“Humanitarian Lies”: Evidence Proves US Afghan Hospital Attack Was Deliberate

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Monday October 19, 2015 22:06

by Stephen Lendman

welve staff members and at least 10 patients, including three children, were killed, with a further two staff presumed dead

Changing US explanations following the October 3 Kunduz hospital attack were all lies – willful deception, covering up a deliberate attack on a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) facility.

Pentagon officials knew it was a hospital, yet attacked it anyway – multiple times for over an hour, killing 24 doctors, other medical staff and patients, injuring 37 others.

Make no mistake! This was a deliberately planned war crime. An AP report said “US analysts knew (the) Afghan site was (a) hospital.”

Photo MSF. Fires burn in the MSF emergency trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after it was hit and partially destroyed by missiles 03 October 2015.

They’d been gathering intelligence on it for days – the strike authorized on the phony pretext of it being used by “a Pakistani operative…coordinat(ing) (with) Taliban activity,” said AP.

MSF stressed doctors, other medical staff and patients alone were in the facility – no Taliban, Taliban supporters, or other US-installed Afghan puppet regime opponents.

According to AP,

US “special operations analysts had assembled a dossier that included maps with the hospital circled, along with indications that intelligence agencies were tracking the location of the Pakistani operative and activity reports based on overhead surveillance, according to a former intelligence official who is familiar with some of the documents describing the site.”

Claiming the “intelligence suggested the hospital was being used as a Taliban command and control center and may have housed heavy weapons” was a complete fabrication.

Nothing of the sort was there. It was solely a hospital, providing vital medical services for thousands of Afghan victims of US imperialism, now with nowhere to go because of Washington’s horrific war crime.

US General John Campbell in charge of Afghan operations lied, calling the strike a mistake, changing previous phony explanations, stopping short of saying who authorized it.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook compounded his Big Lie, claiming US forces

“would never intentionally target a protected medical facility. We have confidence that the ongoing investigations into this tragic incident will uncover exactly what happened and why this hospital was mistakenly struck.”

Ongoing US, NATO and Afghan investigations will all whitewash Washington’s willful war crime when released – exercises solely in coverup and denial of what’s obvious from what’s already known.

MSF needs approval from US and puppet Afghan authorities to proceed with the independent investigation it demands – unwilling to accept the results of phony ones now being conducted.

On October 15, it launched a petitions drive, urging worldwide support, saying:

MSF “today launched a petition urging citizens to call on President Obama and the United States to consent to an independent investigation into the bombing of MSF’s trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3.”

MSF called for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) into the repeated US airstrikes on the hospital…

MSF is calling for the United States and the Obama administration to consent to an investigation into the Kunduz hospital bombing. Consent is required before an impartial truth-seeking investigation can be launched.

Read the petition. Add your name. Demand US war criminals be held accountable for 14 years of naked aggression against a nation threatening no one – the Kunduz hospital attack the latest example of their contempt for human life and welfare.

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And from http://www.msf.org/article/factsheet-kunduz-hospital-attack

Factsheet: Kunduz Hospital Attack

From 2:08am until 3:15am on Saturday, 3 October, MSF’s trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was hit by a series of aerial bombing raids at approximately 15-minute intervals. The main hospital building, which housed the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy ward, was hit with precision, repeatedly, during each aerial raid, while surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched.
The total number of people killed in the attack is 22, including 12 MSF staff members and 10 patients. Thirty-seven people were injured, including 19 members of the MSF team.
From 28 September, when major fighting broke out in Kunduz city, until the time of the attack, MSF teams in Kunduz had treated 394 wounded people in the hospital.
When the aerial attack occurred, there were 105 patients in the hospital and more than 80 MSF international and national staff present.
Our staff reported no armed combatants or fighting in the compound prior to the airstrike.
MSF’s facility in Kunduz was a fully functioning hospital that was full of patients and MSF staff.
The attacks took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to Coalition and Afghan military and civilian officials as recently as Tuesday, 29 September. The attack continued for more than 30 minutes after we first informed US and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington that it was a hospital being hit.
In the aftermath of the attack, the MSF team desperately tried to move wounded and ill patients out of harm’s way, and tried to save the lives of wounded colleagues and patients after setting up a makeshift operating theatre in an undamaged room.
MSF’s hospital was the only facility of its kind in northeastern Afghanistan, providing free high level life- and limb-saving trauma care. In 2014, more than 22,000 patients received care at the hospital and more than 5900 surgeries were performed.
The MSF hospital in Kunduz has been partially destroyed and is no longer operational. This leaves thousands of people without access to emergency medical care when they need it most.
We demand an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC.org) to establish the facts of this event. The IHFFC is not a UN body; it was created in 1991 by Additional Protocol 1, article 90 of the Geneva Conventions that govern the rules of war. The IHFFC is set up for precisely this purpose: to independently investigate violations of humanitarian law, such as attacks on hospitals, which are protected in conflict zones.
MSF started working in Afghanistan in 1980. In Kunduz, as in the rest of Afghanistan, national and international staff work together to ensure the best quality of treatment. MSF supports the Ministry of Public Health in Ahmad Shah Baba hospital in eastern Kabul; Dasht-e-Barchi maternity center in western Kabul; and Boost hospital in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. In Khost, in the east of the country, MSF operates a maternity hospital.
As in all its projects, MSF doctors treat people according to their medical needs and do not make distinctions based on a patient’s ethnicity, religious beliefs or political affiliation.
MSF relies only on private funding for its work in Afghanistan and does not accept money from any government.

http://www.msf.org/article/factsheet-kunduz-hospital-attack

Join us in demanding an Independent Investigation

MSF is pushing for a full, transparent, and independent investigation into this shocking event. Help us by sharing our campaign page http://www.msf.org/kunduz-independentinvestigation and banner, or even better, a photo of yourself holding our banner.

Photo: MSF. A destroyed area of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan is visible at first light on 03 October 2015, the morning after the facility was hit by sustained bombing

Comments (1 of 1)

US Pilots Shot Fleeing Doctors During MSF Hospital Attack

by T

Fri Nov 06, 2015 14:34

Doctors Without Borders have released their internal report (attached) on Thursday about the October attack on its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. In it they report:

...When the first airstrikes hit the main hospital building, two of the three operating theatres were in use. Three international and twenty-three national MSF staff were caring for patients or performing surgeries in this same main building. There were eight patients in the ICU and six patients in the area of the operating theatres.
Those who survived the US airstrikes were direct witnesses of the attack from the different locations inside the MSF compound.

MSF staff recall that the first room to be hit was the ICU, where MSF staff were caring for a number of immobile patients, some of whom were on ventilators. Two children were in the ICU. MSF staff were attending to these critical patients in the ICU at the time of the attack and were directly killed in the first airstrikes or in the fire that subsequently engulfed the building. Immobile patients in the ICU burned in their beds.

After hitting the ICU, the airstrikes then continued from the east to west end of the main hospital building. The ICU, archive, laboratory, ER, x-ray, outpatient department, mental health and physiotherapy departments as well as the operating theatres were all destroyed in this wave after wave of strikes.

After the first strike, MSF medical teams working in the operating theatres ran out of the OT and sought shelter in the sterilisation room. The two patients on the operating table in the OTs were killed in the airstrikes.

The MSF international staff members sleeping in the administrative building were woken up by the sound of the first explosions. An MSF nurse arrived at the administrative building covered from head to toe in debris and blood with his left arm hanging from a small piece of tissue after having suffered a traumatic amputation in the blast. The MSF nurse was bleeding from his left eye and oropharynx. Immediate treatment was provided in an attempt to stabilise the nurse by the medical team in the administrative building.

The airstrikes continued with many staff referring to a propeller plane, which could be heard throughout. This sound is consistent with the reported AC-130 circling the MSF hospital. Many of those interviewed describe massive explosions, sufficient to shake the ground. These bigger explosions were most frequently described as coming in concentrated volleys. MSF staff also described shooting coming from the plane.

Many staff describe seeing people being shot, most likely from the plane, as people tried to flee the main hospital building that was being hit with each airstrike. Some accounts mention shooting that appears to follow the movement of people on the run. MSF doctors and other medical staff were shot while running to reach safety in a different part of the compound.
One MSF staff member described a patient in a wheelchair attempting to escape from the inpatient department when he was killed by shrapnel from a blast. An MSF doctor suffered a traumatic amputation to the leg in one of the blasts. He was later operated on by the MSF team on a make-shift operating table on an office desk where he died. Other MSF staff describe seeing people running while on fire and then falling unconscious on the ground. One MSF staff was decapitated by shrapnel in the airstrikes.

Though it is clear from the staff debriefings and photos that the main hospital building was the principal target of the attack, other locations within the MSF compound were also struck, including in the southern area of the hospital compound where two unarmed MSF guards were found dead as a result of shrapnel wounds...

For more see http://www.msf.ie/kunduz-hospital-attack

From Medencins Sans Frontiers (i.e. Doctors without Borders)

It has been one month since our emergency trauma hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was repeatedly bombed by US forces.

At least thirty people lost their lives: 10 were our patients, three of them children, and 13 were MSF staff (1 MSF staff member and 2 patients are missing and presumed dead). The only specialist trauma centre in northeast Afghanistan has been destroyed, depriving tens of thousands lifesaving surgical care.

Read an Irish Times interview with Dr Declan Barry who was medical team leader at Kunduz hospital until September of this year
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/are-we...95153

For details on the AC-130 attack plane see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_AC-130 The AC-130 is by far the deadliest airborne platform. It is slow moving but armed to the teeth with heavy calibre machine gun, radar, infra-red sensors.

The AC-130 is a heavily armed long-endurance aircraft carrying an array of anti-ground oriented weapons that are integrated with sophisticated sensors, navigation, and fire-control systems. It is capable of delivering precision firepower or area-saturation fire over a target area over a long period of time, at night or in adverse weather. The sensor suite consists of a television sensor, infrared sensor, and radar.

Bringing democracy to an Afghan hospital... The hospital in Kunduz a few days after US attack

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/105556
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