and it was justified” boast (indeed, a large bulk of today’s NYT article, ostensibly about the effects of the hospital’s destruction, is actually devoted to giving voice to those who are justifying why the hospital was attacked, even as the framing of the article is designed to suppress the identity of the perpetrator). But from the start, not even the U.S. military had the audacity to try to obscure that they did this. They left that dirty work to their leading media outlets, which, as usual, are more than eager and happy to comply.

* * * * *

Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/...spital-attack/

I wonder how intelligent the "U.S Intelligence" is. Hospital is a hospital, that's a war crime.

World, it's about time to sanction these stupid motherers.

it was deliberate, and now the US is trying to muddy the waters so they wont get that much feared international pressure and a UN led investigation into the incident.

It also muddies US plans to keep bases in A-stan

[snuggans]

actually the attack on Kunduz (which is why we needed the Kunduz thread not this poor thread) is persuading top generals that the US should not be so hasty in withdrawing the residual force.

[Adar]

Source: https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/...spital-attack/



it was deliberate, and now the US is trying to muddy the waters so they wont get that much feared international pressure and a UN led investigation into the incident.

It also muddies US plans to keep bases in A-stan

Sources cited in the text you quoted are:
Wall street journal
Human Rights Watch
Vice news
NPR
CNN
NY Times
US Army Col Brian Tibus

Which mean that you quoted one military source. His statement was “the circumstances weren’t immediately clear, but the U.S. military was conducting an airstrike in Kunduz at the time the hospital was hit". Which mean that he was stating exactly what he knew at the time but did not want to speculate further as it would be a bit of a career killer to take responsibility for something if it turned out that the initial reports were wrong.

So what you are complaining about is pretty much the lack of a coordinated response from Western media which is a natural side effect of not having media controlled by the state. Some media report what they think happened and other media are just very careful. Furthermore I must say that the papers are impressively consistent with how they write their articles.

For example, your article complain about the headline "Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan"

Which was written by the same paper that the described the MH17 shootdown with the following headline "Jetliner Explodes over Ukraine; Struck by Missile, officials say".

Note how both statements lack an accusation and state what happened to the destroyed object. If you google the articles you will also note that they are written with the same kind of narrative where quotes by involved stakeholders are the focus of the article. So you might not like how the articles are written in the NYTimes. But I assume that you won't start arguing that the NYTimes is Pro-Russian as well, or will you?

[Phier]

I wonder how intelligent the "U.S Intelligence" is. Hospital is a hospital, that's a war crime.

Unless you were specifically targeting a hospital, and the building was not being used for combat purposes, its not a warcrime.

World, it's about time to sanction these stupid motherers.

Go for it.

[hellheaven1987]

I thought someone already mentioned it was a fire spreading from nearby bombing?

[Lazzeer]

"War Crime" is quite serious language. It may be a war crime, it may not be. It's quite dependent on circumstance. Certainly from my perspective here it appears there's insufficient information to prove either side.


Issues which make it more likely to be a war crime
- If the hospital/area was not used by the Taliban, but was directly targeted
- If the hospital/area was used by the Taliban, but only minimal concern was given to loss of civilian life

Issues which make it less likely to be a war crime
- If Taliban forces were within the hospital, and using it as a base during combat operations
- If the military advantage gained from bombing the hospital offset civilian loses (certainly doesn't look like this at the current time)
- If the bombing was unintentional (bombing in the area doesn't necessarily mean the hospital is being targeted)
- If the hospital damage isn't due to a direct strike, but has come out indirectly from the bombing (so say if the bombing hit a nearby target, and somehow caused a fire in the hospital)


It's somewhat hard to say a the moment. MSF naturally have an interest in being as forceful as possible - innocent civilians have died, and there's an interest in ensuring that such a *hail*storm is caused that these kind of areas become "no-go areas" for coalition forces. Simultaneously the US military has an interest in making it seem as competent, and humanitarian, as possible. Bombing hospitals doesn't help with that image.

Going by the pictures, there doesn't seem to necessarily be large structural damage, potentially suggesting that the hospital may not have been directly hit, which could suggest it wasn't directly targeted. The photos have been taken to look good in newspapers though, not to help provide legal assessments. It's possible there is worse damage than what is being shown. Simultaneously exactly what kind of ordinance was used is currently unknown. I also haven't seen any claims Taliban forces were also killed in the strike.

Edit: it looks like the claim now might be that instead of being bombed, the hospital may have instead been struck by AC-130 fire, which would be more consistent with the damage.

[Roma_Victrix]

"War Crime" is quite serious language. It may be a war crime, it may not be. It's quite dependent on circumstance. Certainly from my perspective here it appears there's insufficient information to prove either side.


Issues which make it more likely to be a war crime
- If the hospital/area was not used by the Taliban, but was directly targeted
- If the hospital/area was used by the Taliban, but only minimal concern was given to loss of civilian life

Issues which make it less likely to be a war crime
- If Taliban forces were within the hospital, and using it as a base during combat operations
- If the military advantage gained from bombing the hospital offset civilian loses (certainly doesn't look like this at the current time)
- If the bombing was unintentional (bombing in the area doesn't necessarily mean the hospital is being targeted)
- If the hospital damage isn't due to a direct strike, but has come out indirectly from the bombing (so say if the bombing hit a nearby target, and somehow caused a fire in the hospital)


It's somewhat hard to say a the moment. MSF naturally have an interest in being as forceful as possible - innocent civilians have died, and there's an interest in ensuring that such a *hail*storm is caused that these kind of areas become "no-go areas" for coalition forces. Simultaneously the US military has an interest in making it seem as competent, and humanitarian, as possible. Bombing hospitals doesn't help with that image.

Going by the pictures, there doesn't seem to necessarily be large structural damage, potentially suggesting that the hospital may not have been directly hit, which could suggest it wasn't directly targeted. The photos have been taken to look good in newspapers though, not to help provide legal assessments. It's possible there is worse damage than what is being shown. Simultaneously exactly what kind of ordinance was used is currently unknown. I also haven't seen any claims Taliban forces were also killed in the strike.

Edit: it looks like the claim now might be that instead of being bombed, the hospital may have instead been struck by AC-130 fire, which would be more consistent with the damage.

If the hospital partially burned down due to a fire caused by a nearby bomb exploding, the logical question then becomes this: why was a bombing so close to the hospital even necessary? The staff keep claiming that there were no firefights even close to the vicinity of the hospital.