{"id":241397,"date":"2016-05-03T16:30:44","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T16:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-pentagon-shouldnt-get-to-absolve-itself-for-bombing-a-hospital\/"},"modified":"2016-05-03T20:30:03","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T20:30:03","slug":"the-pentagon-shouldnt-get-to-absolve-itself-for-bombing-a-hospital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/the-pentagon-shouldnt-get-to-absolve-itself-for-bombing-a-hospital\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pentagon Shouldn\u2019t Get to Absolve Itself for Bombing a Hospital"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"hospital-bombing-kunduz-afghanistan\"<\/p>\n

Damaged Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in northern Kunduz. (Photo: scrolleditorial \/ Flickr)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Pentagon just made it official: No war crime was committed when a U.S. plane attacked the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last year, killing 42 patients and health workers and injuring many more.<\/p>\n

At least, that\u2019s the conclusion of its own investigation \u2014 nearly all of which remains classified.<\/p>\n

No war crime, despite the U.S. military having full knowledge of the hospital\u2019s location before the bombing. No war crime, despite desperate hospital staffers calling military liaison officers while the rampage was underway. No war crime, despite their calls being routed without response through layers of lethal bureaucracy for an hour or more as the deadly bombing continued.<\/p>\n

No war crime, says the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

The 16 military personnel involved all will face some kind of administrative consequence, but none of them will be court-martialed. The 16 do not, apparently, include the top strategists of the U.S. war in Afghanistan \u2014 nor anyone responsible for creating or approving the system for responding to desperate calls from civilians being slaughtered by U.S. warplanes. Nor anyone whose job it is to be sure that the U.S. military doesn\u2019t violate the Geneva Conventions\u2019 prohibitions on things like attacking hospitals.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know for sure, because the vast majority of the official report on the Kunduz hospital assault was redacted \u2014 blacked out \u2014 so no one without top security clearance could read even the Pentagon\u2019s own assessment of what happened. Apparently Congress, the press, and the public are all supposed to be satisfied with the explanation<\/a> that the cause was \u201ca combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures.\u201d The official write-up adds that \u201cfatigue and high operational tempo also contributed\u201d to the \u201cfog of war\u201d \u2014 that old standby for excusing large-scale attacks on civilians.<\/p>\n

No one should be satisfied with this internal investigation. There\u2019s an urgent need for an independent, international investigation, as Doctors Without Borders has been demanding since the attack took place last October.<\/p>\n

The press release from U.S. Central Command<\/a> quotes Army General Joseph Votel, the current Centcom commander. \u201cThe fact this was unintentional, an unintentional action, takes it out of the realm of actually being a deliberate war crime against persons or protected locations,\u201d the general insists. \u201cThat is the principal reason why we do not consider this to be a war crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

General Votel can consider whatever he likes, but he doesn\u2019t get to re-write international humanitarian law on his own. Some war crimes do include specific intent \u2014 a charge of genocide, for instance, requires the perpetrator\u2019s intention to destroy, in part or in whole, a racial, ethnic, religious, or other group. Other war crimes, however \u2014 including violating the Geneva Conventions \u2014 do not require that kind of specific intent. (Criminal law has a similar distinction. Some crimes, like assault or battery, are based on a particular action; a separate crime is committed when there is assault with intent to kill.)<\/p>\n

In this case, the 4th<\/sup> Geneva Convention, Article 18<\/a>, states unambiguously that \u201ccivilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack,<\/em> but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.\u201d Criminal negligence may be involved rather than criminal intent, but that would still be a crime.<\/p>\n

Yet Army General John Campbell, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, insists, \u201cThe label \u2018war crimes\u2019 is typically reserved for intentional acts \u2014 intentionally<\/em> targeting civilians or intentionally<\/em> targeting protected objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTypically\u201d is a slippery word. One might conclude from Campbell\u2019s words that U.S. military personnel right up the chain of command are indeed \u201ctypically\u201d liable for war crimes when they, just for example, order the bombing of heavily populated cities to force regime change, or a drone attack on someone from the kill-or-capture list despite his nephew being at his side. But in fact U.S. military personnel are virtually never charged with war crimes.<\/p>\n

And despite the years of brutal U.S. assaults launched in the name of the global war on terror, there is still nothing \u201ctypical\u201d about an attack on a civilian hospital whose location was well known to the military, whose staff was desperately calling to try to stop the bombing, and who lost at least 14 doctors and other staff, 24 patients, and four caretakers in the attack. So regardless of whether it\u2019s true \u2014 or acceptable \u2014 that \u201ctypical\u201d war crimes involve specific intent, that is certainly not a requirement for determining what a war crime is.<\/p>\n

On May 3, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved<\/a> a resolution reaffirming member states\u2019 obligations to protect hospitals, the sick, and the wounded in war zones. Given recent years\u2019 escalation of attacks on hospitals and clinics \u2014 from Israel\u2019s 2014 assault on Gaza, to last year\u2019s Kunduz bombing, and last week\u2019s attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, which killed at least 50 people \u2014 such a resolution is urgently needed.<\/p>\n

Quite likely the devastating attack on the hospital at Kunduz was in fact a war crime. Possibly it wasn\u2019t. But there\u2019s no reason in the world for anyone to accept that an internal Pentagon investigation \u2014 in which almost all of the 3,000 page report remains classified \u2014 is somehow sufficient to determine the answer. An independent, international investigation is crucially required. Letting the Pentagon investigate itself simply isn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This piece was reprinted from Foreign Policy In Focus<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damaged Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in northern Kunduz. (Photo: scrolleditorial \/ Flickr) The Pentagon just made it official: No war crime was committed when a U.S. plane attacked the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last year, killing 42 patients and health workers and injuring many more. At least, that\u2019s the conclusion of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":241398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-241397","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}