In the latest in an unending series of
U.S. atrocities (a series that goes back to the nation's founding,
actually), the U.S. military launched an hour-long aerial
bombardment of a hospital run by the French humanitarian
organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) in
Kunduz, Afghanistan. The aerial bombardment, which lasted an hour,
commenced in the middle of the night around 2 am local time on October
3rd. The duration and repetitive nature of the attack is important to
keep in mind, as the Western media is using the words“bombed” and
“bombing,” which implies a single strike, even a single munition. This
misimpression slides right into the “accident” alibi lie, which is sure
to come next.
After days of evasions and lies in which the U.S. military denied it
bombed the hospital, while simultaneously contradicting itself by
saying maybe the hospital was “collateral damage,” and putting it about
that there was fighting with the Taliban “in the area of the hospital,” a
claim seized on and repeated by media, implying right next to the
hospital, by noon (Washington, D.C. time) on October 5 the U.S.
government domestic propaganda radio network NPR announced that the U.S.
military admitted it bombed the hospital, justifying it by saying that
their Afghan proteges had requested the strike. The Afghans have been
falsely claiming that the Taliban were firing from the hospital. (None
other than NPR's own Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman pointed out the
day before that even if true, attacking the hospital would still be
illegal and possibly a war crime. MSF has vigorously denied the claim.
If armed men took over one of their facilities they would have ceased
operations there, they explained.)
[1]
The Afghans propped up by the West as a putative government apparently
have it in for MSF, Several years ago they arranged to plant a couple of
pistols in an MSF hospital in Helmand province, which they then
proceeded to raid along with British troops, arresting staff. Maybe they
can't stand the example MSF sets of providing medical services to the
Afghan population, something the “government” utterly fails to do.
(Hell, they don't even provide care for their own wounded troops! And
the scum who run the military hospitals steals the medicines and
supplies and sell them, according to bourgeois media reports.)
The U.S. media luckily has a useful distraction they can focus on- the
killings of 9 people last week in Oregon by an unhappy asshole. This, 5
days later, is still a much bigger story than the story of the MSF
hospital bombing, done not by a lone malcontent, but by the United
States Government.
[Another egregious atrocity barely mentioned at all in the U.S. was the
Saudi bombing of a wedding party in Yemen last week, killing 130 people,
In fact it was bombed twice- with U.S.-supplied warplanes and
munitions. This is part of a more than 6 month old terror campaign which
has targeted markets, mosques, and homes, killing over 1,000 civilians
so far, with U.S. support and virtual silence by the U.S. media. The
Iran bogeyman is invoked as justification. But man, we're getting the
full sad violin treatment for 9 people shot in Oregon.]
Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, Barack
Obama, acts as if he is a mere bystander to all this, with no
responsibility. This is a common dodge with him. He did the same with
climate change, granting Shell Oil drilling rights in the Arctic while
simultaneously giving a speech about how something must be done about
climate change. Or decrying mass incarceration as if he himself has no
power or responsibility for how many people are locked up. The pattern
is he commits a crime or immoral act, and then exhorts others to remedy
the “problem,”
His War Secretary, Ashton Carter, has been uttering vague and anodyne statements.
But
let us back up and review the evidence that from the start demonstrated
this was obviously a premeditated, deliberate assault, and not an
“accident” or “mistake,” words already being bandied about (such as by
the New York Times, still the premiere voice of the American bourgeois
establishment).
The following facts are all from early BBC reports, which
dribbled in over the first few hours after the crime. NPR and most U.S.
media ignored these facts, at least at first:
-MSF
repeatedly provided the precise GPS coordinates of the hospital to all
sides in the conflict prior to the attack, including on September 27.
Once the bombing commenced, frantic calls were made to NATO in Kabul and
even to Washington. The bombing continued for another half hour anyway.
-The bombing occurred for an hour at 15 minute intervals.
-The U.S. military provided no explanation or apology to MSF.
-The U.S. military
issued smarmy, ambiguous statements about them bombing “in the area” and
“there may have been collateral damage,” obviously hedging and keeping
their options open about whether they would go with a full-fledged,
brazen denial, or an “oops, sorry, it was an accident” cover story. In
fact, NPR reported just hours after the attack that “the U.S. is
investigating whether” the U.S. bombed the hospital. What, you don't
even know what you bomb? With all your “precision” targeting and
“surgical” bombing? In fact, if you're doing close-in air support of
ground operations, you're going to be quite accurate.
It looked at first as if the U.S. took
advantage of the “cover of war” to attack an institution it has some
beef against. My immediate suspicion was that the U.S. thought (or
feared) that MSF was treating wounded Taliban. This hunch had added
weight later by part of a New York Times article on the attack. [2] Here are paragraphs 20 and 21 of the article, a safe place to relegate a possible motive to:
“Accounts
differed as to whether there had been fighting around the hospital that
might have precipitated the strike. Three hospital employees, an aide
who was wounded in the bombing and two nurses who emerged unscathed,
said that there had been no fighting in the hospital’s immediate
vicinity and no Taliban fighters in the hospital.
“
But a Kunduz police spokesman,
Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, said Taliban fighters had entered the hospital
and were using it as a firing position. The hospital treated the
wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked
Afghan security forces. In a Twitter post, Arjan Hehenkamp,
director of Doctors Without Borders in the Netherlands, denied that
Taliban fighters had been in the hospital, saying that only staff,
patients and caretakers had been inside. [My emphasis.]”
The article also mentions that the Afghans used attack helicopters in
Kunduz, so it's possible the Afghans were the criminal attackers. But
paragraph five cites
an anonymous U.S. official saying that “the attack may have been
carried out by an American AC-130 gunship that was supporting Special
Operations forces on the ground in Kunduz,” in the
Times words.
And U.S. Special Forces are notorious for their unrestrained, immoral
violence and ruthlessness. And the scale of damage, coupled with the
duration of the attack, would point towards the AC-130 gunship, an
extremely destructive “weapons platform.”
Moreover, the fact that the U.S. wasn't
vociferously denying
that they did it, and instead pointed their fingers at the Afghans, was
in and of itself almost proof positive that the U.S. military were the
culprits.
In
this context it bears remembering the times the U.S. attacked
al-Jazeera offices from the air. George Bush was even going to bomb
their headquarters in Doha, Qatar, until Tony Blair (British prime
minister at the time and accomplice to Bush's invasion of Iraq) talked
him out of it.
Oh,
just thought I'd mention; bombing a hospital is a war crime. It's even
prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, a treaty the U.S. is a
signatory to. On the other hand, the U.S.' signature on a piece of paper
is worth the same as a piece of paper- namely zilch. We see that
constantly, for example in its violation of the anti-torture treaty it
signed. And its conduct during its Indochina war. And its atrocites
against civilians just about whenever it wages war. All that is so
routine and unremarked upon that it is actually forgotten. Indeed, I saw
no mention of the statutorily criminal nature of attacking a hospital
in any establishment media reporting- not
BBC, NY Times, Reuters, etc.
They don't want people to know it's a war crime.
But what a nitpicking cavil that all is, eh?
But the NY Times should get credit for another article that
describes what actually happened inside the hospital as the bombs rained
down and burned people alive in their beds, the “human story” that is
essential to get through to people and provoke the necessary emotional
reaction.
[3]
The story quotes the local head of MSF in that part of Afghanistan:
“Over
the next hour, witnesses said, what unfolded was a relentless air
assault that put patients, doctors and the Kunduz hospital operated by
Doctors Without Borders at the center of a bull’s-eye, leaving no
possibility of escape.
“The bombing began at 2:08 a.m. and
continued until 3:15, Mr. Nagarathnam said. 'The bombs hit and then we
heard the plane circle around,' he added. 'There was a pause, and then
more bombs hit. The main hospital building was engulfed in flames,' he
said.”
Meanwhile, Obama Sheds Crocodile Tears
The
adept politician Barack Obama immediately made the obvious (and
cynical) political move one would expect from a competent political
boss. He issued a statement (didn't show his face) referring to “the
tragic incident” and announced he would say nothing more pending the
U.S. military's
own verdict on what it did or didn't do: “we will
await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment
as to the circumstances of this tragedy,” the statement emitted from the
White House in his name read.
So the U.S. military, the
probably perpetrators of the attack, will be investigating itself. I
would venture to say, just as a general principle, that having the
accused do the investigating of the allegations against themselves, is
probably not the best way to arrive at the truth. Wouldn't you agree?
But self-investigating by guilty state parties is standard procedure
in the U.S., whether its police murders of citizens, U.S. war crimes, or
whatever. The only exceptions arise out of the competition for power
between the Democratic Party faction of the political elite and the
Republican Party one. So there you can get a partisan inquisition type
investigation with a political motive, such as the Benghazi
“investigations” by the Republicans in Congress.
That's
not to say there are never useful genuine investigations here. But the
results of those are generally put on a shelf to gather dust, such as
the investigation into the Attica prison massacre ordered by then-New
York State Governor and plutocrat Nelson Rockefeller (of the Rockefeller
oil fortune) or the Kerner Commission report on racial unrest, or the
report that rightly called the police repression around the 1968
Democratic Party convention in Chicago a “police riot.” Those don't
matter because they are ignored. By the time they come out, the issue is
cold, at least in the establishment media's eyes.
Finally, here are accounts from MSF's website:
Twelve staff members and at least seven patients, including three
children, were killed; 37 people were injured including 19 staff
members. This attack constitutes a grave violation of International
Humanitarian Law. [The death toll is now 22.] The
bombing took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS
coordinates of the trauma hospital to Coalition and Afghan military and
civilian officials as recently as Tuesday 29 September, to avoid that
the hospital be hit. As is routine practice for MSF in conflict areas,
MSF had communicated the exact location of the hospital to all parties
to the conflict.
From 2:08 AM until 3:15 AM local time today, MSF’s trauma
hospital in Kunduz was hit by a series of aerial bombing raids at
approximately 15 minute intervals. The main central hospital building,
housing the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy
ward, was repeatedly hit very precisely during each aerial raid, while
surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched.
“The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle round,” said
Heman Nagarathnam, MSF Head of Programmes in northern Afghanistan.
“There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. This happened again and
again. When I made it out from the office, the main hospital building
was engulfed in flames. Those people that could had moved quickly to the
building’s two bunkers to seek safety. But patients who were unable to
escape burned to death as they lay in their beds.” [4]
In fact, MSF probably provides more health care for Afghans than their
so-called government, or the foreign “nation builders.” Here's their
brief description:
MSF
is an international medical organisation and first worked in
Afghanistan in 1980. MSF opened Kunduz Trauma Centre in August 2011 to
provide high quality, free medical and surgical care to victims of
trauma such as traffic accidents, as well as those with conflict related
injuries from bomb blasts or gunshots. In Afghanistan, MSF supports the
Ministry of Public Health in Ahmad Shah Baba hospital in eastern Kabul,
Dasht-e-Barchi maternity in western Kabul and Boost hospital in Lashkar
Gah, Helmand province. In Khost, in the east of the country, MSF runs a
maternity hospital. MSF relies only on private funding for its work in
Afghanistan and does not accept money from any government.
As for the tremendous harm the U.S. has done to the populace by attacking the hospital in Kunduz, MSF notes:
MSF’s
hospital is the only facility of its kind in the north-eastern region
of Afghanistan. For four years it has been providing free high level
life- and limb-saving trauma care. In 2014, more than 22,000 patients
received care at the hospital and more than 5,900 surgeries were
performed.
So the U.S. just took out “the only
facility” in an entire region of the country where critical trauma care
can be had. (Perhaps they meant the only free facility- but knowing
Afghanistan, probably not. Outside of Kabul, Afghanistan is a very
primitive society in every respect.)
But if you're wondering what MSF's crime was, here it is, in their own statement:
“MSF
treats all people according to their medical needs and does not make
any distinctions based on a patient’s ethnicity, religious beliefs or
political affiliation.”
Which of course is unacceptable to
the U.S. Because in the immortal words of the former Emperor Bush:
“Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists.” And being “with
us” requires that you be hostile to all those the U.S. is hostile to.
If you know what's good for you.
That is the ethos of a gangster empire.
1] The
New York Times published a map showing the location of the hospital and
the locations of fighting that we were intended to be duped were “near”
the hospital. Even though the Times omitted a scale of distance on the
left hand map, you can see by counting the blocks that the skirmishes
were quite far from the hospital. As the map makes clear, the Taliban
were nowhere near the hospital. Judging by the block lines visible on
the map on the left, it appears they were at least a half mile away.
The New York Times|Source: Doctors Without Borders (Location of hospital); Satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Bing Maps
"Afghanistan: MSF demands explanations after deadly airstrikes hit hospital in Kunduz." "
Afghanistan: MSF staff killed and hospital partially destroyed in Kunduz,”
