After Warning Russia of Civilian Casualties, U.S.
Bombs Hospital in Afghanistan
By Glenn GreenwaldOctober 03, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Intercept"- Yesterday afternoon, U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power marched to Twitter
to proclaim:
“we call on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian
oppo[sition and] civilians.” Along with that decree, she posted a
statement from the U.S. and several of its closest authoritarian
allies – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UK – warning Russia
that civilian casualties “will only fuel more extremism and
radicalization.”
Early this morning, in the Afghan city of Kunduz,
the U.S.
dropped bombs on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF)). The airstrike killed at least 9 of the
hospital’s medical staff, and seriously injured dozens of patients.
“Among the dead was the Afghan head of the hospital, Abdul Sattar,”
reported The New York Times.
Jason Cone, MSF’s Executive Director,
said the medical charity “condemns in the strongest possible
terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz full of staff
and patients.” He
added that “all parties [to the] conflict, including in Kabul &
Washington, were clearly informed of precise GPS Coordinates of MSF facilities
in Kunduz,” and
that the “precise location of MSF Kunduz hospital [was]
communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over past months,
including on 9/29.” Worst of all, from MSF itself:
For its part, the U.S. military in Afghanistan
issued a statement acknowledging that it carried out airstrikes,
claimed they were conducted “against individuals threatening the
force,” and conceded that “the strike may have resulted in
collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” But the NYT
reported: “From early on, the Taliban had respected the hospital’s
request not to bring weapons inside, according to staff members, and
the hospital had been a refuge in the shattered city of Kunduz. It
was a place where the wounded from all sides were treated.”
The medical organization noted
that “our hospital in Kunduz was the only one of its kind in
NorthEastern Afghanistan.” It referenced a
now-poignant tweet it posted earlier in the week:
Now, however, the Twitter accounts of various MSF
branches are
filled with horrific photographs of their staff traumatized and
their hospital burning as a result of U.S. bombs:
MSF’s full, frequently updated, hard-to-read
account of all of this is
here.
This strike on a hospital in Afghanistan comes
days after the Saudi-led coalition bombed a wedding in Yemen that
killed more than 130 people. After days of silence from the U.S.
Government – which has actively participated from the start in the
heinous bombing of Yemen – Ambassador Power
finally acknowledged the wedding massacre, but treated it like
some natural disaster that has nothing to do with the U.S.:
“Terrible news from Yemen of killing of innocent civilians & aid
workers. Urgently need pol solution to crisis,” she tweeted.
Her accompanying statement claimed that “the
United States has no role in the targeting decisions made by the
Coalition in Yemen,” but yesterday, the Saudi Foreign Minister
told CBS News that “We work with our allies
including the United States on these targets.” There’s no dispute
that the U.S. has lavished the Saudis with all sorts of weapons and
intelligence as it carries out its
civilian-massacring attacks on Yemen.
This last week has been a particularly
gruesome illustration of continuous U.S. conduct under the War on
Terror banner, including under the Nobel Peace Prize-winning
president who celebrates himself for “ending two wars” (in the
same two countries where the U.S. continues to drop bombs). The
formula by now is clear: bombing whatever countries it wants,
justifying it all by reflexively labeling their targets as
“terrorists,” and then dishonestly denying or casually dismissing
the civilians they slaughter as “collateral damage.” If one were to
construct a list of all the countries in the world based on their
credibility to condemn Russia for
using this exact rhetorical template in Syria, the U.S. would
literally be last on that list.
UPDATE: U.S. officials went to
TIME Magazine yesterday
to announce that Russia will be creating more terrorists than
they kill as a result of misguided airstrikes in Syria. “We believe
if you inadvertently kill innocent men, women and children, then
there’s a backlash from that,” Lieut. General Bob Otto, the Air
Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance said. “We might kill three and create 10 terrorists.
It really goes back to the question of are we killing more than were
making?”
It’s impossible to fathom what the U.S. media
would be saying and doing if Russia did something like this in
Syria. By contrast, the reaction to this airstrike by their own
government will be muted and filled with apologia,
ironically quite similar to the
widely vilified caricature of Jeb Bush’s comments about the
Oregon shooting spree: “stuff happens.”
UPDATE II: Al Jazeera
reports that the hospital bombed by the U.S. “is the only
medical facility in the region that can deal with major injuries.”
Nonetheless, “officials of MSF … told Reuters that they ‘frantically
phoned’ NATO and Washington DC, as bombs rained on the hospital for
‘nearly an hour.'”
UPDATE III: The latest
casualty figures from MSF:
Speaking to the nation just three days ago about
the Oregon shooting spree, Barack Obama
said: “This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to
happen every few months…” That applies to a lot more than that
incident.
UPDATE IV: Several reports
suggest that this hospital has been viewed with hostility because it
treats all injured human beings, regardless of which side they’re
on. “The hospital treated the wounded from all sides of the
conflict, a policy that has long irked the Afghan security forces,”
reports the NYT. Al Jazeera
notes 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 the conflict. ‘We are here to help and
treat civilians,’ Abdul Manar said.” That same caretaker added:
“Several women and children are also killed in the strike. I could
hear them screaming for help inside the hospital while it was set
ablaze by the bombing. We are terrified and speechless.”
UPDATE V: The U.N. human
rights chief has
denounced the U.S. airstrike as “tragic, inexcusable, and
possibly even criminal.”
This is not the first time this has happened. In
2004, U.S. airstrikes in Falluja, Iraq
hit a
hospital and “razed it to the ground.”
Caption: Afghan (MSF) surgeons work inside a
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital after an October 3, 2015 air
strike in the city of Kunduz,
Afghanistan.
