It appears our only stratedgy for winning the "war on terror" is to become the
world's preeminent terrorist. What would the investigation be like (and the
ensuing headlines) if the maternity ward of the Beth-Israel hospital here in
Boston was targeted for destruction?
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2015 9:53 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, The Angel of Death
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/
Here's a little thought experiment: imagine that we're 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 don't (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 wouldn't make horrified 24/7 headlines and get top TV news
billing for days, that the cable news channels wouldn't be interviewing crisis
counselors and wedding planners around the clock, and that they wouldn't 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. I'm 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 Yemen's 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 wouldn't 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 we've 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 don't 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 nation's government kill while I was sleeping.
Once I was a freelance reporter, spending weeks or months covering a single
story. Today, I'm a news producer at Democracy Now! and, from the moment I
arrive at the office, I'm scouring the wire services for the latest casualties
from Washington's war zones. It's 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" -- I've never felt so close to this country's
various combat zones. And yet I'm 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 wasn't there when the American gunship began
firing on that hospital Doctors Without Borders ran in Kunduz, and I didn't get
there afterwards either. Nor was I in Yemen's Saada province a few weeks later
when a Doctors Without Borders health clinic was bombed.
If you live here and don't listen to Democracy Now!, odds are you didn't even
know that second strike happened. How is it possible, I think to myself, that
bombing medical facilities isn't front-page news? On that gutted clinic in
Yemen, however, I can't 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 don't 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, there's what happened -- and then there's the version
you're asked to believe. Let's 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 wasn't 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
government's 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 army's haphazard efforts to retake the
city. Most of the hospital's 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 hospital's 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 couldn't 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 compound's 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 don't 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 hospital's
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 it's 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 aircraft's 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 Afghanistan's 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 hospital's 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: "I'm sorry to hear
that. I still do not know what happened."
At this point, the U.S. gunship above had been firing on the hospital's 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"
MSF's 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 hospital's and the
organization's 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 didn't 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. Army's 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.
"I'll 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 don't know why."
Another Version of the Story
That's 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.
Here's the second version of the story, the one we in the United States are
meant to believe. It's far more confusing and lacking in details, but don't
worry, it's 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: we're conducting a full
investigation and one of these days we'll 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, MSF's 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.
It's 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, I'm 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 it's almost impossible to say or
write anything with certainty. And so I can't 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,
there's 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 can't 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 Turse's Tomorrow's 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/
Here's a little thought experiment: imagine that we're 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 don't (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 wouldn't make horrified 24/7 headlines and get top TV news
billing for days, that the cable news channels wouldn't be interviewing crisis
counselors and wedding planners around the clock, and that they wouldn't 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. I'm 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 Yemen's 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 wouldn't 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 we've 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 don't 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 nation's government kill while I was sleeping.
Once I was a freelance reporter, spending weeks or months covering a single
story. Today, I'm a news producer at Democracy Now! and, from the moment I
arrive at the office, I'm scouring the wire services for the latest casualties
from Washington's war zones. It's 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" -- I've never felt so close to this country's
various combat zones. And yet I'm 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 wasn't there when the American gunship began
firing on that hospital Doctors Without Borders ran in Kunduz, and I didn't get
there afterwards either. Nor was I in Yemen's Saada province a few weeks later
when a Doctors Without Borders health clinic was bombed.
If you live here and don't listen to Democracy Now!, odds are you didn't even
know that second strike happened. How is it possible, I think to myself, that
bombing medical facilities isn't front-page news? On that gutted clinic in
Yemen, however, I can't 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 don't 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, there's what happened -- and then there's the version
you're asked to believe. Let's 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 wasn't 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
government's 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 army's haphazard efforts to retake the
city. Most of the hospital's 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 hospital's 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 couldn't 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 compound's 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 don't 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 hospital's
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 it's 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 aircraft's 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 Afghanistan's 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 hospital's 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: "I'm sorry to hear
that. I still do not know what happened."
At this point, the U.S. gunship above had been firing on the hospital's 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"
MSF's 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 hospital's and the
organization's 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 didn't 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. Army's 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.
"I'll 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 don't know why."
Another Version of the Story
That's 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.
Here's the second version of the story, the one we in the United States are
meant to believe. It's far more confusing and lacking in details, but don't
worry, it's 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: we're conducting a full
investigation and one of these days we'll 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, MSF's 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.
It's 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, I'm 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 it's almost impossible to say or
write anything with certainty. And so I can't 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,
there's 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 can't 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
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World.
Copyright 2015 Laura Gottesdiener
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176069