U.S. Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital Attack, Declaring it an “Accident”

 

Shortly after the news broke of the U.S. attack on a Doctors without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, there was abundant evidence suggesting (not proving, but suggesting) that the attack was no accident: (1) MSF repeatedly told the U.S. military about the precise coordinates of its hospital, which had been operating for years; (2) the Pentagon’s story about what happened kept changing, radically, literally on a daily basis; (3) the exact same MSF hospital had been invaded by Afghan security forces three months earlier, demonstrating hostility toward the facility; (4) the attack lasted more than 30 minutes and involved multiple AC-130 gunship flyovers, even as MSF officials frantically pleaded with the U.S. military to stop; and, most compellingly of all, (5) Afghan officials from the start said explicitly that the hospital was a valid and intended target due to the presence of Taliban fighters as patients.

Since then, the evidence that the attack was intentional has only grown. Two weeks ago, AP reported that “the Army Green Berets who requested the Oct. 3 airstrike on the Doctors without Borders trauma center in Afghanistan were aware it was a functioning hospital but believed it was under Taliban control.” Last night, NBC News cited a new MSF report with this headline: “U.S. Plane Shot Victims Fleeing Doctors Without Borders Hospital: Charity.” As the New York Times put it yesterday, the “hospital was among the most brightly lit buildings in Kunduz on the night a circling American gunship destroyed it” and “spread across the hospital roof was a large white and red flag reading ‘Médecins Sans Frontières.’” For reasons that are increasingly understandable, the Obama administration is still adamantly refusing MSF’s demand for an independent investigation into what happened and why.
All of this led MSF’s general director, Christopher Stokes, to say this at a news conference yesterday in Kabul:

“A mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage.”

As my colleague Murtaza Hussain reported yesterday, Stokes added: “From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war.”
This was not the first time top officials from the universally respected MSF have said this. Three weeks ago, Stokes said in an interview with AP that “the extensive, quite precise destruction of this hospital … doesn’t indicate a mistake. The hospital was repeatedly hit.” He added that “all indications point to a grave breach of international humanitarian law, and therefore a war crime.” That’s “all indications” point to a “war crime.”
The point here isn’t that it’s been definitively proven that the U.S. attack was deliberate. What exactly happened here and why won’t be known, as MSF itself has said, until there is a full-scale, truly independent investigation – precisely what the U.S. government is steadfastly blocking. But MSF’s Stokes is absolutely correct to say that all of the evidence that is known means that “mistake” is “quite hard to believe at this stage” as an explanation and that the compilation of all known evidence “points to . . . a war crime.”
Nonetheless, many U.S. journalists immediately, repeatedly and authoritatively declared this to have been an “accident” or a “mistake” despite not having the slightest idea whether that was true, and worse, in the face of substantial evidence that it was false.
What possible motivation would the U.S. government have for submitting to an independent investigation when – as usual – it has an army of super-patriotic, uber-nationalistic journalists eager to act as its lawyers and insist, despite the evidence, that Americans could not possibly be guilty of anything other than a terrible “mistake”? Indeed, the overriding sentiment among many U.S. journalists is that their country and government are so inherently Good that they could not possibly do anything so bad on purpose. Any bad acts are mindlessly presumed to be terrible, uintended mistakes tragically made by Good, Well-Intentioned People (Americans). Other, Bad Countries do bad things on purpose. But Americans are good and do not.
They cling to this self-flattering belief so vehemently that they not only refused to entertain the possibility that the U.S. government might have done something bad on purpose, but they scornfully mock anyone who questions the official claim of “mistake.”When you’re lucky enough as a government and military to have hordes of journalists so subservient and nationalistic that they do and say this – to exonerate you fully – before knowing any facts, why would you ever feel the need to submit to someone else’s investigation?

Bombing a hospital in Afghanistan is the modern American way of war

 

The US strikes that killed 12 health workers and 10 patients were no aberration. This is the strategy we've chosen, and not just in Afghanistan.