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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/7/15

Why Is the U.S. Refusing An Independent Investigation If Its Hospital Airstrike Was An "Accident"?

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In Geneva this morning, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) demanded a formal, independent investigation into the U.S. airstrike on its hospital in Kunduz. The group's international president, Dr. Joanne Liu [...], specified that the inquiry should be convened pursuant to war-crime-investigating procedures established by the Geneva Conventions and conducted by The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. "Even war has rules," Liu said. "This was just not an attack on our hospital. It was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated."

Liu emphasized that the need for an "independent, impartial" investigation is now particularly compelling given what she called "the inconsistency in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened over the recent days."

On Monday, we documented the multiple conflicting accounts offered in the first three days by the U.S. military and its media allies, but the story continued to change even further after that. As The Guardian's headline yesterday noted, the U.S. admission that its own personnel called in the airstrike -- not Afghan forces as it claimed the day before -- meant that "US alters story for fourth time in four days." All of this led Liu to state the obvious today: "We cannot rely on internal military investigations by the U.S., NATO and Afghan forces."

An independent, impartial investigation into what happened here should be something everyone can immediately agree is necessary. But at its daily press briefing on Monday, the U.S. State Department, through its spokesman Mark Toner, insisted that no such independent investigation was needed on the ground that the U.S. Government is already investigating itself and everyone knows how trustworthy and reliable this process is:

QUESTION: The -- so MSF is calling for an independent investigation of this incident by a neutral international body. Is that something the Administration would support?

MR TONER: Well, we've got three investigations underway. Certainly, we've got our own DOD-led investigation. We obviously strongly believe that can be a very transparent and accountable investigation. Let's let these three investigations run their course and see what the results are.

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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
 

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