Anybody want to talk about the doctors without borders facility that we hit with an airstrike. If facts are what they appear to be we just committed what is unquestionably a blatant war crime. The silence from out media has been deafening but the rest of the world is certainly talking about it.

10/9/2015 7:24:06 PM

We haven't cared about committing war crimes for a long time, it's not new

10/9/2015 7:27:58 PM

bring everybody home. how long do we plan on being in afghanistan anyway? shit gets worse and worse but no one talks about that entire war.

10/9/2015 8:19:53 PM

^^

10/9/2015 9:06:49 PM

Quote :

"We haven't cared about committing war crimes for a long time, it's not new"

Oh there's no doubt of that, but this one is even more egregious than usual. I mean, normally we're just blowing up innocent civilians that we then categorize as combatants after the fact. That's going to be pretty fucking tough with this one.

I'm not surprised that the public doesn't give a shit, but usually something like this will at least get some discussion. I mean, we're right in the thick of a bunch of jostling for position in an upcoming election, surely somebody somewhere will ask Hilary or Jeb or Trump about it.

So far, crickets.

10/9/2015 9:31:17 PM

more egregious than going to war on false pretenses?

[Edited on October 9, 2015 at 9:32 PM. Reason : at least that was talked about some though]

10/9/2015 9:31:58 PM

That's not really a war crime though, nor is it even the first time that's happened. See Tonkin, gulf of.

I imagine there are some mitigating factors here, I don't think we went into this particular even with the plan to blow up a hospital facility, I suspect this was a case of bad intelligence and piss poor communication that resulted in an atrocity. One would hope this is exactly the kind of event that could spark conversation about why the fuck we're still in Afghanistan and how much longer we can afford to continue our policy of global adventurism.

Just as an aside, this policy isn't a R vs. D thing either, it's pretty much established US policy at this point. If the fact that Obama continued and then doubled down on pretty much everything the previous president did hasn't convinced you of that then you haven't been paying attention for the last 2 decades.

10/9/2015 9:39:49 PM

The US has bombed many factories, hospitals, schools, and media offices in the past 15 years... nothing new. I mean, it was a mistake, right?

10/9/2015 10:42:24 PM

I agree, it's nothing new unfortunately. The fact that his was a doctors without borders facility, as opposed to say... a wedding party made up of muslims, might draw some public outcry. Of course, there will be no outcry if it's never really reported.

10/9/2015 11:12:23 PM

Exactly.

10/9/2015 11:41:38 PM

Massive cognitive dissonance. If any other country did this, congress would be calling for blood.

It really does demonstrate though what American exceptionalism means. I want to think Putin et at completely nuts, but I can't justify this thought in the face of things like this.

I get mistakes happen, but this shouldn't be in the realm of things we should be mistaking.

10/10/2015 1:03:23 AM

It's ok. Those sick people were all military-aged males, which means they can be considered as armed belligerents.

[Edited on October 10, 2015 at 2:00 AM. Reason : ]

10/10/2015 1:57:17 AM

OK look...we should never have gone into Iraq. We should have burned everything with Taliban and/or terrorist stink on it to the ground in Afghanistan, and then left without trying to nation-build the place (and go back to do it again as necessary, but not take the place on as a project). We've been there at least a decade longer than we should have (I mean in a large-scale context...the CIA and State Dept have been balls-deep in Afghanistan since Oct 1979.)

We have made some egregious fuck-ups (this one seems to be, and certainly others).

^ We have been more liberal than we should have, in my opinion, of defining who should be killed in some instances...

...but in many other instances, we've been restrained to the point of absurdity.


I don't think that, on balance, we (as a country or as a military) have a cavalier attitude towards war crimes at all.

10/10/2015 11:03:01 AM

aside from torturing prisoners, raping kids, and blowing up hospitals, we've been pretty good about not committing war crimes.

10/10/2015 11:26:09 AM

Pretty big fuckup, but its not like we are isis or anything.

10/10/2015 11:02:05 PM

Well, I mean, it's not like ISIS is the standard, either.

10/11/2015 11:03:02 AM

Quote :

"The silence from out media has been deafening but the rest of the world is certainly talking about it."

lol this shit was all over the news

10/11/2015 9:47:55 PM

not like it would be if someone blew up an american hospital

10/11/2015 10:57:34 PM

the American news? no shit, sherlock

10/11/2015 11:08:40 PM

All i really care about when i put on the news is Caitlyn Jenner's new dress and who will be on American Idol tonight.

10/12/2015 6:39:53 PM

What is more important is who from the Kardashian/Jenner clan posed nude or had a "leaked" sex tape.

10/12/2015 6:45:19 PM

We are not ISIS but they exist because of US exploits in the Middle East.

10/19/2015 6:41:19 AM

http://www.wral.com/little-outcry-as-hospitals-bombed-in-syria-yemen/15042112/

10/30/2015 10:19:33 AM

Technically, that hospital could have been treating terrorists, so it had to come down. It's better that 1 terrorist die than 10,000 innocents live.

11/1/2015 9:23:59 AM

the hospital was selling aborted christian baby parts to isis on the black market, body parts that could be used in a dirty bomb and potentially smuggled into the united states for an attack worse than 9/11 on obama's watch that hillary had been warned about in several emails

11/1/2015 5:15:42 PM

that hospital was a terrist training camp that hid the plastic fema coffins and the secret documents that proved 9/11 was a false-flag op between dubya and mossad

11/15/2015 3:58:08 PM

I spoke to a friend yesterday who is a JAG officer for the Army. He was over there a couple of years ago, and his job largely centered around approving targets for drones and airstrikes. Some members of his unit were just over there and got to deal with the fallout on this.

He describes a system in which everybody has a long list of "off-limits" sites ranging "from hospitals down to, like, grandma's tombstone up on the hill," places which are a no-go for airstrikes. In his experience the list was taken seriously. What his colleagues told him was that there was a whole cascade of errors and bad fortune: the plane took off in a hurry and missed part of the briefing; they had their location wrong so that, even though the hospital was on their maps, they thought it was something else; the nature of the weapon system in question (AC-130) meant that what might otherwise have been a tragic but limited bomb impact turned into a sustained, deliberate pounding.

This is one of my best friends, and I don't have any particular reason to think he would lie to me. He's the one who brought it up, too, so it's not like I asked him some pointed question to evade. But even if he were a stranger, common sense would make me agree with his position that no competent controller would ever knowingly permit this kind of attack on a hospital. The consequences are big and severe on every level, and the benefits are...what, exactly? Seeing shit blow up?

11/30/2015 9:05:24 PM

if they thought the bad guys were there and knew it was a hospital the benefits of bombing the hospital would be saving their own people and the hospital being collateral. People want to explain themselves and no one actually believes they committed a war crime after the fact.

11/30/2015 9:10:19 PM

^^

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-tech-fails-led-to-air-force-strike-on-msfs-kunduz-hospital/

Your best friend is correct, the report on what went wrong was recently released and it details some technical failures that resulted in fail safes not kicking in. It seems to most be human error but the computer backups weren't working (it seems, literally, that not having internet access on the plane was a contributing factor).

The crew did have the information necessary to determine they were targeting a hospital, but had already begun this process and perhaps ignored it due to "inattention blindness".

12/1/2015 12:03:54 AM