After the United States Apparently Blew Up 22 People in a Hospital — Secretary of Defense Ash Carter Implied that — Collateral Damage Is too Difficult to Track until We Forget about It

05 October 2015

Bureaucratized militarism run wild?

Life imitates art:

Medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) [Doctors without Borders] on Sunday demanded an independent international inquiry into a suspected U.S. air strike that killed 22 people in an Afghan hospital it runs, branding the attack a "war crime".

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter promised a full investigation into whether the American military was connected to the destruction of the hospital, but cautioned it would take time to gather information.

"We do know that American air assets ... were engaged in the Kunduz vicinity, and we do know that the structures that - you see in the news - were destroyed," Carter told reporters traveling with him shortly before landing in Spain on Sunday.

"I just can't tell you what the connection is at this time."

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a U.S. military AC-130 gunship had been operating in the area, firing at Taliban targets after receiving a request for support from U.S. special operations forces advising Afghan troops.

Intentional collateral damage?

Maybe:

On Sunday, Hamdullah Danishi, the acting governor of Kunduz, told the Washington Post: “The hospital campus was 100% used by the Taliban. The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there. We tolerated their firing for some time.”

And it is not as if no one knew where the hospital was:

"As MSF does in all conflict contexts, these precise locations were communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over the past months, including most recently on 29 September," according to MSF Afghanistan representatives.

The bombing reportedly continued for more than 30 minutes after US and Afghan military offices in Kabul and Washington were first informed.

The moral? — Crusades against evil have a habit into turning into it

It would be difficult to come up with a better example of the transition from intended good to its opposite than blowing up Doctors without Borders — one of the world’s most prominent examples of Heroes against Suffering:

We went to look for survivors. A few had already made it to one of the safe rooms. One by one, people started appearing, wounded, including some of our colleagues and caretakers of patients.

We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds.

We had to organise a mass casualty plan in the office, seeing which doctors were alive and available to help. We did an urgent surgery for one of our doctors. Unfortunately he died there on the office table. We did our best, but it wasn't enough.

The whole situation was very hard. We saw our colleagues dying. Our pharmacist - I was just talking to him last night and planning the stocks, and then he died there in our office.

These are people who had been working hard for months, non-stop for the past week. They had not gone home, they had not seen their families, they had just been working in the hospital to help people... and now they are dead. These people are friends, close friends.

I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable.

Yes it is.

PeteFree.com

After the United States Apparently Blew Up 22 People in a Hospital — Secretary of Defense Ash Carter Implied that — Collateral Damage Is too Difficult to Track until We Forget about It