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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 11/7/15

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

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Relentless bombing of a civilian hospital staffed by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders)
Relentless bombing of a civilian hospital staffed by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders)
(Image by The Alex Jones Channel, Channel: TheAlexJonesChannel)
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(updated below -- Update II)

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 'Medecins Sans Frontià ¨res.'" 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."

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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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