Het is al weer even terug, dat de VS een ziekenhuis van Artsen zonder Grenzen bombardeerde en dat Peter van Buren hier een artikel over schreef op ICH. Volgens hem was dit bombardement bepaald geen vergissing, ook vertelt van Buren over het enorme aantal onschuldige slachtoffers, die met de standrechtelijke executies worden gemaakt door de VS met drone aanvallen. Ook noemt hij het gebruik van verarmd uranium in munitie door de VS en het gebruik van door de VS geleverde clustermunitie (Rusland wordt nu beschuldigd van clustermunitie gebruik) door de grote partners van de VS: Israël en Saoedi-Arabië. De laatst genoemde drie landen, weigeren een verdrag tegen clustermunitie te tekenen….. Lees en huiver (beneden kunt u voor een Nederlandse vertaling klikken, let wel: dat kost wat extra tijd):
From Iraq to Kunduz, US
Civilian Killings Are No
Accident – They’re Policy
By
Peter Van Buren
October
12, 2015 “Information
Clearing House”
– “MEE”
– America and its allies make modern war in a way that assures
“mistakes” destroy hospitals, and civilian lives are
taken by drones and bombs. These horrors are all too often
strategic decisions, or the result of the profligate use of
needlessly destructive weapons. They are typically far from
accidents. The attack on a Doctors without Borders (MSF) hospital
in Kunduz, Afghanistan, is only the latest. It is important as
a clear example of a sordid policy.
Target
Kunduz
The series of
cascading explanations the United States offered for striking
Kunduz hospital ignore the larger story of how such “accidents”
really happen.
An American AC-130, a flying gunship, conducted
the strike. A retired Air Force Special Operations officer
explained to me the AC-130 is considered a “first hit”
weapon; its ordnance hits where it is designated to hit on the
first try. The targeted hospital was marked by a US Special Forces
operator on the ground alongside the Afghans. The AC-130 fired on
the hospital for over
one hour, in 15-minute paced barrages, even as Doctors Without
Borders representatives frantically sought to contact American
officials.
The US should have known the target was a hospital.
The Afghans had controlled Kunduz alongside their American allies
for some time. It was a mature battlefield, with landmarks such as
the hospital well-known on the ground. It is a large, distinctive
building as seen from the air; take a look.
In
addition, NGOs employ organisations
like the International NGO Safety and Security Association (INSSA)
specifically to coordinate with armed forces, to include
providing precise
GPS coordinates to avoid “accidental” targeting.
Doctors Without Borders also directly provides combatants
their locations;
in Kunduz, as recently as 29
September.
The latter details are especially important in
evaluating strikes against hospitals and other civilian targets.
Unlike in WWII when planes flew over cities hoping to hit a target
only as precisely defined as “Tokyo,” modern ordnance is
delivered using laser designation, satellite coordination and GPS
systems.
America blew up exactly what it aimed at in Kunduz.
America’s
other hospitals
Kunduz was not the
first protected facility America attacked.
In 2001 the United
States bombed the Red
Cross in Kabul, twice. The US also bombed other targets in
Iraq; a maternity facility in Baghdad,
a hospital in Rutbah, stormed another in Nasiriya,
and shelled the Al Yarmuk
Hospital in Iraq in 2003. A hospital in Belgrade,
former Yugoslavia, was bombed in the 1990s. In Hanoi,
the United States struck the Bach Mai hospital – twice – during
the infamous 1972 “Christmas Bombing”.
America bombed
the Al Jazeera broadcast facilities in Baghdad and Kabul
and also destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in
1999. Civilian infrastructure, such as water and sewer plants, were
targeted in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003.
There are always
investigations following such incidents, though in the history of
modern American warfare none have ever deemed such devastation as
intentional. Yet hospitals do make attractive targets. Destroying
them results in fighters dying of their wounds, and increases the
burden on healthy soldiers, pulling them from the battlefield to
care for their own wounded. In military terms that is known as a
“soft kill”.
Accidents emerge in war, but so do
patterns.
Civilian
deaths and the drone war
The killing of
civilians as a result of American war is not limited to attacks on
hospitals. The global drone war continues to take innocent lives,
in what has come to be known without shame as collateral
damage.
The Council on Foreign Relations assesses that 500 drone
strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan killed 3,674
civilians as of 2014. The count measures kills outside of
Iraq and Afghanistan specifically because only those places were
considered active war zones by the United States when the tally was
made.
There is a commonality to the growing death toll: the
inevitable civilian deaths are caused by the profligate use of
horrifically destructive indiscriminate weapons.
Civilian
casualties overall in America’s 2003-2011 Iraq war were anywhere
from 140,000 dead
to upwards of 500,000,
with many killed by artillery, aerial bombs and depleted uranium
munitions, indiscriminate weapons unique to American forces.
In
Yemen, in just one specific example, American drone strikes aimed
at 17 named men actually killed 273
people, at least seven of them children, including the American
citizen son of al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar
al-Awlaki.
For its drone strikes, the US uses Hellfire
missiles, armed with warheads originally designed to burn through
tank armour.
Aiming them at a person inevitably will kill those nearby; the US
claimed al-Awlaki’s son was killed inside a car, seated next to the
actual target. Such deaths are closely tied to America’s policy of
“signature drone
strikes,” where a missile is aimed at a “profile:”
a suspect cell phone, a car matching some description, or a
suspicious gathering.
America’s
allies – Israel and Saudi Arabia
America’s allies,
equipped with American weapons, follow a similar pattern in making
war.
Saudi Arabia in Yemeni cities, and Israel in urban Gaza,
employ cluster
munitions. Such munitions are known as “area denial
weapons,” causing indiscriminate destruction over swathes of
territory. Documented munitions used inside Yemen include
American-made CBU-52 cluster bombs, each loaded with 220
“anti-material”
bomblets. Imagine the use of such weapons in central London, or on
a Manhattan street.
Though not confined to cluster munitions
alone, the deployment of these US-made weapons by the Saudis in
Yemen has only added to the carnage.
Almost 4,000 people have been killed, with 19,000 injured.
In
Gaza in 2009, the Israelis used cluster
munitions, white phosphorus – a flesh burning agent also used
by the US in Iraq – as well as standard artillery, all against
dense urban areas. The UN estimates over
1,400 civilians, of whom 495 were children, were killed in the
attacks. The Israelis also destroyed a hospital in
Gaza, attacked two others,
and shelled UN-run
schools in 2014.
Policy? The US, Israel and Saudi
Arabia are among the countries that refuse
to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions banning such
weapons.
The
cost of modern war
Accountability
remains in the hands of those with the weapons. America and Israel
conduct self-investigations, and stymie independent
ones, to clear their military of blame – the Saudis do not even
bother. At the UN, the United States blocks action
critical of Israel. In Yemen, the US claims it cannot control how
the Saudis choose to employ American weapons, and has stated the
Saudi actions only “border on” violations of
international law; Amnesty International labels them war
crimes. NATO and the EU are deathly silent on the substantive
issues, even in places where their own forces are on the
ground.
Modern war as conducted by the United States and its
allies in the Middle East has as a known outcome massive civilian
casualties. The sites precisely targeted can be civilian, in
violation of all known standards of international law. With
indiscriminate weapons, the collateral kills are foreseeable – and
thus preventable – consequences. To label the destruction of one
hospital in isolation a war crime is to think too small. The
civilian deaths are policy.
Kunduz was no accident. It was
simply another example.
–
Peter Van Buren is
a retired 24-year veteran of the US Department of State, including
service in Iraq. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I
Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the
99 Percent. He lives and writes from New York City.
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en: ‘VS bombardement MSF ziekenhuis in Kunduz: deze ‘vergissing’ kostte 42 mensen het leven…..‘
en: ‘MSF ziekenhuis Millis (Syrië) verwoest, 13 doden…….‘
en:
‘BBC:
VS beschieting MSF ziekenhuis in Afghanistan was een ‘menselijke
vergissing……..‘
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