The
Pentagon Shouldn’t Get to Absolve Itself for
Bombing a Hospital
We need an independent investigation of the
brutal U.S. attack on a Doctors Without Borders
hospital in Afghanistan, which killed 42 people.
By Phyllis Bennis
May 03, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "FPIF"
- The
Pentagon just made it official: No war crime was
committed when a U.S. plane attacked the Doctors
Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan
last year, killing 42 patients and health
workers and injuring many more.
At least,
that’s the conclusion of its own investigation —
nearly all of which remains classified.
No war
crime, despite the U.S. military having full
knowledge of the hospital’s location before the
bombing. No war crime, despite desperate
hospital staffers calling military liaison
officers while the rampage was underway. No war
crime, despite their calls being routed without
response through layers of lethal bureaucracy
for an hour or more as the deadly bombing
continued.
No war
crime, says the Pentagon.
The 16
military personnel involved all will face some
kind of administrative consequence, but none of
them will be court-martialed. The 16 do not,
apparently, include the top strategists of the
U.S. war in Afghanistan — nor anyone responsible
for creating or approving the system for
responding to desperate calls from civilians
being slaughtered by U.S. warplanes. Nor anyone
whose job it is to be sure that the U.S.
military doesn’t violate the Geneva Conventions’
prohibitions on things like attacking hospitals.
We
don’t know for sure, because the vast majority
of the official report on the Kunduz hospital
assault was redacted — blacked out — so no one
without top security clearance could read even
the Pentagon’s own assessment of what happened.
Apparently Congress, the press, and the public
are all supposed to be satisfied with
the explanation that the cause was “a
combination of human errors, compounded by
process and equipment failures.” The official
write-up adds that “fatigue and high operational
tempo also contributed” to the “fog of war” —
that old standby for excusing large-scale
attacks on civilians.
No one
should be satisfied with this internal
investigation. There’s an urgent need for an
independent, international investigation, as
Doctors Without Borders has been demanding since
the attack took place last October.
The
press release from U.S. Central Command
quotes Army General Joseph Votel, the current
Centcom commander. “The fact this was
unintentional, an unintentional action, takes it
out of the realm of actually being a deliberate
war crime against persons or protected
locations,” the general insists. “That is the
principal reason why we do not consider this to
be a war crime.”
General
Votel can consider whatever he likes, but he
doesn’t get to re-write international
humanitarian law on his own. Some war crimes do
include specific intent — a charge of genocide,
for instance, requires the perpetrator’s
intention to destroy, in part or in whole, a
racial, ethnic, religious, or other group. Other
war crimes, however — including violating the
Geneva Conventions — do not require that kind of
specific intent. (Criminal law has a similar
distinction. Some crimes, like assault or
battery, are based on a particular action; a
separate crime is committed when there is
assault with intent to kill.)
In this
case, the
4th Geneva Convention, Article 18,
states unambiguously that “civilian hospitals
organized to give care to the wounded and sick,
the infirm and maternity cases, may in no
circumstances be the object of attack, but
shall at all times be respected and protected by
the Parties to the conflict.” Criminal
negligence may be involved rather than criminal
intent, but that would still be a crime.
Yet
Army General John Campbell, the commander of
U.S. forces in Afghanistan, insists, “The label
‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for
intentional acts — intentionally
targeting civilians or intentionally
targeting protected objects.”
“Typically” is a slippery word. One might
conclude from Campbell’s words that U.S.
military personnel right up the chain of command
are indeed “typically” liable for war crimes
when they, just for example, order the bombing
of heavily populated cities to force regime
change, or a drone attack on someone from the
kill-or-capture list despite his nephew being at
his side. But in fact U.S. military personnel
are virtually never charged with war crimes.
And
despite the years of brutal U.S. assaults
launched in the name of the global war on
terror, there is still nothing “typical” about
an attack on a civilian hospital whose location
was well known to the military, whose staff was
desperately calling to try to stop the bombing,
and who lost at least 14 doctors and other
staff, 24 patients, and four caretakers in the
attack. So regardless of whether it’s true — or
acceptable — that “typical” war crimes involve
specific intent, that is certainly not a
requirement for determining what a war crime is.
On May
3, the United Nations Security Council
unanimously approved a resolution
reaffirming member states’ obligations to
protect hospitals, the sick, and the wounded in
war zones. Given recent years’ escalation of
attacks on hospitals and clinics — from Israel’s
2014 assault on Gaza, to last year’s Kunduz
bombing, and last week’s attack on a Doctors
Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, which killed
at least 50 people — such a resolution is
urgently needed.
Quite
likely the devastating attack on the hospital at
Kunduz was in fact a war crime. Possibly it
wasn’t. But there’s no reason in the world for
anyone to accept that an internal Pentagon
investigation — in which almost all of the 3,000
page report remains classified — is somehow
sufficient to determine the answer. An
independent, international investigation is
crucially required. Letting the Pentagon
investigate itself simply isn’t good enough.