{"id":13068,"date":"2015-10-06T06:35:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T11:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13068"},"modified":"2015-10-06T06:35:53","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T11:35:53","slug":"the-radically-changing-story-of-the-u-s-airstrike-on-afghan-hospital-from-mistake-to-justification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13068","title":{"rendered":"The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification<\/a><\/h3>\n
When news first broke of the\u00a0U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital<\/a>\u00a0in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its\u00a0official statement suggested<\/a>: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz \u201cmay have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.\u201d Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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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\u00a0with airstrikes. Citizens of both countries are well-trained \u2013 like some tough, war-weary, cigar-chomping general \u2013 to reflexively\u00a0spout the phrase \u201ccollateral damage,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s something significantly different about this incident that has caused this \u201cmistake\u201d claim to fail. Usually, the only voices protesting or challenging the claims of the\u00a0U.S. military are the foreign, non-western\u00a0victims who live\u00a0in 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\u00a0of the U.S. military, which are typically treated by U.S. media outlets\u00a0as unassailable\u00a0authority.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification When news first broke of the\u00a0U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital\u00a0in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its\u00a0official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2487,9558,9556,5437,9413,5567,9637,844],"class_list":["post-13068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-afghanistan","tag-collateral-damage","tag-doctors-without-borders","tag-glenn-greenwald","tag-kunduz","tag-the-intercept","tag-us-airstrike","tag-us-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13070,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13068\/revisions\/13070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}