From Mistake to Justification
The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan
Hospital
By Glenn GreenwaldOctober 05, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Intercept" - 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:
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 similarly
alluded 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 Post also
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:
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
UPDATE: Responding to the
above-referenced admission, 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.
