The Pentagon Shouldn’t Get to Absolve Itself for Bombing a Hospital [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/03/pentagon-shouldnt-get-absolve-itself-bombing-hospital

The Pentagon just made it official: No war crime was committed when a U.S. plane attacked the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last year, killing 42 patients and health workers and injuring many more.

At least, that’s the conclusion of its own investigation — nearly all of which remains classified.

No war crime, says the Pentagon.

The 16 military personnel involved all will face some kind of administrative consequence, but none of them will be court-martialed. The 16 do not, apparently, include the top strategists of the U.S. war in Afghanistan — nor anyone responsible for creating or approving the system for responding to desperate calls from civilians being slaughtered by U.S. warplanes. Nor anyone whose job it is to be sure that the U.S. military doesn’t violate the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions on things like attacking hospitals.

We don’t know for sure, because the vast majority of the official report on the Kunduz hospital assault was redacted — blacked out — so no one without top security clearance could read even the Pentagon’s own assessment of what happened. Apparently Congress, the press, and the public are all supposed to be satisfied with the explanation that the cause was “a combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures.” The official write-up adds that “fatigue and high operational tempo also contributed” to the “fog of war” — that old standby for excusing large-scale attacks on civilians.