American Empire: Dripping With Blood and Disdain

When he testified to an overly friendly Senate committee last month about the American military attack on a charity hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, General John Campbell promised a full accounting of the "collateral carnage" by Halloween. His self-imposed deadline has come and gone. Everybody is shocked, shocked I tell you. Not.

Meanwhile, an independent report released Thursday by the actual victim of the attack, Médecins Sans Frontières, was also greeted with a group yawn by the complicit mass media. Revelations that doctors were decapitated or had their legs blown off by American air-gunners as they fled their burning hospital were buried beneath a very tiny headline on today's New York Times homepage, just below the apparently more important news that Ben Carson isn't trying to woo black voters, and that Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie didn't make the cut for the next Top Tier GOP debate show.

It could not be clearer that the elites of the political-media-military nexus want us to forget about this horrific war crime perpetrated in all our names. As MSF (translated as Doctors Without Borders) has learned to its chagrin as its requests for investigatory help from 76 separate sovereign nations have gone coldly unheeded, the tentacles of  Superpower encircle the globe in a literal stranglehold.

Meanwhile, we can read the medical charity's own report of the carnage inside the hospital right as it happened.

Especially chilling is the revelation that an unnamed US official  from Washington, D.C. called the medical staff the day before the attack and specifically demanded to know if Taliban fighters were "holed up" within the hospital before smarmily inquiring as to staff safety. The MSF responded that they were treating patients at full capacity, and yes, the patients included wounded Taliban members. This turned out to be the calm before the airstrike storm. There had been virtually no fighting in the area, as General Campbell had initially claimed.

"MSF staff recall that the first room to be hit was the ICU, where MSF staff were caring for a number of immobile patients, some of whom were on ventilators," according to the report. Two children were among the victims burned alive in their beds.

From the ICU ground zero, the Americans proceeded to methodically destroy the library, the emergency room, the laboratory, the mental health unit, the outpatient department, the physical therapy department and the operating suite. Doctors were killed as they performed surgery, as were two patients lying anesthetized on the tables. A nurse suffered a traumatic amputation, his arm hanging by a thread as he rushed, covered in blood, to an administration building to awaken and warn other sleeping staff members.

Witnesses reported that airplane gunners seemed to be directly pursuing the medical personnel and patients fleeing the carnage to seek safety in other buildings. The open-air victims of the prolonged attack included a patient in a wheelchair.

The total number of known dead has increased from 22 to 30: 13 patients, 10 staff, and seven so badly burned as to be unidentifiable. 

At the time of the attack, the hospital was well lit and easily identified by a large lettered flag on its rooftop, the report said.

Christopher Stokes, general director of MSF. told a news conference in Kabul:  "A mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage.From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war. You cannot do this. You cannot bomb a hospital.”

He suspects that somebody, somewhere, decided to relieve the hospital of its protected status under the Geneva Conventions. That icy phone call from Washington right before the attack lends credence to that suspicion. The bombing of the hospital was neither collateral damage nor was it a passive-aggressive mistake that was made. It was pure, brutal, cold-blooded murder.

Unless the Obama administration indicts those responsible (the US has refused to be part of the International Criminal Court) his much-ballyhooed legacy will be even bloodier than it already is. The man is positively dripping with it, to complement the disdain for the rule of law and democracy that he and most other presidents have harbored with impunity.

Meanwhile, MSF president Joanne Liu is right: "The silence (of the whole world) is embarrassing."

American Exceptionalism