Tag Archives: Doctors Without Borders

US Is Still Stonewalling an Independent Review of Why It Bombed a Hospital, by Nazish Kolsy

Posted on November 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

In this country the Afghanistan hospital bombing is already down the memory hole. In Afghanistan, the victims are still dead, the hospital is still destroyed, and the US government has still not explained itself. From Nazish Kolsy at antiwar.com:

“Even war has rules,” said Doctors Without Borders head Dr. Joanne Liu as part of her response to the devastating US bombing of the organization’s hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan earlier this October.

After a series of different explanations and excuses – four separate accounts of the incident over the first four days, by The Guardian’s count – the United States still hasn’t provided a concrete explanation as to why and how the hospital was targeted, killing 22 doctors and patients. The attack was the worst on any Doctors Without Borders hospital in its 44 years of operating.

But it wasn’t all that different from other recent US attacks on civilian infrastructure. Since as far back as 1991, the US has been “accidentally” blowing up medical and humanitarian facilities in a range of places, resulting in high civilian casualties and other “collateral damage.”

To name but a few, in 1991 the US targeted an air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing 408 Iraqi civilians. (A US general claimed the shelter was “an active command-and-control center.”) In 1998 the Clinton administration attacked the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, which the US claimed was associated with the bin Laden network and was “involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.” As a result, according to The Intercept, “tens of thousands of people have suffered and died” from “treatable diseases” in the country since then. In 2001, the US attacked the complex that housed the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul – not once but twice, destroying storage warehouses that held food and supplies for refugees.

The incident in Kunduz, unfortunately, just adds to the list.

While past incidents have often failed to elicit serious calls for accountability, Doctors Without Borders – also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF – responded with an outraged press release demanding an independent, impartial investigation of the incident. Appalled by the lack of responsibility taken by either the Afghan or US government, MSF characterized the strike as an attack on the Geneva Conventions. “This cannot be tolerated,” the statement explained. “These Conventions govern the rules of war and were established to protect civilians in conflicts – including patients, medical workers, and facilities. They bring some humanity into what is otherwise an inhumane situation.”

So far, the United States is refusing to comply with MSF’s request for an independent, impartial investigation and instead is carrying out three investigations of its own conducted by the Department of Defense.

To continue reading: US Is Still Stonewallingan Independent Review

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Politicians Exploit School Shooting While Ignoring Bombing Victims, by Ron Paul

Posted on October 12, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Ron Paul, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

Following the recent Oregon school shooting, many politicians rushed to the microphones to call for new gun control laws. President Obama even called on gun control supporters to “politicize” the shooting, while some members of Congress worked to establish a special commission on gun violence.

The reaction to the shooting stands in stark contrast to the reaction to the US military’s bombing of an Afghanistan hospital run by the international humanitarian (and Nobel Peace Prize winning) group Doctors Without Borders.

Our Nobel Peace Prize winning president did apologize to his fellow Nobel laureate for the bombing. However, President Obama has not “politicized” this tragedy by using it to justify ending military involvement in Afghanistan. No one in Congress is pushing for a special commission to examine the human costs of US militarism, and the mainstream media has largely ignored Doctors Without Borders’ accusation that the bombing constitutes a war crime.

The reason for the different reactions to these two events is that politicians prefer to focus on events they can “politicize” to increase government power. In contrast, politicians ignore incidents that raise uncomfortable questions about US foreign policy.

If the political and media elites were really interested in preventing future mass shootings, they would repeal the federal “gun-free” schools law, for example. By letting shooters know that their intended victims are defenseless, the gun-free schools law turns schoolchildren into easy targets.

To continue reading: Politicians Exploit Shooting, Ignore Bombing

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U.S. Bombing of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan Was No Accident – “It Was the Target,” by Michael Krieger

Posted on October 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

We analysts of the US government often have difficulty determining if what it does is done out of incompetence or malice or both. Initially it looked like the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was a case of the former, but three or four changed government stories later, it looks like it might be the latter—malice—if not on the part of the US government, then Afghanistan’s. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

In particular, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) 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.

– From Glenn Greenwald’s article: The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification

By now, all of you will have read about the U.S. military’s recent bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. What you may not be aware of, is how much the official story has changed in the days since this inexcusable act of barbarism became public.

Doctors Without Borders has been calling the attack a “war crime,” which to the average American sounds outlandish and impossible. The justification for this claim is simple — that the airstrike wasn’t an accident at all, and that the U.S. military intentionally targeted the hospital. As the days go by, it becomes increasingly clear that this is indeed the case, and the Pentagon is now scrambling to justify the intentional targeting of a hospital.

As Glenn Greenwald reports at 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.

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.

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.

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.

To continue reading: US Bombing of Hospital Was No Accident

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