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US Bombs Hit Doctors Without Borders Hospital
Prune writes: According to multiple news sources, U.S. airstrikes partially destroyed a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan, killing at least nine staff members and at least 50 overall, including patients, and this after giving its coordinates to U.S. forces multiple times. I'm especially saddened to report this given I had become one of the supporters of this charity after recommendations from Slashdot members in a discussion about choosing charities to donate to a while back.
Oh, and to correct:
No, they actually said:
The deletion of "in Kunduz" was clearly done to make it sound like the US kept hitting the hospital again and again; there is no other reason someone would have removed that from the sentence.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
No. You just have a naieve and unrealistic idea of what war is or what war can be.
If we had CNN in the 40s we never would have been able to defeat Japan or Germany because of all of the bleeding hearts. Now THAT was real carnage. Nothing that the US does today is remotely comparable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It is insightful. Go learn about General Smedley Butler.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I once checked out an archive of old Nazi political cartoons, and indeed they made use of that very sort of thing. There was one incident for example where the allies accidentally bombed Switzerland not long after hitting a hospital in Germany during a bombing raid. The cartoon played on the similarity of the Swiss flag and the Red Cross flag, with the allied pilot apologizing to the Swiss on the grounds that he got the flags mixed up.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
Do they just get to ignore that because some yahoo thought there might be some Taliban in the area?
I think you meant to say:
Do they just get to ignore that because some yahoo thought the Taliban might be operating a command center from within the hospital?
The answer to that question is "no, you take everything you believe to be true into account and make a sober military decision based on what you believe to be true, and you take into consideration the risks and consequences if your information turns out to be false or outdated. Oh, and you don't let 'yahoos' make command decisions like whether to bomb a hospital or not. If you have the luxury of time, several high-level decision-makers need to be in on the decision. If you don't have time to get several generals' input, then a high-level person who is known to think soberly (i.e. not a 'yahoo') should make the decision."
In other words you don't go and say "hospital? who cares?" but you don't say "dammit, hospital, that's 100% off limits no matter what the justification" either.
If you are 99.44% sure your intelligence that the Taliban is operating out of the command center is true, and you have very good reason to believe more good will come from taking out the hospital than harm (including the local and international political repercussions for taking out a hospital), you take it out.
If you don't, then your enemy can just take over hospitals knowing that their command centers are "untouchable" once they do so.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It is.
And they do precisely what they say they'll do. They blow up the exact building the airmen intended to blow up.
The problem in this case is the Afghan police told the Air Force they were taking fire from the MSF hospital, and they needed it to be leveled. Since the Taliban controlled the entire fucking city, including the hospital, a whole yesterday, the Air Force didn't bother to check the pre-Taliban-list of targets you shouldn't level in Kunduz.
The Afghan Police are still swearing up and down they were being attacked from the hospital, MSF speculates this whole fiasco is revenge for MSF's "treat anyone, even Taliban" policy, and I doubt the US Government will make a determination over whether the raid was justified until they can prove conclusively whether the Afghan Police are making shit up. Which will be somewhat difficult, given that said police specifically asked for most of the evidence to be destroyed.
The system the Royal Navy uses to come to a decision as to whether to launch or not is purely cost based - our nuclear deterrent launch authority is independent to that of the US, so we cant use their infrastructure to issue launch authority as that may be denied to us on occasion. Since replacing that infrastructure is a big and costly venture, unjustifiable for the two submarines that are on armed patrol, we use a simpler system.
As we havent had an issue yet, I'd say its perfectly adequate...
If the Washington Post's article's details are correct, this was NOT a bombing gone awry. It was artillery rounds (and possibly 40mm cannon fire) from an AC-130 Spectre, a gunship that's been in use since the Vietnam era. They're usually pinpoint accurate, every round is fired with an eyeball targetting via low-vision video, and there'll be full video tape of the entire action.
Doesn't make it any nicer, doesn't make it any less of a screw-up (in fact, more so). Lots of videos online of Spectre working out in Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
The hospital should consider itself lucky: those hits were probably only 105mm howitzer rounds. If they'd been multiple thousand pounders, the catastrophe and casualties would've been even greater.
Of course if the Post is wrong and this was NOT an AC-130 .. never mind.
[Re-posting to fix fucked-up tags:]
the overthrow of Ukraine's democracy
The what? Yanukovych campaigned on a promise not to sell the country out to Putin, then promptly turned around and started to sell the country out to Putin. The people who'd voted for him quite understandably raised hell about this, and he fled the country for (surprise, surprise) Russia, leaving behind an estate and mansion worth at least 100 million US dollars, which he somehow had been able to afford on a 2,000-dollar-per-month salary.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
ISIS, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State... these are all "respectful" terms. They want to be referred to as the "Islamic State", as their goal is to reestablish a new caliphate.
Daesh is an acronym of their Islamic name. Acronyms are rarely used in Arabic, which has led to confusion and anger on Daesh's part. It removes the "Islamic State" part that's so important to them. And it sounds similar to a word meaning "one who crushes underfoot". Daesh threatens to kill anyone caught using that term for them, which to me is reason enough alone to use it. It's also what the local opposition to them calls them, not wanting to dignify them as a legitimate caliphate.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
PKK, FSA, al-Nusra, Ahrar ash-Sham, and tons of other militias are opposed to and regularly fight Daesh. They control large swaths of Syria, and have recently been making major progress in the northwest, taking over Idleb - which was almost certainly the trigger for Russia to step up its game, as they're nearing Latakia.
Check a map.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
MSF/Doctors Without Borders has been adamant there were no Taliban shooting from the hospital, and MSF has a lot more credibility (they're comparable to Red Cross) than the Afghan police that reported this as supposedly a fire base. Not to mention that the police have a clear revenge motive against MSF, as they are known to have long been complaining that MSF treats patients from all sides, including the Taliban, indiscriminately.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Now THAT was real carnage
ROFL.
Sorry, you guys are just too soft-hearted for actual war if you call the US part in WW2 a "real carnage".
The USSR lost around 10 million soldiers in WW.
Germany lost about 5 million.
China lost 3.5 million.
The USA lost 0.4 million.
The real carnage in WW2 was on the eastern front and in China. For the Germans, the battle of Stalingrad alone cost them as many casualties (at least half a million, possibly up to 800,000) than the entire western front. 80% of the German casualties are thanks to the Russians.
And yes, the USAF bombed some German cities to rubble. But even so, German civilians fled the Red Army towards the west, not the other way around. If you've ever read stories about the siege of Leningrad from the Russian perspective, you know why. I know them. My girlfriend is from St. Petersburg as it is known today. After I've heard her tell WW2 stories from russian perspective, I laugh about US war movies. Omaha Beach: 2000 casualties. The horror. That would have been a quiet day in Stalingrad, where four times as many people died every day for five months straight.
That is what real carnage looks like.
Stalingrad had a population of 400,000 before the war. After the German 6th Army was destroyed, an official census counted 1,500 residents. Pictures from Stalingrad look worse than pictures from Hiroshima. That is real carnage.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org