China Snatches U.S. Navy Spy Apparatus; U.S. Demands Its Return

An underwater, unmanned "drone" operated by the U.S. Navy was seized by the Chinese Navy. China claims it was in Chinese waters, the U.S. claims it was in international waters. [It was in the South China Sea, which China now claims as a virtual Chinese lake. Hence the disagreement.] The U.S. has demanded that China give its drone back, and China said okay, it'll give it back- (when it's good and ready, no doubt). (A curve ball was thrown into the play by president-to-be Donald Trump, who said China should keep the drone. Don't ask me why. I suppose he just always has to grab the spotlight, and that often requires saying something outlandish, in order to stand out. He is a narcissist, an exhibitionist, and an egomaniac, remember. In fact, I'm sure he won't let you forget that for the coming four years, at least.)

The U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, absurdly claimed that this spy device was engaged in "scientific" research- as if the U.S. Navy is a scientific research organization.

The Pentagon propaganda office issued a statement under the name of its chief mouthpiece Peter Cook asserting that the underwater spy vehicle was gathering "military oceanographic data...." [My emphasis.] I guess the propagandists at the Pentagon and at NPR didn't get their stories straight. But NPR regards it as one of its missions to always protect the U.S. government, so that could account for the misrepresentation of the drone's mission.  [1]
 
China will doubtless disassemble and study and copy their booty. They did this sort of thing before, when a U.S. spy plane was forced to land on Chinese territory after a Chinese fighter jet clipped and damaged it in flight. (The hot-dogging Chinese pilot was killed in his reckless act, which infuriated the Chinese towards the U.S. But since the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, after the CIA gave its location to NATO, supposedly in ignorance that it was the Chinese embassy, the Chinese are I think predisposed to blame the U.S. for their losses in confrontations with the U.S. By the way, that embassy bombing is NEVER mentioned in the U.S. Amnesia handicaps ones ability to deal realistically with the world and its other inhabitants.)

This incident is another small step in China's nibbling away at the edge of U.S. power in the Pacific. A much bigger milestone is Philippines death squad president Rodrigo Duterte telling the U.S. to kiss-off, and openly embracing China. The Obama regime has responded like a deer in the headlights, seemingly frozen. When Duterte called Obama a "son of a whore" and publicly cursed him, the U.S. barely reacted to this effrontery. Then the Philippines won a court case against China for China appropriating islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. reacted to that by talking like a mediator, instead of clearly siding with the winner, the Philippines. This signaled weakness. Obviously the U.S. wishes to avoid confrontation with China- but that means the U.S. must retreat in the face of growing Chinese power and "assertiveness."

The Philippines then abandoned its claim and started cozying up to China, under Duterte.

Duterte brags of personally murdering "criminals." No doubt the mild verbal remonstrances the U.S. has to make over his "human rights record," in order to maintain its image as the beacon of freedom and democracy and human rights, irked Duterte, even though the criticisms were strictly pro forma. Duterte is a crude thug, unsophisticated to play the game with winks and nods and understand that some things are just political theater, not to be taken seriously. (The U.S. "objecting" to relentless Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a long-running, very tired political play.) A murderous goon like Duterte is temperamentally more comfortable with the tyrants of Beijing than with the two-stepping hypocrites of Washington.

A bit of background: The Philippines was a U.S. colony until after World War II, when it became a neocolony and client dictatorship. It was a Spanish colony until the U.S. seized it as war booty during the Spanish-American war of 1898, when the U.S. also gained control of Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and carved Panama out of Colombia for its own uses. The Filipinos had the crazy idea that they should be independent, so several hundred thousand of them had to be killed to convince them to stop resisting U.S. conquest. President Theodore Roosevelt, an iconic figure in U.S. pseudo-history (quasi-mythology) sent hearty congratulations to the U.S. military commander of the invasion and occupation force for his fine work in suppressing Filipino resistance.

During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Their brutality alienated the Filipinos, just as Japanese barbarism alienated the other victims in their "Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as the Koreans and Chinese. In this, they made exactly the same strategic blunder as the Nazis. Their ideology of racial "superiority," hyper-militarism and fascism proved too much for the colonized to bear, unlike other imperialisms which are tolerated by the conquered for longer time-spans.

Two giant U.S. military bases, the Subic Bay naval base and Clark airfield, were long occupied by the U.S. Some years after U.S.-backed dictator Marcos was overthrown, the U.S. was asked to vacate those bases. The U.S. has been angling to get those or other bases in the Philippines back ever since.

For a number of years now, U.S. "special forces" have been semi-covertly helping the Filipino military hunt and kill Islamofascist rebels in the Philippines. Duterte now says he wants the U.S. military out, and the U.S. can keep its money too.

 

                       EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUTERTE DUMPS DIRT ON U.S.!


Instead of the U.S. successfully constructing a coalition of nations to contain China, things seem to be going the other way, first with the U.S. gratuitously picking a fight with Russia over the Ukraine, which the U.S. gleefully destabilized, and driving Russia into China's arms (witness a recent multi-billion dollar economic deal and joint naval maneuvers between Russia and China), friendlier ties between India and China, and now the Philippines rushing to embrace China and spurning its long-time dominant political spouse the U.S.

The U.S. is so powerful that it has gotten away with some major blunders (the Indochina War, siding with jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and fecklessly allowing Pakistan to become a nuclear weapons power, for example), but with China's rise, the stakes may be higher than ever. In the two World Wars, other nations did the heavy fighting and dying, and the U.S. picked up the chips at the end of the games. But all-out war with nuclear-armed China is out of the question, as obviously a land invasion is!

China is ruled by a patient one-party dictatorship that has less pressure from domestic public opinion when it comes to how it conducts foreign affairs than in the U.S. case. It also has a much more unified ruling class, whereas in the U.S. the Republican Party seems determined to destroy the Democratic Party and monopolize political power. No matter what a Democratic president does, even if it is identical with Republican policies, he is attacked by the Republicans. That won't be a problem for the next four to eight years, with a Republican president and Congress, and the Democrats inclined to bark but never bite. But U.S. politicians are still remarkably short-sighted, and this is reflected in its conduct of foreign affairs. Part of this is due to their need to get reelected (every two years in the case of House Representatives). Part is due to Americans' temperamental impatience. And part is a disinterest in history, which to Americans is like intellectual broccoli, something off-putting.

But ironically, it may be the mercurial, notoriously short-attention-spanned Donald Trump who makes some changes. [2]

1]  Here is the Pentagon's statement. The title links to globalsecurity.org, which reproduced the Pentagon statement. If you want to have the Pentagon record you computer ID so they can track you, put you in the NSA database, and maybe plant spyware/malware on your computer, I have also provided the Pentagon's URL for the statement, from global security, below the statement. Note that the type of data the Pentagon admits the drone was collecting is pertinent to anti-sub warfare, especially "sound speed." To destroy subs, one has to track them by listening for them. Sound travels through water at different speeds depending on salinity and temperature, for example. So this drone is not so innocent, to quote a song.

"Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Incident in South China Sea, Release No. NR-448-16," December 16, 2016.

Using appropriate government-to-government channels, the Department of Defense has called upon China to immediately return an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) that China unlawfully seized on Dec. 15 in the South China Sea while it was being recovered by a U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ship. The USNS Bowditch (T-AGS 62) and the UUV -- an unclassified "ocean glider" system used around the world to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature, and sound speed - were conducting routine [sic!]operations in accordance with international law about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, Philippines, when a Chinese Navy PRC DALANG III-Class ship (ASR-510) launched a small boat and retrieved the UUV. Bowditch made contact with the PRC Navy ship via bridge-to-bridge radio to request the return of the UUV. The radio contact was acknowledged by the PRC Navy ship, but the request was ignored. The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1032611/

2] See "Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations 'Realist'?," December 16, 2016.

What Happens When One Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bombs Another Nobel Peace Prize Winner?

Well, one thing that doesn't happen is the Norwegian Nobel Committee doesn't revoke the prize. [1]

Barack Obama (Nobel Peace Prize 2009) the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, is ultimately responsible for (and for all we currently know, had foreknowledge of) the war crime bombing of the hospital run by the Swiss-based charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Nobel Peace Prize 1999) or MSF- Doctors Without Borders- in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 2nd.

What does happen is that, five days after the crime, a few hours after the victims public call for an investigation under the terms of the Geneva Convention, the Bomber-in-Chief calls to apologize, and trots out his official mouthpiece (a fratboy type named Josh Earnest) to inform the world of the apology. Which is supposed to get the Nobelist and his military off the hook morally. Hey, he said he was sorry! And besides, the attackers are going to investigate themselves. What more could a reasonable person possibly want?

You can shoot up a hospital operating room and still be a respectable felllow.

Meanwhile, the death toll in the attack has apparently more than doubled. The confirmed dead number 22; 12 medical personnel and 10 patients, including 3 children. MSF has announced that another 24 of its people are missing. We should presume them dead, now that six days have passed since the savage assault.

If you find it spooky that a Nobelist would kill Nobelists, consider this: the official designation for the type of warplane that committed the crime, the AC-130U gunship, is “Spooky II.” [2]

1] The Nobel Committee consists of five people appointed by the Norwegian parliament to award the five Nobel prizes established by Swedish industrialist, armaments maker, and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel in his will. A sixth prize, the Sham Nobel, is in “economics” and was created by ideological hustlers piggybacking on the prestige of the real Nobels. It was established 73 years after Nobel's death by the Swedish central bank, which gave money to the Nobel foundation to administer it.

2] It's also referred to as “Spectre.” Ooh, so scary. See among numerous sources, “USAF Project Gunship II, The Aviation Zone, “Home of the Heavies,” a military fetishism site.

 More barrels, the better to butcher you with.

WikiLeaks Invites Obama to Bomb It

In effect, that is. It's certainly not their intent to be subjected to a murderous U.S. attack.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization and website founded by Julian Assange, offered a $50,000 reward for military records of the U.S. war crime of bombing the Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 2^nd. [1] And they asked for some very specific material that the U.S. no doubt will refuse to release. Here's their ask:

“The AC-130 records its attacks with high resolution gun cameras. According to military procedure, this footage should have been retained along with the cockpit audio. A post-massacre inquiry report referred to as an ‘AR 15-6’ should have also been commissioned. We are raising a U.S. $50,000 bounty to obtain the footage, the cockpit audio, the inquiry report and other relevant materials.” [2] [3]

Wow! Talk about tickling the throat of the tiger. That sure got the attention of the U.S., I'll bet.

The U.S. has already taken extreme measures to destroy WikiLeaks. It arranged for credit card companies and Paypal to bar donations to WikiLeaks. It has launched numerous computer attacks against the organization and unleashed the whole panoply of secret police repressive and close surveillance against the group. Most notoriously, it arranged a long-running criminal “investigation” of Assange by Sweden, and now has him trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Ecuador has granted Assange political asylum, a decision Britain refuses to respect. It has a police cordon around the Embassy, and planted a listening device inside, violating diplomatic sovereignty. And the U.S. has a secret indictment of Assange. It is licking its chops waiting for an opportunity to seize him and imprison him for decades, if not life. There is an ongoing grand jury “investigation” of WikiLeaks, a standard political repression weapon the U.S. uses.

WikiLeaks incited the enduring hatred of the U.S. government and some U.S. elites (a number of whom publicly called for Assange's murder) by exposing, among other things, one of the most blood chilling U.S. war crimes, the murder of Reuters journalists in Iraq by a murderous U.S. helicopter crew, who also fired on a van full of children whose father had stopped to aid the journalists after they had been gunned down in the street.

WikiLeaks was given the helicopter's video and audio recording of the murders anonymously by U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning, who was turned in by FBI secret police informer Adrian Lamo, in whom Manning unwisely confided in online. Manning was then kept naked for a year in a Marine brig (despite being an Army private), court-martialed, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. The murderers of course suffered no consequences at all. [See the collateral murder video.]

The U.S. is used to getting its way and will break any law to get it.

It took the extreme measure of forcing down the presidential plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales and had it searched when it suspected that Edward Snowden was onboard. Snowden is the man who exposed some of the massive NSA global surveillance programs.

To show their displeasure with al-Jazeera, the Qatari news outfit, they bombed its offices four times in Kabul and Baghdad, and kidnapped one of its employees, who they imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, where they tried to force him to be a spy inside al-Jazeera for them.

Considering the U.S.' willingness to commit any crime, I have an idea! Why not a drone strike on the Ecuadorean embassy in London? It's the next logical step after bombing a hospital run by an internationally renowned organization. What do you think, Barack? It's not like you'd be technically bombing London. The embassy is Ecuadorean national territory by law. You could always say it was a “mistake,” issue an “apology,” and announce an “investigation” afterwards if the squawking got too loud.
Ecuador does have a left-wing government now, after all. And the president is (falsely) accused of attacking press “freedom.” You could say bombing their embassy strikes a blow for freedom. That's no more far-fetched than a lot of U.S. propaganda, such as support for fascist death squad terror states is “defending freedom and democracy.”

But Obama did “apologize” to Médecins Sans Frontières....five days after the war crime, and a few hours after MSF publicly called for an independent of the crime under the Geneva Convention. Guess he thought he could dissuade them with a “sorry.”

1] “Afghanistan: MSF staff killed and hospital partially destroyed in Kunduz,” and “Kunduz Hospital Airstrike,” Médecins Sans Frontières.

2] “Wikileaks Offers to Pay $50,000 for Kunduz Bombing Footage,” Time magazine, October 8, 2015. You could go to the WikiLeaks website, but the U.S. government will trap your IP address and plant spyware and maybe worse on your computer. You could try using the Tor browser and a vpn, but there's no guarantee that would provide absolute protection. I suppose you could use a computer in an Internet cafe or library, so it won't be your computer- but if you use your actual name to use it, they might find out your name, depending on how fanatical they are. (Pretty fanatical, generally speaking.) Living in a global police state gets to be a real pain in the ass....

Interestingly, Time referred to WikiLeaks as “Transparency activist group Wikileaks” I was surprised by that non-derogatory, accurate description from a U.S. establishment media organ.

3] The AC-130 is the murderous flying gunship the U.S. unleashed on the hospital- it has also been used in El Salvador, Vietnam, and other poor countries victimized by the U.S., generally against people who have no defense against it. It is a cargo plane reconfigured with rapid-fire cannons to blow people on the ground to bits. It also carries air-to-ground missiles. There are plans to add a laser weapon. It also helped murder 4,000 Panamanians when the U.S. invaded that country on the orders of Bush the Elder.
There's an amoral description of the plane and its history at Wikipedia.

Standard weapons are two 20mm cannons, a 25mm Gatling gun that fires 1,800 rounds per minute, a 40mm cannon that fires 100 rounds a minute, and a large 105mm cannon that can fire 10 shells a minute. It is also packed with various surveillance and electronic equipment. See Federation of American Scientists for specs.

My, what Big Bullets you Butchers have! 40mm munitions on the flying abattoir.

AC-130 gunship with air to ground 
missiles on wingpod.

Lockheed Martin manufactures the killer aircraft. Note cannons protruding from fuselage.

Black Americans can enjoy the benefits of 

slaughtering people too.

You've come a long way, Baby- 

you've got your own gun now.

  That's what I call progress!

 After awhile one does gets blase about butchery.

 Blast away, Boys!

Obama won't unleash this on ISIS or on Assad's forces- but a hospital makes a perfect target. Hospitals can't shoot back!

[Scroll down to earlier essays for details on the hospital bombing and its aftermath, and the ever-changing series of smarmy U.S. lies.]

U.S. Military Changes Its Story- Again- On Bombing Doctors Without Borders Hospital

As I covered in my previous essay (below this one), the U.S. military committed a vicious war crime on Saturday (October 2) when it unleashed an hour-long aerial bombardment of a hospital run by the French humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières- MSF) in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Commencing immediately afterwards, the U.S. military has cycled through a number of bogus, sickening lies. This is the same behavior we see after every atrocity it commits. It starts with flat denials, then like a criminal under police interrogation, digs itself in deeper and deeper with changing versions that obliquely acknowledge bits of reality while twisting them to try and craft "innocent" explanations. But the contradictions and facts pile up and inevitably trap the lying criminal.

The latest story was trotted out by the U.S./NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John Campbell. The previous tale was that U.S. airpower was supporting U.S. Special Forces troops fighting the Taliban in Kunduz. Now he says it was Afghan soldiers who called in the air attack. (The U.S. at first denied it attacked the hospital at all. Who, us? Wasn't us!)

You'd think it wouldn't take several days to ascertain just who called in the strike. The whole thing stinks of slimy prevarication. Of course, when at first you deny the strike at all, that kind of dents your credibility.

Campbell, delivering the latest clumsy lies to reporters at the Pentagon, relegated the murders of medical personnel and patients to half a sentence- the last half too. And he refused to acknowledge they were medical personnel and patients, referring only to "civilians." Here's the quote, which has gotten wide play in U.S. media:

"We have now learned that on October 3, Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces," he said. "An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat, and several innocent civilians were accidentally struck."

Yeah, that can happen when you attack a hospital. And get him: "We have now learned." Like the U.S. command are just a bunch of passive witnesses, not perpetrators who ordered the commission of a war crime. They're just trying to figure this out. What, somebody claims their hospital was bombed? When did you say this was? Couldn't have been us, because that's not who we are.

And Campbell still won't even admit it's wrong to attack a hospital!

"If errors were committed, we will acknowledge them. We will hold those responsible accountable, and we will take steps to ensure mistakes are not repeated."

IF errors were committed! (Forget about "crimes.")

Of course the MSF hospital wasn't a Taliban position. Although it apparently was an "enemy position," meaning that MSF is regarded as an enemy. Firing from the hospital is a complete fabrication, and probably no more than 1% of the world's population believe that.

MSF had a worthy reply to Campbell's smarmy, grotesque statement:

"Today the U.S. government has admitted [finally!]  that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff," the statement read. "Their description of the attack keeps changing -- from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government. 

"The reality is the U.S. dropped those bombs. The U.S. hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff. The U.S. military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical."

This isn't going away as quickly as the U.S. military and it's Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, no doubt calculated it would. That's because part of the international and even U.S. media aren't playing along. (Despicably, such propaganda fonts as NPR and Yahoo! "News" are acting as auxiliary propagandists for the Pentagon- for the most part in NPR's case, and entirely in Yahoo's, which actually rewrote a Reuters piece to drain it of all human detail for a coldly distant and exiguous account.) MSF has been able to get their people into the media. Even Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General who is supposed to be a U.S. puppet, has strongly denounced the attack.

Here's a key fact from MSF. The hospital is actually located in the middle of a compound, surrounded by other buildings. Only the hospital was attacked. Furthermore, the operating room and intensive care unit were specifically blasted. Helpless patients were burned alive in their beds.

This belies the claim of some kind of accident. It certainly puts the lie to the claim that the Taliban were firing from the hospital. They would have had to be in buildings along the perimeter of the compound. 

The New York Times already let slip in a map they published that the street fighting was nowhere near the hospital compound. (See essay below.) We also know from the surviving staff that there was no fighting in the vicinity.

General Campbell, man of great heart that he is, offered his "deepest condolences." This follows a statement concocted by Pentagon propagandists and dumped on the world in Campbell's name October 3:

"While we work to thoroughly examine the incident and determine what happened, my thoughts and prayers are with those affected."

You already know "what happened," because YOU DID IT. And "my thoughts and prayers are with those affected," is standard boilerplate of the most banal and common kind. In fact, the parents of the murderer who shot to death nine people at an Oregon community college last Thursday issued the exact same words, "our thoughts and prayers are with" the families etc. That exact language, "our thoughts and prayers are with," are routinely trotted out after tragedies and crimes in America. The fact that it is mere boilerplate proves the insincerity of the issuers of the statements.

And what could be more distincing and minimizing than referring to the victims as "those affected"? That sounds like people caught in a traffic jam: "We are doing routine maintenance and we apologize to all those affected and thank you for your patience" while we conduct our "investigations." 

The U.S. wants everyone to know that they're conducting not one, not two, but THREE, count 'em, three "investigations." (NPR Pentagon transmission belt Tom Bowman for one made sure we knew this.) So rest assured! The Pentagon is investigating (itself), NATO (which is just the U.S. and the ducks that line up behind it) is investigating, and the Afghanistan government is investigating. You know, the people who falsely claim the Taliban were shooting at them from the hospital. The ones who hate MSF, who planted pistols in another MSF hospital in Helmand province a few years ago and raided it with British forces in tow, arresting staff. That Afghanistan government. I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of this.

Campbell made sure to repeat to the assembled scribes at the Pentagon the news of the triple "investigations." So who can doubt their seriousness? And if three investigations all find the same thing, it must be right. Right?

I could list all the past Pentagon and U.S. whitewashes- OOPS, I meant to say "investigations"- that were, let us say, less than convincing. But an exhaustive list would take up quite a bit of time to compile. So we'll let that go.

I would just reiterate a point that should be too obvious to need making- accused parties shouldn't be investigating themselves. 

MSF has been repeatedly calling for an actually independent investigation.

Chiming in with the Pentagon killers, Obama's chief mouthpiece, Josh Earnest, emitted the predictable disgusting lies which are the precise opposite of reality, claiming, absurdly, against centuries of evidence, that:

"There is no country in the world and no military in the world that goes to greater lengths and places a higher premium on avoiding civilian casualties than the United States Department of Defense." 

Oh. You could have fooled me.

Let's see: the Iraq invasion (est. dead at least 105,000 up to 1 million), Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (combined dead 4-5 million), razing of hundreds of cities in World War II, two atomic bombings- I think that's enough to make the point.

But that's funny. I thought the Israeli army has no equal in avoiding killing civilians. At least that's what the Israelis always say after every assault on Gaza. (Excuse me, I mean every time they "mow the lawn," as they call the culling of the Palestinian population.)

As for the destroyed hospital, that was the only trauma care facility in that part of Afghanistan. So far the U.S. hasn't offered to pay to rebuild it. Or offered to pay compensation for the 22 innocent people it murdered. (12 medical staff and 10 patients, including 3 children. Plus 37 people wounded.) So more people will die from lack of medical care in the future. (No victim of the U.S. ever gets a dime without suing. And of the tiny minority who manage to sue, most lose in U.S. courts.)

Nation-building, U.S. style!

[Quotations source: "Civilians 'accidentally struck' in Afghan hospital bombing, U.S. commander says," CNN, October 6, 2015.]

Why Did the U.S. Launch a Sustained Aerial Bombardment of a Doctors Without Borders Hospital?

In the latest in an unending series of U.S. atrocities (a series that goes back to the nation's founding, actually), the U.S. military launched an hour-long aerial bombardment of a hospital run by the French humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The aerial bombardment, which lasted an hour, commenced in the middle of the night around 2 am local time on October 3rd. The duration and repetitive nature of the attack is important to keep in mind, as the Western media is using the words“bombed” and “bombing,” which implies a single strike, even a single munition. This misimpression slides right into the “accident” alibi lie, which is sure to come next.

After days of evasions and lies in which the U.S. military denied it bombed the hospital, while simultaneously contradicting itself by saying maybe the hospital was “collateral damage,” and putting it about that there was fighting with the Taliban “in the area of the hospital,” a claim seized on and repeated by media, implying right next to the hospital, by noon (Washington, D.C. time) on October 5 the U.S. government domestic propaganda radio network NPR announced that the U.S. military admitted it bombed the hospital, justifying it by saying that their Afghan proteges had requested the strike. The Afghans have been falsely claiming that the Taliban were firing from the hospital. (None other than NPR's own Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman pointed out the day before that even if true, attacking the hospital would still be illegal and possibly a war crime. MSF has vigorously denied the claim. If armed men took over one of their facilities they would have ceased operations there, they explained.) [1]

The Afghans propped up by the West as a putative government apparently have it in for MSF, Several years ago they arranged to plant a couple of pistols in an MSF hospital in Helmand province, which they then proceeded to raid along with British troops, arresting staff. Maybe they can't stand the example MSF sets of providing medical services to the Afghan population, something the “government” utterly fails to do. (Hell, they don't even provide care for their own wounded troops! And the scum who run the military hospitals steals the medicines and supplies and sell them, according to bourgeois media reports.)

The U.S. media luckily has a useful distraction they can focus on- the killings of 9 people last week in Oregon by an unhappy asshole. This, 5 days later, is still a much bigger story than the story of the MSF hospital bombing, done not by a lone malcontent, but by the United States Government.

[Another egregious atrocity barely mentioned at all in the U.S. was the Saudi bombing of a wedding party in Yemen last week, killing 130 people, In fact it was bombed twice- with U.S.-supplied warplanes and munitions. This is part of a more than 6 month old terror campaign which has targeted markets, mosques, and homes, killing over 1,000 civilians so far, with U.S. support and virtual silence by the U.S. media. The Iran bogeyman is invoked as justification. But man, we're getting the full sad violin treatment for 9 people shot in Oregon.]

Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, Barack Obama, acts as if he is a mere bystander to all this, with no responsibility. This is a common dodge with him. He did the same with climate change, granting Shell Oil drilling rights in the Arctic while simultaneously giving a speech about how something must be done about climate change. Or decrying mass incarceration as if he himself has no power or responsibility for how many people are locked up. The pattern is he commits a crime or immoral act, and then exhorts others to remedy the “problem,”

His War Secretary, Ashton Carter, has been uttering vague and anodyne statements.

But let us back up and review the evidence that from the start demonstrated this was obviously a premeditated, deliberate assault, and not an “accident” or “mistake,” words already being bandied about (such as by the New York Times, still the premiere voice of the American bourgeois establishment).

The following facts are all from early BBC reports, which dribbled in over the first few hours after the crime. NPR and most U.S. media ignored these facts, at least at first:

-MSF repeatedly provided the precise GPS coordinates of the hospital to all sides in the conflict prior to the attack, including on September 27. Once the bombing commenced, frantic calls were made to NATO in Kabul and even to Washington. The bombing continued for another half hour anyway.

-The bombing occurred for an hour at 15 minute intervals.

-The U.S. military provided no explanation or apology to MSF.

-The U.S. military issued smarmy, ambiguous statements about them bombing “in the area” and “there may have been collateral damage,” obviously hedging and keeping their options open about whether they would go with a full-fledged, brazen denial, or an “oops, sorry, it was an accident” cover story. In fact, NPR reported just hours after the attack that “the U.S. is investigating whether” the U.S. bombed the hospital. What, you don't even know what you bomb? With all your “precision” targeting and “surgical” bombing? In fact, if you're doing close-in air support of ground operations, you're going to be quite accurate.

It looked at first as if the U.S. took advantage of the “cover of war” to attack an institution it has some beef against. My immediate suspicion was that the U.S. thought (or feared) that MSF was treating wounded Taliban. This hunch had added weight later by part of a New York Times article on the attack. [2] Here are paragraphs 20 and 21 of the article, a safe place to relegate a possible motive to:

“Accounts differed as to whether there had been fighting around the hospital that might have precipitated the strike. Three hospital employees, an aide who was wounded in the bombing and two nurses who emerged unscathed, said that there had been no fighting in the hospital’s immediate vicinity and no Taliban fighters in the hospital.

“But a Kunduz police spokesman, Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, said Taliban fighters had entered the hospital and were using it as a firing position. The hospital treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked Afghan security forces. In a Twitter post, Arjan Hehenkamp, director of Doctors Without Borders in the Netherlands, denied that Taliban fighters had been in the hospital, saying that only staff, patients and caretakers had been inside. [My emphasis.]”

The article also mentions that the Afghans used attack helicopters in Kunduz, so it's possible the Afghans were the criminal attackers. But paragraph five cites an anonymous U.S. official saying that “the attack may have been carried out by an American AC-130 gunship that was supporting Special Operations forces on the ground in Kunduz,” in the Times words. And U.S. Special Forces are notorious for their unrestrained, immoral violence and ruthlessness. And the scale of damage, coupled with the duration of the attack, would point towards the AC-130 gunship, an extremely destructive “weapons platform.”

Moreover, the fact that the U.S. wasn't vociferously denying that they did it, and instead pointed their fingers at the Afghans, was in and of itself almost proof positive that the U.S. military were the culprits.

In this context it bears remembering the times the U.S. attacked al-Jazeera offices from the air. George Bush was even going to bomb their headquarters in Doha, Qatar, until Tony Blair (British prime minister at the time and accomplice to Bush's invasion of Iraq) talked him out of it.

Oh, just thought I'd mention; bombing a hospital is a war crime. It's even prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, a treaty the U.S. is a signatory to. On the other hand, the U.S.' signature on a piece of paper is worth the same as a piece of paper- namely zilch. We see that constantly, for example in its violation of the anti-torture treaty it signed. And its conduct during its Indochina war. And its atrocites against civilians just about whenever it wages war. All that is so routine and unremarked upon that it is actually forgotten. Indeed, I saw no mention of the statutorily criminal nature of attacking a hospital in any establishment media reporting- not BBC, NY Times, Reuters, etc. They don't want people to know it's a war crime.

But what a nitpicking cavil that all is, eh?

But the NY Times should get credit for another article that describes what actually happened inside the hospital as the bombs rained down and burned people alive in their beds, the “human story” that is essential to get through to people and provoke the necessary emotional reaction. [3]

The story quotes the local head of MSF in that part of Afghanistan:

“Over the next hour, witnesses said, what unfolded was a relentless air assault that put patients, doctors and the Kunduz hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders at the center of a bull’s-eye, leaving no possibility of escape.

“The bombing began at 2:08 a.m. and continued until 3:15, Mr. Nagarathnam said. 'The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle around,' he added. 'There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. The main hospital building was engulfed in flames,' he said.”

Meanwhile, Obama Sheds Crocodile Tears

 The adept politician Barack Obama immediately made the obvious (and cynical) political move one would expect from a competent political boss. He issued a statement (didn't show his face) referring to “the tragic incident” and announced he would say nothing more pending the U.S. military's own verdict on what it did or didn't do: “we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy,” the statement emitted from the White House in his name read.

So the U.S. military, the probably perpetrators of the attack, will be investigating itself. I would venture to say, just as a general principle, that having the accused do the investigating of the allegations against themselves, is probably not the best way to arrive at the truth. Wouldn't you agree?

But self-investigating by guilty state parties is standard procedure in the U.S., whether its police murders of citizens, U.S. war crimes, or whatever. The only exceptions arise out of the competition for power between the Democratic Party faction of the political elite and the Republican Party one. So there you can get a partisan inquisition type investigation with a political motive, such as the Benghazi “investigations” by the Republicans in Congress.

That's not to say there are never useful genuine investigations here. But the results of those are generally put on a shelf to gather dust, such as the investigation into the Attica prison massacre ordered by then-New York State Governor and plutocrat Nelson Rockefeller (of the Rockefeller oil fortune) or the Kerner Commission report on racial unrest, or the report that rightly called the police repression around the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago a “police riot.” Those don't matter because they are ignored. By the time they come out, the issue is cold, at least in the establishment media's eyes.

Finally, here are accounts from MSF's website:

Twelve staff members and at least seven patients, including three children, were killed; 37 people were injured including 19 staff members. This attack constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law. [The death toll is now 22.]

The bombing took place despite the fact that MSF had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to Coalition and Afghan military and civilian officials as recently as Tuesday 29 September, to avoid that the hospital be hit. As is routine practice for MSF in conflict areas, MSF had communicated the exact location of the hospital to all parties to the conflict.

 

From 2:08 AM until 3:15 AM local time today, MSF’s trauma hospital in Kunduz was hit by a series of aerial bombing raids at approximately 15 minute intervals. The main central hospital building, housing the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy ward, was repeatedly hit very precisely during each aerial raid, while surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched.

 

“The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle round,” said Heman Nagarathnam, MSF Head of Programmes in northern Afghanistan. “There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. This happened again and again. When I made it out from the office, the main hospital building was engulfed in flames. Those people that could had moved quickly to the building’s two bunkers to seek safety. But patients who were unable to escape burned to death as they lay in their beds.” [4]

In fact, MSF probably provides more health care for Afghans than their so-called government, or the foreign “nation builders.” Here's their brief description:

MSF is an international medical organisation and first worked in Afghanistan in 1980. MSF opened Kunduz Trauma Centre in August 2011 to provide high quality, free medical and surgical care to victims of trauma such as traffic accidents, as well as those with conflict related injuries from bomb blasts or gunshots. In Afghanistan, MSF supports the Ministry of Public Health in Ahmad Shah Baba hospital in eastern Kabul, Dasht-e-Barchi maternity in western Kabul and Boost hospital in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province. In Khost, in the east of the country, MSF runs a maternity hospital. MSF relies only on private funding for its work in Afghanistan and does not accept money from any government.

 

As for the tremendous harm the U.S. has done to the populace by attacking the hospital in Kunduz, MSF notes:

MSF’s hospital is the only facility of its kind in the north-eastern region of Afghanistan. For four years it has been providing free high level life- and limb-saving trauma care. In 2014, more than 22,000 patients received care at the hospital and more than 5,900 surgeries were performed.

So the U.S. just took out “the only facility” in an entire region of the country where critical trauma care can be had. (Perhaps they meant the only free facility- but knowing Afghanistan, probably not. Outside of Kabul, Afghanistan is a very primitive society in every respect.)

But if you're wondering what MSF's crime was, here it is, in their own statement:

“MSF treats all people according to their medical needs and does not make any distinctions based on a patient’s ethnicity, religious beliefs or political affiliation.”
Which of course is unacceptable to the U.S. Because in the immortal words of the former Emperor Bush: “Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists.” And being “with us” requires that you be hostile to all those the U.S. is hostile to.

If you know what's good for you.

That is the ethos of a gangster empire.


1] The New York Times published a map showing the location of the hospital and the locations of fighting that we were intended to be duped were “near” the hospital. Even though the Times omitted a scale of distance on the left hand map, you can see by counting the blocks that the skirmishes were quite far from the hospital. As the map makes clear, the Taliban were nowhere near the hospital. Judging by the block lines visible on the map on the left, it appears they were at least a half mile away.

 The New York Times|Source: Doctors Without Borders (Location of hospital); Satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Bing Maps

2] “Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan,” New York Times website, October 3, 2015.

3] “Survivors Tell of Kunduz Hospital in Flames,” New York Times website, October 3, 2015.

4] “Afghanistan: 'I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable.'” Médecins Sans Frontières,

"Afghanistan: MSF demands explanations after deadly airstrikes hit hospital in Kunduz."

"Afghanistan: MSF staff killed and hospital partially destroyed in Kunduz,”

Bush Created "Enemy Combatants." Now Obama Has Invented "Unprivileged Belligerents," Formerly Known as Journalists

Amazingly, the U.S. has openly declared its intent to murder journalists.

As I wrote about yesterday, ["Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like"] under Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Barack Obama, the Department of "Defense" has issued a new manual giving its killers carte blanche to deal with journalists whose work it considers a "threat" in the same manner that "enemy combatants" and "terrorists" are dealt with. These journalists are now to be considered "unprivileged belligerents." A belligerent is an enemy soldier. "Unprivileged" means the normal laws of war do not apply. In short, the Obama regime's Pentagon has declared its intent to murder journalists who displease it too much. (One such journalist, Michael Hastings, was murdered by the government last year, apparently at the instigation of  CIA boss John Brennan. Hastings was reviled by the military for "causing" the firing of general Stanley McCrystal, and held in contempt by establishment pseudo-journalists.) [1]

These categories were specifically created to dehumanize the intended targets of violence to legitimize, morally and pseudo-legally, torture, murder, and indefinite imprisonment in secret locations under barbaric conditions without having to bother with courts, lawyers, or trials. They create the psychological and political conditions to activate these crimes against basic human rights. Thus does Obama take the U.S. further into barbarism, continuing the evil project of his predecessors.
The fact that the U.S. is now openly declaring its "right" to treat journalists it finds annoying as subhuman scum to be eliminated at will moved the New York Times to publish a worried editorial on the matter. (Referenced and linked to in my previous essay noted above.)

The Pentagon document is a declaration of war against journalists who don't toe the U.S. line. Al-Jazeera journalists were targets of lethal U.S. violence from the very start of the "War On Terrorism" in 2001. In the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the target list of journalists was expanded to include "unembedded" journalists, that is, those who would not be stooges of the U.S. military.
What had been unofficial policy, a practice of selective murder thinly veiled under cynical claims of "accidents," is now openly proclaimed as stated U.S. military policy. As usual, the U.S. government does its Alice-In-Wonderland game of calling whatever they proclaim as "lawful." "Law is whatever the U.S. Killer State says it is."

U.S. involvement in or directly murdering journalists goes back at least to 1948, when CBS correspondent George Polk was murdered by Greek fascists and the Truman regime arranged to frame up communists for the crime. Polk had exposed corruption in the the fascist regime of former Nazi collaborations the Truman regime installed in Greece after World War Two. No less a personage than the notorious William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the wartime OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was detailed to arrange the coverup and frameup. (A communist journalist was tortured into "confessing," among other, ahem, irregularities in the "trial." Make that show trial, a term the self-proclaimed "Free World" was fond of throwing at its Bolshevik adversaries. Or as they say in Wonderland, first the verdict, then then trial.)

The U.S. media and "educational" system has done an assiduous job of erasing the story of George Polk from general knowledge, while cynically recognizing the journalism award named after him. Very little has been written about this tawdry crime of U.S. Imperialism and its fascist underlings. I first learned of it years ago when a now-defunct magazine named More published a cover story about it, telling the true story. Then Kati Marton, a former wife of ABC chief "news" reader Peter Jennings and U.S. State Department tough guy Richard Holbrooke (both now deceased) wrote a book that also endeavored to reveal the truth.

Over the decades, the U.S. has been involved in the murders of hundreds of journalists by the various neo-fascist regimes it has installed in its various satrapies around the world, especially in Latin America. It has directly killed a smaller number, some in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, some inside the U.S. (See my essay referenced above for examples.) The particulars of each case leave no doubt that none were accidents or "suicides," and all were deliberate murders.

The U.S. used to put up a facade of denial. Now they have announced they will no longer even bother with that.

1] For a discussion of the hatred and contempt U.S. corporate propagandists had for the genuine journalist Michael Hastings, see "Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies," the Guardian, (UK), June 19, 2013.