In a surprising development, the US government investigates itself and finds itself…blameless! Who would have thought? From Robert Koehler at antiwar.com:
“The people are being reduced to blood and dust. They are in pieces.”
The doctor who uttered these words still thought the hospital itself was a safe zone. He was with Doctors Without Borders, working in Kunduz, Afghanistan, where the Taliban and government forces were engaged in hellish fighting and civilians, as always, were caught in the middle. The wounded, including children, had been flowing in all week, and the staff were unrelieved in their duties, working an unending shift.
Their week ended at 2 a.m. last Oct. 3 when – as the world knows – a U.S. AC-130 gunship began strafing the hospital, the crew apparently acting on the mistaken belief that this was a Taliban compound. The strike lasted for an hour, continuing even though the humanitarian organization contacted the Pentagon to plead that it stop.
A total of 211 shells hit the hospital. The Intensive Care Unit was wiped out. Every patient in the unit except for a 3-year-old girl was killed, some burning to death in their beds. A total of 42 people – patients, staff and doctors – died because of this lethal mistake.
One of the dead was Dr. Osmani, the young doctor quoted above, who had just begun ophthalmology training in Kabul but still worked at the MSF facility in Kunduz on weekends, according to an eyewitness account by Kathleen Thomas, another doctor there, an Australian, who survived.
“Our colleagues didn’t die peacefully like in the movies,” she wrote last month in The Guardian. “They died painfully, slowly, some of them screaming out for help that never came, alone and terrified, knowing the extent of their own injuries and aware of their impending death. Countless other staff and patients were injured; limbs blown off, shrapnel rocketed through them, burns, pressure-wave injuries of the lungs, eyes and ears. Many of these injures have left permanent disability. It was a scene of nightmarish horror that will be forever etched in my mind.”
Some mistake.
This is all news again, of course, because the US government, having investigated the incident, has just released a 3,000-page, mostly classified report, uh, exonerating itself. This comes as no surprise.
Well, it admitted the bombing was an unfortunate mistake and 16 military personnel involved in the incident have received “administrative actions” as punishment. Also, since the tragedy, the US has made “condolence payments” to the victims: $6,000 to families of the dead, $3,000 to the injured.
It seems to me all this requires a moment or two of profound silence, as we try to absorb both the tragedy and the absurdity of these events, which unite in a sort of horrific shrug of indifference to the predictable consequences of war.
To continue reading: Cowardice and Exoneration in Kunduz
