Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, The Angel of Death
By Laura Gottesdiener
Posted on November 15, 2015, Printed on November 15, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176069/
Heres a little thought experiment: imagine that were in Kansas (without
Toto) and a bridal party in three rented limos is heading down a highway
toward a church where a wedding is about to take place. Suddenly, a small
out-of-control plane plummets into those limos killing the bride, the mother
of the bride, and five of the seven bridesmaids; 15 others are wounded. Bear
with me here, if this particular method of wedding slaughter seems a little
farfetched. After all, we dont (yet) have drones armed with Hellfire
missiles patrolling American skies that could take out such a caravan.
So all we have is a small plane and seven dead women. Tell me, though, that
such a situation wouldnt make horrified 24/7 headlines and get top TV news
billing for days, that the cable news channels wouldnt be interviewing
crisis counselors and wedding planners around the clock, and that they
wouldnt stick with it through the tearful interviews with the bridegroom,
who was practically at the altar when his bride-to-be died, and the
similarly tearful funerals to come. Who can doubt for a moment that such a
story would dominate the news -- as, for instance, happened on October 25th
when a woman ploughed her car into a crowd, killing four and injuring 50 at
Oklahoma State University's homecoming parade? On the second night of
coverage of the story on NBC Nightly News, it still came in well ahead of a
breaking news report from Afghanistan and Pakistan: that more than 200
people had just died in an earthquake, including at least 12 girls killed in
a panicked flight from their school.
Now, take a moment to think about something you probably never saw on your
TV screen. Im talking about not one but at least eight wedding parties
wiped out in whole or in part between December 2001 and December 2013 in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen by U.S. air power, and evidently two more
barely a week apart this fall by the U.S.-backed Saudi air force, also in
Yemen. In the first of those, two missiles reportedly tore through wedding
tents in a village on the Red Sea, killing more than 130 celebrants,
including women and children; in the second, a house 60 miles south of
Yemens capital, Sana'a, where dozens of people were celebrating, was hit
leaving at least 28 dead. Cumulatively, over the years (by my informal
count) close to 450 Iraqis, Afghans, and Yemenis have died in these
disasters and many more were wounded. Each of the eviscerated weddings made
the news somewhere in our world (or I wouldnt have noticed), though with
rare exceptions they never made the headlines and, of course, never did any
of them get anything close to the 24/7 media spotlight weve grown so used
to; nor, except perhaps at this website, has anyone attended to these
disasters as a cumulative, repetitive set of events.
Again, try to imagine the reaction here if multiple wedding parties were
being wiped out repetitively, always in more or less the same way. I hardly
need tell you what a hullabaloo would result. In this country, even single
acts of horror against Americans or by those we officially loathe regularly
get such attention, as with the grisly beheadings of the Islamic State. And
that is certainly appropriate. Even after all these years, what still seems
strange to me, however, is that we -- Washington, the media, the public --
seem so cold-bloodedly unfazed by horrors repetitively committed in our name
in distant lands.
All of this came to my mind once again when TomDispatch regular Laura
Gottesdiener filed her latest piece and in it I could feel -- and identify
with -- her frustration over the attention we regularly dont give those we
kill in our war zones. Tom
One Night in Kunduz, One Morning in New York
Two Versions of the U.S. Destruction of a Hospital in Afghanistan
By Laura Gottesdiener
When people ask me what my new job is like, I tell them that I wake up very
early and count the dead. When I say very early, I mean a few minutes
after four a.m., as the sky is just softening to the color of faded purple
corduroy. By the dead, I mostly mean people across the world that my
government has killed or helped another nations government kill while I was
sleeping.
Once I was a freelance reporter, spending weeks or months covering a single
story. Today, Im a news producer at Democracy Now! and, from the moment I
arrive at the office, Im scouring the wire services for the latest
casualties from Washingtons war zones. Its a disconcerting job for someone
used to reporting stories on the ground. As I cull through the headlines --
Suspected U.S. drone strike kills 4 militants in Pakistan; U.S. troops
dispatched to Kunduz to help Afghan forces -- Ive never felt so close to
this countrys various combat zones. And yet Im thousands of miles away.
Usually, I try to avoid talking about our wars once I leave the office.
After all, what do I know? I wasnt there when the American gunship began
firing on that hospital Doctors Without Borders ran in Kunduz, and I didnt
get there afterwards either. Nor was I in Yemens Saada province a few
weeks later when a Doctors Without Borders health clinic was bombed.
If you live here and dont listen to Democracy Now!, odds are you didnt
even know that second strike happened. How is it possible, I think to
myself, that bombing medical facilities isnt front-page news? On that
gutted clinic in Yemen, however, I cant tell you much more. I know that the
strike was carried out by U.S.-backed, Saudi-led forces, and that it
happened only a few days after the Obama administration approved an $11.25
billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. But I dont know what the air felt like
that evening just before the missile hit the maternity ward.
Still, when your job is to chronicle these wars each morning, how can you
not say something? How can you not start writing when our wars become all
you think about, something you begin to dream about? How can you not respond
when you realize, as I did recently, that the longest of them, the (second)
U.S. war in Afghanistan, has stretched on for nearly half my life?
All this is my way of telling you that I need to talk to you about Kunduz.
A Calm Night in October
Like any good story, theres what happened -- and then theres the version
youre asked to believe. Lets start with the first one.
On Friday, October 2nd, staff members from the trauma center in Kunduz,
Afghanistan, climbed to the roof of that hospital and laid out two large
flags with the name of their organization: Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors
Without Borders), the Nobel-Prize-winning medical-humanitarian aid
organization best known by its French acronym MSF. This wasnt something the
workers could have done days earlier. The previous Monday, September 28th,
Taliban fighters had unexpectedly seized control of the fifth largest city
in Afghanistan, as up to 7,000 government troops and police fled. Over the
next days, the Afghan governments efforts to retake the city sparked
intense fighting between the Taliban and government troops backed by U.S.
Special Operations forces.
As that fighting grew closer to the hospital, stray bullets pierced the
ceiling of the intensive care unit and MSF staff were instructed to sleep
inside the hospital compound. If any of them left, it was feared, they might
be unable to safely return to work the next day.
And there was plenty of work to be done. One hundred wounded patients
arrived on Monday -- 36 of them in critical condition. The staff added 18
extra beds. Over the next four days, another 250 patients cycled through the
emergency room alone. The building was so overcapacity that staff members
put mattresses and pillows in corridors and administrative offices.
Fighter jets could be heard roaring overhead as the U.S. began launching
airstrikes in support of the Afghan armys haphazard efforts to retake the
city. Most of the hospitals staff refrained from even stepping outside.
By Friday, however, the fighting began to recede from the area around the
hospital, and staff members felt safer climbing to the roof to spread out
the flags in order to ensure that the facility would be identifiable from
the air. The organization had also sent the hospitals GPS coordinates to
the U.S. Department of Defense, the Afghan Ministries of Interior and
Defense, and the U.S. Army in Kabul four days earlier. The markers were just
considered one more level of protection.
The hospital itself couldnt be missed. Its lights blazed throughout Friday
night and into the early hours of Saturday morning as doctors tried to
tackle a backlog of pending surgeries. Outside the compounds walls, the
rest of the city, home to 270,000 inhabitants, was mostly dark. After a week
of fighting, the hospital was one of the few buildings in the area that
still had running generators and so the power to light itself. It was a
relatively calm night, slightly overcast and unseasonably warm for early
October. The sound of gunfire had receded, and some staff members even dared
to step outside for the first time in days.
"The Single Deadliest Aircraft"
The explosions began just as staff members were putting patients under
anesthesia in the operating room.
At 2:19 a.m., a representative of MSF in Kabul called the American-led NATO
mission to Afghanistan to say that the hospital was being bombed. A minute
later, an MSF representative called the Red Cross, then the United Nations.
From New York, a member of MSF called the Pentagon.
We dont know what was happening inside the Pentagon that night. We do know
that, back in Kunduz, a U.S. AC-130 gunship was circling above the
hospitals main building.
The low-flying AC-130 is equipped with cannons and a 105-mm howitzer. It can
fly at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour, but its designed, above all, to
circle close to the ground while firing at targets below. As an article in
the Washington Post explained, The AC-130 essentially loiters over a target
at around 7,000 feet, flying in a circle and firing from weapons ports
mounted on the aircrafts left side.
The gunship is specially designed for night missions. The plane is equipped
with infrared sensors, while its crew of 12 (or so) sport night-vision
goggles. Manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the older version of
the plane, the AC-130H Spectre, cost $110 million apiece, while the newer
AC-130U Spooky version goes for $210 million. One Special Operations Air
Force captain described the gunship as the single deadliest aircraft and
flying squadron in the war on terrorism. In 2002, this same type of gunship
fired on a wedding party in Afghanistans Helmand province, killing more
than 40 people.
Versions of the gunship have been in use by the U.S. military since the
Vietnam War. An older model, which flew in Operation Desert Storm, the first
Gulf War, is now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air
Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. It was dubbed Azrael,
which in both Hebrew and Arabic means the Angel of Death.
At 2:47 a.m., a representative from MSF in Kabul texted the American-led
mission to Afghanistan that one of the Kunduz hospitals staff members had
just died, that many were missing, and that the trauma center was still
under repeated fire.
Five minutes later, someone from the mission texted back: Im sorry to hear
that. I still do not know what happened.
At this point, the U.S. gunship above had been firing on the hospitals main
building on and off for more than 45 minutes. The strikes were, according to
MSF Director of Operations Bart Janssens, very precise. [The gunship] came
four or five times over the hospital, and every time extremely precisely hit
with a series of impacts on the main building of the hospital, he told
Reuters.
Surviving staff members recall that the first room to be attacked was the
intensive care unit, which then held a number of patients, including two
children. The strikes next hit the lab, the emergency room, the X-ray room,
the mental health center, and the operating theaters, where two patients
were lying on the operating tables. Both were killed.
Everyone capable of fleeing tried to do so: doctors, staff, patients. One
man in a wheelchair was killed by flying shrapnel. Some people were on fire
as they ran. One staff member was decapitated. As people fled the building,
doctors and medical staff were hit by fire from the plane. Some who survived
had the impression, from the sound of the plane, that it was following them
as they ran.
A Purpose to Kill and Destroy
MSFs hospital had been a fixture in Kunduz since August 2011, the only
medical facility in the region. A photo snapped a few months after its
opening showed a large sign affixed to the front gate of the compound: The
MSF Trauma Centre will prioritize treatment for war-wounded and other
seriously injured persons, without regard to their ethnicity or political
affiliations, and determined solely by their medical needs. No fee charged.
Above the text was an image of an automatic rifle surrounded by a red circle
with two thick lines through it, indicating the hospitals and the
organizations strict no-weapons policy in its facilities.
Doctors Without Borders opened the facility two years after it returned to
Afghanistan. In 2004, the organization had pulled out of the country after
five of its workers were killed in a roadside ambush in Badghis Province. In
2009, the group returned and began supporting a hospital in Kabul. Upon its
reentry, Michiel Hofman, then a director of the organization, told the
German magazine Der Spiegel that he had been shocked to discover normal
wartime rules of hospital neutrality didnt seem to apply in the ongoing
conflict. International forces and police, he said, would regularly go
into hospitals to harass patients. Hospitals would be attacked. There is a
dire record of respecting the neutrality of health structures.
That same year, a Swedish aid group running a hospital in Wardak Province
accused the U.S. Armys 10th Mountain Division of storming the facility and
tying up hospital guards as the troops searched for members of the Taliban.
Nonetheless, the Kunduz hospital operated in relative peace until July 2015,
when armed members of a U.S.-backed Afghan Special Operations team raided
it, forcing the facility to close temporarily. It soon reopened. By October
2015, the site was under increasingly close surveillance by U.S. Special
Operations analysts who, it was later reported, believed there might have
been a Pakistani intelligence operative working out of the facility. (MSF
officials insist that there were only nine international staff members, none
of whom were Pakistani, no less intelligence operatives.)
In the days before the attack, those analysts had put together a cache of
information about the hospital -- including maps with the facility circled.
At 2:56 a.m., on the morning of the attack, an MSF representative in Kabul
again texted an official of the American-led mission, demanding an end to
the strikes, which had lasted nearly an hour. By then, flames had overtaken
the main building, with children still trapped inside. Abdul Manar, a
caretaker at the hospital, recalled the sound of their cries. I could hear
them screaming for help inside the hospital while it was set ablaze by the
bombing, he told Al Jazeera.
Ill do my best, the official responded. Praying for you all.
The strikes nonetheless continued. At 3:10 and 3:14, MSF again called the
Pentagon. Finally, sometime around 3:15 a.m., the gunship flew off and the
strikes were over.
With the operating rooms destroyed, surviving staff members turned an office
desk into a makeshift operating table and attempted to treat a doctor whose
leg had been blown off. Lajos Zoltan Jecs, a nurse, helped with the surgery.
The doctor, he recalled, died atop that desk. We did our best, he wrote
later, but it wasn't enough.
The staff were in shock. Many were crying. Jecs and others went to check on
the damage in the intensive care unit only to find six patients burning in
their beds.
In all, 30 people died: 13 staff members, 10 patients, and seven bodies so
badly burned that, more than a month later, the remains have not yet been
identified.
The hospital closed that same day. About two weeks later, a U.S. tank rammed
into the shell of the charred building, possibly destroying evidence of what
that AC-130 had done. All told, MSF General Director Christopher Stokes
concluded: The view from inside the hospital is that this attack was
conducted with a purpose to kill and destroy. But we dont know why.
Another Version of the Story
Thats one version of the story, based on a Doctors Without Borders
preliminary report on the destruction of their hospital, released on
November 5th, as well as on articles published by Reuters, the Associated
Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera, the
testimonies of medical staff published by MSF, and a Democracy Now!
interview with the executive director of MSF USA.
Heres the second version of the story, the one we in the United States are
meant to believe. Its far more confusing and lacking in details, but don't
worry, its much shorter.
On October 3rd, an American AC-130 gunship mistakenly struck a hospital
run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz. The attack was ordered by U.S.
Special Operations forces, possibly at the behest of the Afghan army (or
maybe not).
Earlier contradictory accounts, all issued within the span of four days, go
as follows: (1) it may not have been an American air strike; (2) the U.S.
launched airstrikes in the neighborhood of the hospital and the facility was
hit by accident; (3) the hospital was hit because American Special
Operations forces were under fire near the hospital and called in the
strikes in their own defense; (4) the facility was hit because Afghan forces
supported by that Special Ops unit advised that they were taking fire from
enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces.
As the story changed, culpability shifted back and forth. The Afghans, not
the Americans, had called in the attack. No, the Afghans never directly
called in the attack. The Americans called in the attack from within the
U.S. chain of command.
In the end, the bottom line from Washington was: were conducting a full
investigation and one of these days well get back to you with the details.
This second version of the story (in its many iterations) came from
commander of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan General John Campbell, White
House spokesperson Josh Earnest, and Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook.
Unnamed sources added some colorful, although unsupported allegations about
a Pakistani intelligence agent or armed Taliban fighters being inside the
hospital -- despite all evidence to the contrary.
Campbell offered his deepest condolences. President Obama called the head
of MSF and personally apologized for the tragic incident. The Pentagon
promised to make condolence payments to the families of those killed.
Several investigations into the incident were launched by the Pentagon and
a joint Afghan-NATO team. However, MSFs repeated call for an independent
investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission,
established under the additional protocols to the Geneva Convention, have
been ducked or ignored.
There is, at least, one aspect both accounts agree on: the timing.
Its undisputed that the attack occurred on October 3, 2015 -- just over
nine months after President Obama officially declared the ending of the U.S.
combat mission in Afghanistan.
All the Unknown Deaths
In the mornings as I scan the news, Im often overcome by the absurdity of
writing about ongoing wars that have officially ended or a hospital that has
been mistakenly struck with exceptional precision. The U.S. bombing of
that trauma center in Kunduz was indisputably horrific, one of the worst
episodes of civilian casualties in the Afghan war, as the New York Times
described it. But its outrageousness comes, in part, because for once we
have enough information to piece the story together since that AC-130
attacked a well-known, prize-winning, Western humanitarian organization.
To my mind, however, the truly disconcerting stories are the ones that
arrive at my desk with so little information that its almost impossible to
say or write anything with certainty. And so I cant really tell you what
happened on August 12th, when a suspected U.S. drone strike in Yemen...
killed five suspected al-Qaida militants, as the Associated Press reported
in the standard language used to obscure attacks for which we, in the United
States, have essentially no real information whatsoever.
Who were these five people, I wonder, killed suddenly as they drove along a
road somewhere to the east of the city of Mukalla? Statistically speaking,
theres a reasonable likelihood that they were innocent people. As the
Intercept recently reported, based on leaked secret documents, 90% of those
killed during one recent period in the U.S. drone campaign in Afghanistan
were not the sought-after targets. Without being there, however, I cant
tell you who those five Yemeni militants were, or what lives they led, or
how many children they had, or even whether they were children themselves --
and the odds are that neither can the Pentagon.
Nor can I tell you what happened when the U.S. launched its first drone
strike in Syria on August 4th. I remember scouring different news sources
over the following mornings for the most basic piece of information: how
many people -- if any -- had been killed. That was, after all, what I was
doing: waking up early and counting the death toll from America's endless
wars.
But in the days and weeks that followed, the Pentagon's spokesman refused to
offer specifics of any sort on this strike. It's possible he didn't have
any. And so, to this day, even the number of deaths remains unknown.
Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and a news producer with
Democracy Now! The author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight
for a Place to Call Home, her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Al
Jazeera, Guernica, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and frequently at TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Laura Gottesdiener
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176069
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, The Angel of Death
By Laura Gottesdiener
Posted on November 15, 2015, Printed on November 15, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176069/
Heres a little thought experiment: imagine that were in Kansas (without
Toto) and a bridal party in three rented limos is heading down a highway
toward a church where a wedding is about to take place. Suddenly, a small
out-of-control plane plummets into those limos killing the bride, the mother
of the bride, and five of the seven bridesmaids; 15 others are wounded. Bear
with me here, if this particular method of wedding slaughter seems a little
farfetched. After all, we dont (yet) have drones armed with Hellfire
missiles patrolling American skies that could take out such a caravan.
So all we have is a small plane and seven dead women. Tell me, though, that
such a situation wouldnt make horrified 24/7 headlines and get top TV news
billing for days, that the cable news channels wouldnt be interviewing
crisis counselors and wedding planners around the clock, and that they
wouldnt stick with it through the tearful interviews with the bridegroom,
who was practically at the altar when his bride-to-be died, and the
similarly tearful funerals to come. Who can doubt for a moment that such a
story would dominate the news -- as, for instance, happened on October 25th
when a woman ploughed her car into a crowd, killing four and injuring 50 at
Oklahoma State University's homecoming parade? On the second night of
coverage of the story on NBC Nightly News, it still came in well ahead of a
breaking news report from Afghanistan and Pakistan: that more than 200
people had just died in an earthquake, including at least 12 girls killed in
a panicked flight from their school.
Now, take a moment to think about something you probably never saw on your
TV screen. Im talking about not one but at least eight wedding parties
wiped out in whole or in part between December 2001 and December 2013 in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen by U.S. air power, and evidently two more
barely a week apart this fall by the U.S.-backed Saudi air force, also in
Yemen. In the first of those, two missiles reportedly tore through wedding
tents in a village on the Red Sea, killing more than 130 celebrants,
including women and children; in the second, a house 60 miles south of
Yemens capital, Sana'a, where dozens of people were celebrating, was hit
leaving at least 28 dead. Cumulatively, over the years (by my informal
count) close to 450 Iraqis, Afghans, and Yemenis have died in these
disasters and many more were wounded. Each of the eviscerated weddings made
the news somewhere in our world (or I wouldnt have noticed), though with
rare exceptions they never made the headlines and, of course, never did any
of them get anything close to the 24/7 media spotlight weve grown so used
to; nor, except perhaps at this website, has anyone attended to these
disasters as a cumulative, repetitive set of events.
Again, try to imagine the reaction here if multiple wedding parties were
being wiped out repetitively, always in more or less the same way. I hardly
need tell you what a hullabaloo would result. In this country, even single
acts of horror against Americans or by those we officially loathe regularly
get such attention, as with the grisly beheadings of the Islamic State. And
that is certainly appropriate. Even after all these years, what still seems
strange to me, however, is that we -- Washington, the media, the public --
seem so cold-bloodedly unfazed by horrors repetitively committed in our name
in distant lands.
All of this came to my mind once again when TomDispatch regular Laura
Gottesdiener filed her latest piece and in it I could feel -- and identify
with -- her frustration over the attention we regularly dont give those we
kill in our war zones. Tom
One Night in Kunduz, One Morning in New York
Two Versions of the U.S. Destruction of a Hospital in Afghanistan
By Laura Gottesdiener
When people ask me what my new job is like, I tell them that I wake up very
early and count the dead. When I say very early, I mean a few minutes
after four a.m., as the sky is just softening to the color of faded purple
corduroy. By the dead, I mostly mean people across the world that my
government has killed or helped another nations government kill while I was
sleeping.
Once I was a freelance reporter, spending weeks or months covering a single
story. Today, Im a news producer at Democracy Now! and, from the moment I
arrive at the office, Im scouring the wire services for the latest
casualties from Washingtons war zones. Its a disconcerting job for someone
used to reporting stories on the ground. As I cull through the headlines --
Suspected U.S. drone strike kills 4 militants in Pakistan; U.S. troops
dispatched to Kunduz to help Afghan forces -- Ive never felt so close to
this countrys various combat zones. And yet Im thousands of miles away.
Usually, I try to avoid talking about our wars once I leave the office.
After all, what do I know? I wasnt there when the American gunship began
firing on that hospital Doctors Without Borders ran in Kunduz, and I didnt
get there afterwards either. Nor was I in Yemens Saada province a few weeks
later when a Doctors Without Borders health clinic was bombed.
If you live here and dont listen to Democracy Now!, odds are you didnt
even know that second strike happened. How is it possible, I think to
myself, that bombing medical facilities isnt front-page news? On that
gutted clinic in Yemen, however, I cant tell you much more. I know that the
strike was carried out by U.S.-backed, Saudi-led forces, and that it
happened only a few days after the Obama administration approved an $11.25
billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. But I dont know what the air felt like
that evening just before the missile hit the maternity ward.
Still, when your job is to chronicle these wars each morning, how can you
not say something? How can you not start writing when our wars become all
you think about, something you begin to dream about? How can you not respond
when you realize, as I did recently, that the longest of them, the (second)
U.S. war in Afghanistan, has stretched on for nearly half my life?
All this is my way of telling you that I need to talk to you about Kunduz.
A Calm Night in October
Like any good story, theres what happened -- and then theres the version
youre asked to believe. Lets start with the first one.
On Friday, October 2nd, staff members from the trauma center in Kunduz,
Afghanistan, climbed to the roof of that hospital and laid out two large
flags with the name of their organization: Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors
Without Borders), the Nobel-Prize-winning medical-humanitarian aid
organization best known by its French acronym MSF. This wasnt something the
workers could have done days earlier. The previous Monday, September 28th,
Taliban fighters had unexpectedly seized control of the fifth largest city
in Afghanistan, as up to 7,000 government troops and police fled. Over the
next days, the Afghan governments efforts to retake the city sparked
intense fighting between the Taliban and government troops backed by U.S.
Special Operations forces.
As that fighting grew closer to the hospital, stray bullets pierced the
ceiling of the intensive care unit and MSF staff were instructed to sleep
inside the hospital compound. If any of them left, it was feared, they might
be unable to safely return to work the next day.
And there was plenty of work to be done. One hundred wounded patients
arrived on Monday -- 36 of them in critical condition. The staff added 18
extra beds. Over the next four days, another 250 patients cycled through the
emergency room alone. The building was so overcapacity that staff members
put mattresses and pillows in corridors and administrative offices.
Fighter jets could be heard roaring overhead as the U.S. began launching
airstrikes in support of the Afghan armys haphazard efforts to retake the
city. Most of the hospitals staff refrained from even stepping outside.
By Friday, however, the fighting began to recede from the area around the
hospital, and staff members felt safer climbing to the roof to spread out
the flags in order to ensure that the facility would be identifiable from
the air. The organization had also sent the hospitals GPS coordinates to
the U.S. Department of Defense, the Afghan Ministries of Interior and
Defense, and the U.S. Army in Kabul four days earlier. The markers were just
considered one more level of protection.
The hospital itself couldnt be missed. Its lights blazed throughout Friday
night and into the early hours of Saturday morning as doctors tried to
tackle a backlog of pending surgeries. Outside the compounds walls, the
rest of the city, home to 270,000 inhabitants, was mostly dark. After a week
of fighting, the hospital was one of the few buildings in the area that
still had running generators and so the power to light itself. It was a
relatively calm night, slightly overcast and unseasonably warm for early
October. The sound of gunfire had receded, and some staff members even dared
to step outside for the first time in days.
"The Single Deadliest Aircraft"
The explosions began just as staff members were putting patients under
anesthesia in the operating room.
At 2:19 a.m., a representative of MSF in Kabul called the American-led NATO
mission to Afghanistan to say that the hospital was being bombed. A minute
later, an MSF representative called the Red Cross, then the United Nations.
From New York, a member of MSF called the Pentagon.
We dont know what was happening inside the Pentagon that night. We do know
that, back in Kunduz, a U.S. AC-130 gunship was circling above the
hospitals main building.
The low-flying AC-130 is equipped with cannons and a 105-mm howitzer. It can
fly at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour, but its designed, above all, to
circle close to the ground while firing at targets below. As an article in
the Washington Post explained, The AC-130 essentially loiters over a target
at around 7,000 feet, flying in a circle and firing from weapons ports
mounted on the aircrafts left side.
The gunship is specially designed for night missions. The plane is equipped
with infrared sensors, while its crew of 12 (or so) sport night-vision
goggles. Manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the older version of
the plane, the AC-130H Spectre, cost $110 million apiece, while the newer
AC-130U Spooky version goes for $210 million. One Special Operations Air
Force captain described the gunship as the single deadliest aircraft and
flying squadron in the war on terrorism. In 2002, this same type of gunship
fired on a wedding party in Afghanistans Helmand province, killing more
than 40 people.
Versions of the gunship have been in use by the U.S. military since the
Vietnam War. An older model, which flew in Operation Desert Storm, the first
Gulf War, is now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air
Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. It was dubbed Azrael,
which in both Hebrew and Arabic means the Angel of Death.
At 2:47 a.m., a representative from MSF in Kabul texted the American-led
mission to Afghanistan that one of the Kunduz hospitals staff members had
just died, that many were missing, and that the trauma center was still
under repeated fire.
Five minutes later, someone from the mission texted back: Im sorry to hear
that. I still do not know what happened.
At this point, the U.S. gunship above had been firing on the hospitals main
building on and off for more than 45 minutes. The strikes were, according to
MSF Director of Operations Bart Janssens, very precise. [The gunship] came
four or five times over the hospital, and every time extremely precisely hit
with a series of impacts on the main building of the hospital, he told
Reuters.
Surviving staff members recall that the first room to be attacked was the
intensive care unit, which then held a number of patients, including two
children. The strikes next hit the lab, the emergency room, the X-ray room,
the mental health center, and the operating theaters, where two patients
were lying on the operating tables. Both were killed.
Everyone capable of fleeing tried to do so: doctors, staff, patients. One
man in a wheelchair was killed by flying shrapnel. Some people were on fire
as they ran. One staff member was decapitated. As people fled the building,
doctors and medical staff were hit by fire from the plane. Some who survived
had the impression, from the sound of the plane, that it was following them
as they ran.
A Purpose to Kill and Destroy
MSFs hospital had been a fixture in Kunduz since August 2011, the only
medical facility in the region. A photo snapped a few months after its
opening showed a large sign affixed to the front gate of the compound: The
MSF Trauma Centre will prioritize treatment for war-wounded and other
seriously injured persons, without regard to their ethnicity or political
affiliations, and determined solely by their medical needs. No fee charged.
Above the text was an image of an automatic rifle surrounded by a red circle
with two thick lines through it, indicating the hospitals and the
organizations strict no-weapons policy in its facilities.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Doctors
Without Borders opened the facility two years after it returned to
Afghanistan. In 2004, the organization had pulled out of the country after
five of its workers were killed in a roadside ambush in Badghis Province. In
2009, the group returned and began supporting a hospital in Kabul. Upon its
reentry, Michiel Hofman, then a director of the organization, told the
German magazine Der Spiegel that he had been shocked to discover normal
wartime rules of hospital neutrality didnt seem to apply in the ongoing
conflict. International forces and police, he said, would regularly go
into hospitals to harass patients. Hospitals would be attacked. There is a
dire record of respecting the neutrality of health structures.
That same year, a Swedish aid group running a hospital in Wardak Province
accused the U.S. Armys 10th Mountain Division of storming the facility and
tying up hospital guards as the troops searched for members of the Taliban.
Nonetheless, the Kunduz hospital operated in relative peace until July 2015,
when armed members of a U.S.-backed Afghan Special Operations team raided
it, forcing the facility to close temporarily. It soon reopened. By October
2015, the site was under increasingly close surveillance by U.S. Special
Operations analysts who, it was later reported, believed there might have
been a Pakistani intelligence operative working out of the facility. (MSF
officials insist that there were only nine international staff members, none
of whom were Pakistani, no less intelligence operatives.)
In the days before the attack, those analysts had put together a cache of
information about the hospital -- including maps with the facility circled.
At 2:56 a.m., on the morning of the attack, an MSF representative in Kabul
again texted an official of the American-led mission, demanding an end to
the strikes, which had lasted nearly an hour. By then, flames had overtaken
the main building, with children still trapped inside. Abdul Manar, a
caretaker at the hospital, recalled the sound of their cries. I could hear
them screaming for help inside the hospital while it was set ablaze by the
bombing, he told Al Jazeera.
Ill do my best, the official responded. Praying for you all.
The strikes nonetheless continued. At 3:10 and 3:14, MSF again called the
Pentagon. Finally, sometime around 3:15 a.m., the gunship flew off and the
strikes were over.
With the operating rooms destroyed, surviving staff members turned an office
desk into a makeshift operating table and attempted to treat a doctor whose
leg had been blown off. Lajos Zoltan Jecs, a nurse, helped with the surgery.
The doctor, he recalled, died atop that desk. We did our best, he wrote
later, but it wasn't enough.
The staff were in shock. Many were crying. Jecs and others went to check on
the damage in the intensive care unit only to find six patients burning in
their beds.
In all, 30 people died: 13 staff members, 10 patients, and seven bodies so
badly burned that, more than a month later, the remains have not yet been
identified.
The hospital closed that same day. About two weeks later, a U.S. tank rammed
into the shell of the charred building, possibly destroying evidence of what
that AC-130 had done. All told, MSF General Director Christopher Stokes
concluded: The view from inside the hospital is that this attack was
conducted with a purpose to kill and destroy. But we dont know why.
Another Version of the Story
Thats one version of the story, based on a Doctors Without Borders
preliminary report on the destruction of their hospital, released on
November 5th, as well as on articles published by Reuters, the Associated
Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera, the
testimonies of medical staff published by MSF, and a Democracy Now!
interview with the executive director of MSF USA.
Heres the second version of the story, the one we in the United States are
meant to believe. Its far more confusing and lacking in details, but don't
worry, its much shorter.
On October 3rd, an American AC-130 gunship mistakenly struck a hospital
run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz. The attack was ordered by U.S.
Special Operations forces, possibly at the behest of the Afghan army (or
maybe not).
Earlier contradictory accounts, all issued within the span of four days, go
as follows: (1) it may not have been an American air strike; (2) the U.S.
launched airstrikes in the neighborhood of the hospital and the facility was
hit by accident; (3) the hospital was hit because American Special
Operations forces were under fire near the hospital and called in the
strikes in their own defense; (4) the facility was hit because Afghan forces
supported by that Special Ops unit advised that they were taking fire from
enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces.
As the story changed, culpability shifted back and forth. The Afghans, not
the Americans, had called in the attack. No, the Afghans never directly
called in the attack. The Americans called in the attack from within the
U.S. chain of command.
In the end, the bottom line from Washington was: were conducting a full
investigation and one of these days well get back to you with the details.
This second version of the story (in its many iterations) came from
commander of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan General John Campbell, White
House spokesperson Josh Earnest, and Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook.
Unnamed sources added some colorful, although unsupported allegations about
a Pakistani intelligence agent or armed Taliban fighters being inside the
hospital -- despite all evidence to the contrary.
Campbell offered his deepest condolences. President Obama called the head
of MSF and personally apologized for the tragic incident. The Pentagon
promised to make condolence payments to the families of those killed.
Several investigations into the incident were launched by the Pentagon and
a joint Afghan-NATO team. However, MSFs repeated call for an independent
investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission,
established under the additional protocols to the Geneva Convention, have
been ducked or ignored.
There is, at least, one aspect both accounts agree on: the timing.
Its undisputed that the attack occurred on October 3, 2015 -- just over
nine months after President Obama officially declared the ending of the U.S.
combat mission in Afghanistan.
All the Unknown Deaths
In the mornings as I scan the news, Im often overcome by the absurdity of
writing about ongoing wars that have officially ended or a hospital that has
been mistakenly struck with exceptional precision. The U.S. bombing of
that trauma center in Kunduz was indisputably horrific, one of the worst
episodes of civilian casualties in the Afghan war, as the New York Times
described it. But its outrageousness comes, in part, because for once we
have enough information to piece the story together since that AC-130
attacked a well-known, prize-winning, Western humanitarian organization.
To my mind, however, the truly disconcerting stories are the ones that
arrive at my desk with so little information that its almost impossible to
say or write anything with certainty. And so I cant really tell you what
happened on August 12th, when a suspected U.S. drone strike in Yemen...
killed five suspected al-Qaida militants, as the Associated Press reported
in the standard language used to obscure attacks for which we, in the United
States, have essentially no real information whatsoever.
Who were these five people, I wonder, killed suddenly as they drove along a
road somewhere to the east of the city of Mukalla? Statistically speaking,
theres a reasonable likelihood that they were innocent people. As the
Intercept recently reported, based on leaked secret documents, 90% of those
killed during one recent period in the U.S. drone campaign in Afghanistan
were not the sought-after targets. Without being there, however, I cant
tell you who those five Yemeni militants were, or what lives they led, or
how many children they had, or even whether they were children themselves --
and the odds are that neither can the Pentagon.
Nor can I tell you what happened when the U.S. launched its first drone
strike in Syria on August 4th. I remember scouring different news sources
over the following mornings for the most basic piece of information: how
many people -- if any -- had been killed. That was, after all, what I was
doing: waking up early and counting the death toll from America's endless
wars.
But in the days and weeks that followed, the Pentagon's spokesman refused to
offer specifics of any sort on this strike. It's possible he didn't have
any. And so, to this day, even the number of deaths remains unknown.
Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and a news producer with
Democracy Now! The author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight
for a Place to Call Home, her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Al
Jazeera, Guernica, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and frequently at TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Laura Gottesdiener
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176069
