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Médecins Sans Frontières medical personnel treat civilians injured following an
offensive against Taliban militants by Afghan and coalition forces, at the MSF
hospital in Kunduz. (photo: MSF/AFP/Getty Images)
US
Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital
Attack, Declaring It an "Accident"
By Glenn Greenwald, The
Intercept
07 November 15
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 ‘Médecins Sans Frontières.’” 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:
As my
colleague Murtaza Hussain reported yesterday, Stokes
added: “From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of
war.”
This
was not the first time top officials from the universally respected MSF have
said this. Three weeks ago, Stokes said in an interview with AP that
“the extensive, quite precise destruction of this hospital … doesn’t
indicate a mistake. The hospital was repeatedly hit.” He added that “all
indications point to a grave breach of international humanitarian law, and
therefore a war crime.” That’s “all indications” point to a “war crime.”
The
point here isn’t that it’s been definitively proven that the
U.S. attack was deliberate. What exactly happened here and why won’t be
known, as MSF itself has said, until there is a full-scale, truly independent
investigation — precisely what the U.S. government is steadfastly
blocking. But MSF’s Stokes is absolutely correct to say that all of the evidence
that is known means that “mistake” is “quite hard to believe at this stage” as
an explanation and that the compilation of all known evidence “points to …
a war crime.”
Nonetheless,
many U.S. journalists immediately, repeatedly and authoritatively declared this
to have been an “accident” or a “mistake” despite not having the slightest idea
whether that was true, and worse, in the face of substantial evidence that it
was false.
What
possible motivation would the U.S. government have for submitting to an
independent investigation when — as usual — it has an army of super-patriotic,
uber-nationalistic journalists eager to act as its lawyers and insist, despite
the evidence, that Americans could not possibly be guilty of anything
other than a terrible “mistake”? Indeed, the overriding sentiment among many
U.S. journalists is that their country and government are so inherently Good
that they could not possibly do anything so bad on purpose. Any bad acts are
mindlessly presumed to be terrible, uintended mistakes tragically made by
Good, Well-Intentioned People (Americans). Other Bad Countries do bad things on
purpose. But Americans are good and do not.
They
cling to this self-flattering belief so vehemently that they not only refused
to entertain the possibility that the U.S. government might have done something
bad on purpose, but they scornfully mock anyone who questions the
official claim of “mistake.” When you’re lucky enough as a government and
military to have hordes of journalists so subservient and nationalistic
that they do and say this — to exonerate you fully — before
knowing any facts, why would you ever feel the need to submit to someone
else’s investigation?
Christian
Science Monitor
Vox
Vox
headline. (photo: The Intercept/Vox)
The
New Yorker
The New
Yorker headline. (photo: The Intercept/The New Yorker)
Boston
Globe
American
Journalism is the ultimate accountability-free profession, as demonstrated by the
fact that every journalist not named “Judy Miller” who uncritically
regurgitated and advocated false government claims about Iraq not only paid no
price but has thrived. So needless to say, none of the people who instantly
acquitted the U.S. in the Kunduz hospital attack have in any way accounted for
their early proclamations or attempted to reconcile them with all of this
evidence.
At
Vox, Max “surely-the-result-of-some-terrible-human-error” Fisher left it to his
colleague Zach Beauchamp to admit that a new AP report “doesn’t prove,
conclusively, that the U.S. knowingly and intentionally bombed a hospital. But
it does raise some serious questions about who knew what about the Kunduz
hospital” (there was, of course, no reference to Fisher’s prior verdict of
innocence, nor Klein’s announcement on Twitter that this was all an
“accident”). Anderson’s New Yorker colleague Amy Davidson
had published an article asking
all the right questions before he declared it “unlikely” to have been
“intentionally criminal.” Meanwhile, as evidence of
intentionality grew, Murphy simply abandoned his prior “trust me”
decree that this was all an accident (we’d never do this on purpose) and
seamlessly switched to what certainly could be read to be justification (yeah,
OK, we did it and we were right to do it):
(The
claim that the hospital had been taken over by Taliban fighters has been repeatedly debunked,
including by MSF just yesterday; they
also quite rightly pronounced themselves “disgusted” at the suggestion that
even if it were true that Taliban fighters were among the patients,
razing their hospital would be justified.)
It is,
of course, pleasing to view your own tribe as inherently superior. It feels
nice to believe that your own side is so intrinsically moral, so
Exceptional, that one needs no “evidence” or “investigation” to know immediately
that any bad acts are unintended. It is a massive relief to know that things
like “war crimes” and intentionally bombing structures protected by
the Geneva Conventions can only be done by the countries declared by your
government to be adversaries, but never by your own government.
But as
comforting, uplifting and self-affirming as that worldview is, it is literally
the exact antithesis of the skepticism that the most basic precepts of
journalism require. Declaring your own government innocent when it
repeatedly bombs a well-known, well-established hospital filled with doctors,
nurses and patients — before you have the slightest idea what actually
happened, and in the face of all kinds of evidence in conflict with such
assurances of innocence — is inexcusable for all sorts of obvious reasons.
Very unfortunately, this sort of hyper-nationalism and reflexively tribalistic
self-love is pervasive in American journalism — Americans do not
do such things — which is why the U.S. government knows that it
can engage in such acts without any accountability or even pressure to allow an
independent investigation.
UPDATE: A
couple more horrible examples:
To think the United States purposely bombed a hospital is evidence
of a mindset that suggests such deep hostility toward America that [MSF
International President Joanne] Liu ought to go work somewhere else. … I
don’t for a minute think that the United States was involved in ‘war
crime’ here — unless the definition of a crime is so stretched as to
encompass a horrible accident.
Doctors Without Borders cheapens the value of its own indignation
by raising what seems to have been a deadly mistake to the level of a wanton
moral transgression, but the Pentagon also shouldn’t simply dismiss it with the
default explanation that it was just the “fog of war.” It was a bloody
blunder, but not, by any reasonable definition, a war crime.
I
genuinely don’t understand why the White House or Pentagon bothers to spend
money on official spokespeople. It’s such a redundant function given how many
in the U.S. media eagerly perform that role.
UPDATE
II: Political Science professor Corey Robin directed me to this article in The Nation by Greg
Gradin and said: “Right after Kunduz, historian showed deliberate targeting of
hospitals was policy for U.S. in Cambodia.” But as I replied to Professor Robin, and as all these
intrepid journalists have taught us: “Nobody needs to read this. We all KNOW
that **Americans** don’t do things like this. Only Bad Countries & People
do.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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