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Yemeni Suffering Made Easy

June 27, 2018

Yemeni Suffering Made Easy

Photo Source Felton Davis | CC BY 2.0

The Saudi and UAE-led operationto retake the rebel-held port city of Hodeidah, which could jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, represents more than the latest tragic chapter in Yemen’s civil war. It is the fully expected outcome of several Western nations’ complicity in a multi-country assault that has made Yemen the world’s largest humanitarian disaster.

The recent attack on Hodeidah is both a function of Western arms support and a feature of longstanding Western political programming that has sustained the coalition’s attack on the country since a bombing campaign began in 2015.

For the last several years the US, UK, and France have all greenlit arms sales, refueling missions, and special forces guidanceto the coalition with few, if any, conditions. The operation in Hodeidah is no different, where French special forces are already on the ground and the US is providing intelligence and aerial refueling to assist the coalition. Since the beginning of the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, the results of American, French, and British arms and support have led to the bombing of funerals, weddings, markets, hospitals, schools and other public spaces populated by civilians. The latest bombing of a wedding party (because there have been more than one) killed twenty, including the bride herself.

Some observers equivocate as to whether these destructive acts stem from purposeful targeting or simply the negligent use of sophisticated Western weapons technology, but the frequency with which non-combatants, civilian production capacity, and food supply chains continue to be struck appear deliberate. To assume these attacks are anything but calculated is to stretch the bounds of reasonableness: within the first day of operations in Hodeidah, a Doctors Without Borders treatment facility suffered a coalition missile strike even though the GPS coordinates of the facility had been providedtwelve times and the roof had clear markings to distinguish the building for medical purposes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doctors Without Borders Calls U.S. Report on Afghan Hospital Bombing ‘Shocking’

November 26, 2015

Doctors Without Borders Calls U.S. Report on Afghan Hospital Bombing ‘Shocking’ 

CNN

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday that “human error” was a factor in the Oct. 3 bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 30 civilians and left 37 wounded. In a statement, Doctors Without Borders, which had previously called the attack a probable war crime, said the report was “shocking” and left “more questions than answers.”

Gen. John F. Campbell said the strike was “tragic, but avoidable.” Human errors compounded by technical malfunctions onboard the AC-130 attack aircraft caused the strike, he said, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon in a video broadcast from Kabul.

The military investigation found that the “cause of this tragedy was … avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures,” Campbell said.

Campbell addresses reporters in this CNN video:

From the Los Angeles Times:

The medical facility was misidentified as a target by U.S. military personnel who believed they were striking a different building several hundred meters away where there were reports of Taliban fighters, he said. The hospital was on the military’s so-called “no-strike list.”

Campbell did not identify the names or number of individuals suspended and did not say whether they would face disciplinary or criminal charges. Decisions on whether to prosecute will be made by the U.S. Special Operations Command, officials said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Lies From The New York Times

October 22, 2015

More Lies From The New York Times

The New York Times Has Degenerated Into A Propaganda Organ Of The US Government

44 years ago the NYT published the Pentagon Papers.
Today the NYT publishes neoconservative lies, which have destroyed several countries and millions of peoples, and dishonest apologies for Washington’s war crimes. Stephen Lendman tells us about the latest NYT atrocity.
It is amazing that anyone still reads the NYT.

NYT Justifies US Afghan Hospital Bombing

Almost daily, The Times finds new ways to disgrace itself. Instead of full and accurate reporting, it fronts for imperial lawlessness – making it complicit with high crimes of war and against humanity.

Its administration and Pentagon press release “journalism” is an open cesspool of misinformation, distortion and Big Lies – all propaganda all the time on issues mattering most.

Its latest willful deception headlines “Hospital Attack Fueled by Units New to Kunduz,” saying:

“The American airstrike against a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan…was approved by American Special Operations Forces normally assigned to other parts of Asia.”

“The Afghan commandos who requested the strike had been rushed from another part of the country to help quell the Taliban attack. And the AC-130 gunship that unleashed the fire had not worked with either group before.”

“Military investigators have not yet reached any final conclusions about how the Oct. 3 attack in Kunduz occurred, but an emerging focus of investigators is how the lack of familiarity of American and Afghan forces with the area and their lack of experience in working together may have directly contributed to the series of mistaken decisions that led to the attack, American officials said.”

“They attributed those problems, in part, to the withdrawal of American forces from northern Afghanistan that has been part of the gradual drawdown of United States forces in the country.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Rejects Hospital Bombing Investigation, Instead Smashes into Hospital in Tank, Destroying Evidence

October 16, 2015

US Rejects Hospital Bombing Investigation, Instead Smashes into Hospital in Tank, Destroying Evidence

After changing its story many times, the US now admits that it intentionally threw bombs, for more than an hour, at the now famous Doctors Without Borders hospital, proving accurate the assessment of DWB staffer Meinie Nicolai, who said the US attack was “a premeditated massacre.”

Since initial US claims that the protected DWB hospital was a “Taliban stronghold” and so forth have been debunked as stupid, the US now claims it targeted the hospital because one man, a “Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence spy”, was inside.

However, Glenn Greenwald points out that the US puppet government in Afghanistan has had it out for DWB for some time because they treat patients indiscriminately, whereas US allies like Israel, for example, discriminate between patients, treating Al Qaeda fighters while targeting members of the UN-recognized Syrian government: “Israel has opened its borders with Syria in order to provide medical treatment to Nusra Front and al-Qaida fighters wounded in the ongoing civil war, according to The Wall Street Journal.”

On October 14th, an “international panel” announced that it was “ready to investigate the deadly US [hospital] bombing”, but would need “assurances from Barack Obama and the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, that their governments [would] comply.”

The US rejected the initiative for the investigation, and instead, on October 15th, sent soldiers to smash up the bombed hospital with a tank, “destroy[ing] potential evidence” for the war crimes investigation.

To explain this, the US announced that the tank was carrying the US’s own “investigators”.

In the mean time, a whistle-blower has released classified documents on Obama’s global assassination ring that illustrate gross recklessness and confirm that almost one hundred percent of the people being killed are not actual targets – though targeting people and executing them is also criminal.

Author focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry.  Contact on Twitter.

Why Is the U.S. Refusing an Independent Investigation If Its Hospital Airstrike Was an “Accident”?

October 8, 2015

In Geneva this morning, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) demanded a formal, independent investigation into the U.S. airstrike on its hospital in Kunduz. The group’s international president, Dr. Joanne Liu (pictured above, center), specified that the inquiry should be convened pursuant to war crime-investigating procedures established by the Geneva Conventions and conducted by The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. “Even war has rules,” Liu said. “This was just not an attack on our hospital. It was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated.”

Liu emphasized that the need for an “independent, impartial” investigation is now particularly compelling given what she called “the inconsistency in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened over the recent days.” On Monday, we documented the multiple conflicting accounts offered in the first three days by the U.S. military and its media allies, but the story continued to change even further after that. As The Guardian’s headline yesterday noted, the U.S. admission that its own personnel called in the airstrike — not Afghan forces as it claimed the day before — meant that “U.S. alters story for fourth time in four days.” All of this led Liu to state the obvious today: “We cannot rely on internal military investigations by the U.S., NATO and Afghan forces.”

An independent, impartial investigation into what happened here should be something everyone can immediately agree is necessary. But at its daily press briefing on Monday, the U.S. State Department, through its spokesperson Mark Toner, insisted that no such independent investigation was needed on the ground that the U.S. government is already investigating itself and everyone knows how trustworthy and reliable this process is:

QUESTION: The — so MSF is calling for an independent investigation of this incident by a neutral international body. Is that something the administration would support?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Snowden Has A Simple Solution To Get To The Bottom Of The US Afghan Bombing “War Crime”

October 7, 2015

Snowden Has A Simple Solution To Get To The Bottom Of The US Afghan Bombing “War Crime”

Overnight, Medecins Sans Frontiers, or the “Doctors without Borders” medical group which suffered a tremendous loss of life at the hands of US bombardment this past Saturday, stepped up its criticism of what it has previously called a US “war crime.”

As Reuters reports, earlier today it called for an independent international fact-finding commission to be established to investigate the U.S. bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which it deems a war crime, and which it would use to decide whether or not to file criminal charges, although it was unclear against whom precisely: perhaps 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama?

Why independent: because as MSF said “we cannot rely on internal investigations by U.S, NATO and Afghan forces.”

Instead, the medical charity said that the commission, which can be set up at the request of a single state under the Geneva Convention, would gather facts and evidence from the United States, NATO and Afghanistan. MSF said it sent a letter on Tuesday to the 76 countries who signed up to the additional protocol of the Geneva Convention that set up the standing commission in 1991.

There is one problem: neither the United States nor Afghanistan are signatories and Francoise Saulnier, MSF lead counsel MSF, said that the consent of the states involved is necessary.

Good luck getting it.

Assuming the US does “agree” to comply with this fact-finding mission, we expect the full data dump – after all the necessary scrubbing of the evidence of course – to take place, some time in 2019.

For now, however, the MSF is not backing down: “If we let this go, we are basically giving a blank check to any countries at war,” MSF International President Joanne Liu told a news briefing in Geneva. “There is no commitment to an independent investigation yet.”

MSF is in talks with Switzerland about convoking the international commission of independent experts.

“Today we say enough, even war has rules,” Liu said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. Bombing of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan Was No Accident – “It Was the Target”

October 7, 2015

U.S. Bombing of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan Was No Accident – “It Was the Target”

Screen Shot 2015-10-06 at 10.26.44 AM

In particular, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) quickly publicized numerous facts that cast serious doubt on the original U.S. claim that the strike on the hospital was just an accident. To begin with, the organization had repeatedly advised the U.S. military of the exact GPS coordinates of the hospital. They did so most recently on September 29, just five days before the strike. Beyond that, MSF personnel at the facility “frantically” called U.S. military officials during the strike to advise them that the hospital was being hit and to plead with them to stop, but the strikes continued in a “sustained” manner for 30 more minutes.  

– From Glenn Greenwald’s article: The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification

By now, all of you will have read about the U.S. military’s recent bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. What you may not be aware of, is how much the official story has changed in the days since this inexcusable act of barbarism became public.

Doctors Without Borders has been calling the attack a “war crime,” which to the average American sounds outlandish and impossible. The justification for this claim is simple — that the airstrike wasn’t an accident at all, and that the U.S. military intentionally targeted the hospital. As the days go by, it becomes increasingly clear that this is indeed the case, and the Pentagon is now scrambling to justify the intentional targeting of a hospital.

As Glenn Greenwald reports at the Intercept:

When news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification

October 6, 2015

The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification

When news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.

This obfuscation tactic is the standard one the U.S. and Israel both use whenever they blow up civilian structures and slaughter large numbers of innocent people with airstrikes. Citizens of both countries are well-trained – like some tough, war-weary, cigar-chomping general – to reflexively spout the phrase “collateral damage,” which lets them forget about the whole thing and sleep soundly, telling themselves that these sorts of innocent little mistakes are inevitable even among the noblest and most well-intentioned war-fighters, such as their own governments. The phrase itself is beautifully technocratic: it requires no awareness of how many lives get extinguished, let alone acceptance of culpability. Just invoke that phrase and throw enough doubt on what happened in the first 48 hours and the media will quickly lose interest.

But there’s something significantly different about this incident that has caused this “mistake” claim to fail. Usually, the only voices protesting or challenging the claims of the U.S. military are the foreign, non-western victims who live in the cities and villages where the bombs fall. Those are easily ignored, or dismissed as either ignorant or dishonest. Those voices barely find their way into U.S. news stories, and when they do, they are stream-rolled by the official and/or anonymous claims of the U.S. military, which are typically treated by U.S. media outlets as unassailable authority.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Bombs Afghanistan Hospital, Kills 9 Civilians, Injures 37; Tosses It Off As “Collateral Damage”

October 3, 2015

US Bombs Afghanistan Hospital, Kills 9 Civilians, Injures 37; Tosses It Off As “Collateral Damage”

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for US foreign policy, or for the credibility of the US state department to slide further, it got much worse.

Less than a day after US ambassador to the UN, uber-warhawk Samantha Power informed Russia of the latest US foreign policy stance by tweeter, when she called “on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian oppo[sition and] civilians” in the latest desperate attempt to halt the Russian campaign against US-created ISIS which may wipe out the terrorist threat in just a few short days, it was the US itself which admitted that early on Saturday the US airforce bombed an Afghan hospital run by the medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, in the Afghan city of Kunduz in an air strike that killed at least nine people and wounded 37.

As the Executive Director, of Doctors without Borders Jason Cone tweeted, “all parties 2 conflict, including in Kabul & Washington, were clearly informed of precise GPS Coordinates of @MSF facilities in Kunduz” and that the “precise location of @MSF Kunduz hospital communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over past months, including on 9/29.”

In other words, this morning’s US bombing was nothing more than another example of the utter incompetence, carelessness and disregard for innocent civilian lives that has become a staple hallmark of US foreign policy, something we have already witnessed repeatedly in the past 6 years as a result of the thousands of innocent people dead as part of US drone attacks, also known as “collateral damage.”

The attack, which started at 2:15am local time, took place when almost 200 patients and employees were in the hospital, the only one in the region that can deal with major injuries, Medecins Sans Frontieres said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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