A hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz has been hit and partially destroyed in an overnight ‘aerial attack’ that killed at least nine Medecins Sans Frontieres staff. NATO has admitted a US airstrike may have caused accidental ‘collateral damage.’ FOLLOW LIVE UPDATES: http://on.rt.com/6szb
Obama’s Mission Accomplished.
State Dept: What difference does it make?
DoD: Two top terrorist were killed yesterday in air strikes in Kunduz.
Q: What lessons have been learned?
A: — Afghans didn’t build that
B: — They should have ducked
C: — To save a country for Democracy, you must first destroy it
D: — All of the above
Ya just gotta love how the media use the name Medecins Sans Frontieres instead of the more familiar and recognizable name, Doctors Without Borders.
And the Freak Show rolls on!
Life is a very jumbled mixture. The pain of it, if you’re awake and thinking, brings into your mind the happiest moments you can remember and transforms them into agony unless you resist bitterness with every drop of strength you have left, if not more. Physical pain makes clear-thinking and generous thinking more difficult, until death appears in front of you, and then the physical pain is as nothing.
I know that I’m not supposed to be bitter, and yet that somehow makes it harder not to be. When my father and sister and two cousins were blown into little pieces last year, it was the action of some distant office worker pushing a switch on a remote-controlled airplane. And I’m supposed to believe that they meant well. And this is supposed to make it better. But somehow it makes it worse.
The war that landed me in this hospital in Kunduz, along with all of the screaming men, women, and children around me whose voices have now faded into what I imagine the roar of the ocean must be, this war comes from a distant land that we are told means well. Yet it generates enemies through its horrors. It funds those enemies through its incompetence, corruption, and insistence on buying protection for its occupiers. It fights those enemies with such marvelous weaponry that it kills and kills and kills until many more enemies face it, and it goes on fighting from afar. I’m told the people in America believe the war ended, that it isn’t even happening, that it isn’t entering Year 15 in four days, while I will never enter Year 14.
I’ve only known war. I’ve only heard of peace. Now I will know only the peace of the dead. And I’ve been told that the dead go on with living somewhere else, but I’m told this by people whose other statements are nothing but lies, so I prefer to wait the endless moments of this hospital burning to the ground with me inside it, and then see for myself.
I understand that I am only an Afghan. I am not an American school student wrongly murdered. I am not an Israeli settler brutally blown up. I’m not a U.S. soldier or a Syrian or Ukrainian who was killed by the wrong side. But this is what makes my bitterness so hard to push back against. I’m an Afghan being bombed for women’s rights that I will never ever have a chance to exercise, because I will never ever be a woman. So, I must focus on my gratitude to those who have been kind to me, including those who left this world ahead of me to guide the way.
When I focus on the good in my life intensely, I can shut out any echoes of the evil. I can almost even come back to the evil with a sense of forgiveness and the realization that really, truly, the people who do these things must not know what they are doing. I understand that no one could really begin to understand my experience who isn’t me.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Ruminations-of-an-Afghan-G-by-David-Swanson-Afghan-Civilian-Massacre_Afghan-Visit_Afghan-War_Afghanistan-Drawdown-151004-112.html
US Government Accused Of “War Crime” By Doctors Without Borders In “Horrible” Hospital Bombing That Killed 22
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/05/2015 12:32 -0400
In the aftermath of Saturday’s tragic and unprecedented bombing of an Afghanistan hospital by the US air force, one which killed 22 and continued for 30 minutes after mission command has been allegedly notified of the “error” which the US initially claimed was “collateral damage”, the Doctors without Borders physician group in charge of operating the hospital has come out swinging and has equated the US bombing of a hospital to engaging in nothing short of a war crime.
According to AFP, “pressure mounted on Washington Monday to come clean over the apparent US airstrike on an Afghan hospital that killed 22, an incident the Pentagon chief said was “confused and complicated” but which medical charity MSF branded a war crime.”
MSF general director Christopher Stokes, however, had no intention of waiting:
“Under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed, MSF demands that a full and transparent investigation into the event be conducted by an independent international body.”
Stokes also hit out at claims by Afghan officials that insurgents were using the hospital as a position to target Afghan forces and civilians.
“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,” he said.
“This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimise the attack as ‘collateral damage’.”
Others joined in: UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has also called for a full and transparent probe, noting: “An air strike on a hospital may amount to a war crime.”
To be sure, the US which has done everything in its power in the past week to divert attention to Russian bombardment in Syria as attacks on Syrian “civilians” and “moderate rebels”, had a canned response: Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed sadness over the “tragic loss of life” but warned that the investigation will not be swift.
“The situation there is confused and complicated so it may take some time to get the facts, but we will get the facts, but we will be full and transparent about sharing them,” he told reporters on a flight to Madrid at the start of a European tour.
Then, moments ago after the US government did in fact admit, again, it was at fault, the DwB once again lashes out at the US government with the following 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.”
So what is the US response? Why desperately attempt to pivot once again to Russian “war crimes”
NATO URGES RUSSIA TO STOP HARMING CIVILIANS, SYRIAN OPPOSITION
And the biggest US strategic asset in the region, of course: ISIS.
More importantly, we fail to find any historical precedent for a Nobel Peace Prize winner having been accused of engaging in war crimes just several short years later.
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