Additional details of the heavily redacted report on the October US attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which killed 42 civilians, showed a level of confusion on the ground that soldiers involved say was a recipe for disaster.
Troops involved in the deployment on the ground said they were extremely confused about the rules of engagement for the war, repeatedly asking commanders “how far do you want us to go” in helping Afghan forces on the ground. The nominally non-combat troops were simply asked “how far do you want to go?”
Confused, no instruction given from commanders and deployed without proper maps of the area, the troops ultimately called in airstrikes and the plane, itself having myriad technical issues and with an ill-trained crew, attacked a hospital.
The number of excuses that combined to make such an attack happen may explain the lack of charges for specific people in the incident, but also underscores the disastrously disorganized situation among occupation forces in the country, which soldiers called a “recipe for disaster.” Indeed, disaster happened, and the question that looms largest is how, or even whether, the Pentagon can fix so many calamitous mistakes.
Ok, but don’t troops on the ground, no matter how confused, know that you don’t blow up hospitals?
Basic Geneva training has it that Hospitals cannot be fired upon, there is NO excuses they have big red crosses or cresents painted on them to identify them from the air!
Once again, when the only two options to explain the actions of GovCo are “Stupid” or “Evil”, they ALWAYS pick Stupid as a defense.
…“how far do you want us to go”…
That question tells me that they knew exactly what they were doing. If they knew enough to get clearance from the commanders then they knew what they were doing was going to cross lines into war crimes. The squad leaders were obviously not ignorant of the rules of engagement nor were they “confused.” Like it has been noted above, there was a big phukin’ red cross on the building. And hey, even if the combat troops were “confused” the guys flying the airship could have stopped this mistake, if they wanted to, but didn’t.
You want to clear up some of the “confusion?” – Then prosecute everyone involved for war crimes, especially the “commanders” who basically told them to do whatever they wanted. Wrong on so many levels.
just like in the “collateral murder’ video, guys trained to hose stuff down.
Sarcastic to the extreme — Ditz wins first prize
Ditz is of course being sarcastic, for he above all reporters knows full well that hospitals full of civilians and wounded Taliban are our most valuable targets in this war on the working-class being carried out by the rich nobility of Afghanistan.
For the civilian hospitals treat only civilians and Taliban, NATO troops and Afghan Army having their own hospitals and if our military had not been so corrupt as to bomb hospitals giving birth to babies, it would never have agreed to nuke cremate 220,000 civilians in Japan.
The additional tragedy is that Afganistan has been ongoing since 2003…this is a failed war and a failed nation. The US is a failed nation for staying there. We can blame the ground troops and pilots but the blame goes higher..Sec Def Carter and Obama for sending our military into a failed conflict. This has got to stop And this event proves it. We also need to bring home the 5000 in Iraq, the 300 in Syria and the 100 now in Yemen…and end all these insane foreign interventions we cannot win.
Here’s a possibility! One side blows up hospitals with a red crescent painted on them and the other side blows up hospitals with a red cross painted on them. Which calls for change. Hospitals have nothing to do with medieval religious beliefs and so all of them should have a big or triangle painted on them. Or even a square but make them all the same. definitely not a circle!
You got to be some kind of gullible to believe this US attack on the hospital was an accident Seriously how much does it take before people stop believing this blatant bullshit? Think about it. Mistakes get corrected. The US has been bombing hospitals (and other civilians) for decades. If it were just a mistake this kind of “accident” would have been halted long ago