US Forces Have Bombed Doctors Without Borders Instead of Taliban

Bombs dropped by the US military have destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital, so far 3 are confirmed dead and 30 are missing with 19 doctors injured. The US instigated a bomb strike on the city of Kunduz and continued the bombing for 30 minutes after the facility informed them of their proximity. The US military has not officially responded other than filing it under "collateral damage."

Good fucking job, guys.

 

[AnOminous]

Obama's a shameless hypocrite who never deserved a Peace Prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize has a sad and pathetic history. For instance, giving Yasser Arafat and Itzhak Rabin one.

Now, Obama is part of that sad and pathetic history.

 

[Arctic]

The Nobel Peace Prize has a sad and pathetic history. For instance, giving Yasser Arafat and Itzhak Rabin one.

Now, Obama is part of that sad and pathetic history.

In the old days, the Nobel committee would simply not give prizes when they felt that nobody deserved them that particular year. Now they're giving prizes to practically everyone.

 

[AnOminous]

In the old days, the Nobel committee would simply not give prizes when they felt that nobody deserved them that particular year. Now they're giving prizes to practically everyone.

I would call these aspirational prizes. That is, they're awarding someone a prize in the usually vain hope that they will then do something to deserve it.

 

[The Knife's Husbando]

Not to mention the poor bastard who came up with the prize, Alfred Nobel, had to sit back and watch his invention for making hard-rock mining safer- dynamite- be used to create umpteen-hundred new & inventive ways to blow people up in warfare.

 

[Cosmos]

Obama's a shameless hypocrite who never deserved a Peace Prize.

Oh hey, do you know who he was up against?

• Sima Samar, an Afghani doctor, human rights activist and chairwoman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. She has spoken out against sharia law (particularly about how incredibly biased it is towards men) and was forced to resign from the Karzai administration after speaking out for women's rights.
• Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese human rights activist who's thought of as the father of Chinese democracy. He was jailed for 18 years for protesting Mao's China after leaving his position as a member of the Red Guard. He's been nominated seven other times.
• Denis Mukwege, a Congolese doctor who has treated thousands of women who were the victims of violent rape, especially gang wartime rape. He has become the world's leading expert on how to repair the internal physical damage caused by gang rape.
• And many more!

OBAMA TOTALLY DESERVED IT, GUYS.

On-topic: You dun goofed, US Military.

 

[Red]

The Nobel Peace Prize has a sad and pathetic history. For instance, giving Yasser Arafat and Itzhak Rabin one.

Now, Obama is part of that sad and pathetic history.

Don't forget the peace prize for lobotomies!

 

[Too Many Crooks]

Oh hey, do you know who he was up against?

• Sima Samar, an Afghani doctor, human rights activist and chairwoman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. She has spoken out against sharia law (particularly about how incredibly biased it is towards men) and was forced to resign from the Karzai administration after speaking out for women's rights.
• Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese human rights activist who's thought of as the father of Chinese democracy. He was jailed for 18 years for protesting Mao's China after leaving his position as a member of the Red Guard. He's been nominated seven other times.
• Denis Mukwege, a Congolese doctor who has treated thousands of women who were the victims of violent rape, especially gang wartime rape. He has become the world's leading expert on how to repair the internal physical damage caused by gang rape.
• And many more!

OBAMA TOTALLY DESERVED IT, GUYS.

On-topic: You dun goofed, US Military.

Damn, that makes it even worse.

 

[SpessCaptain]

On the Noble Peace Prize. Feynman said it right:

"I don't know anything about the Nobel Prize and what's it all about, and what's worth what and if the people in the Swedish academy decide if the x-y-z wins a Nobel Prize, then so be it. I don't have anything to do with a Nobel Prize.

I don't like honors. I appreciate if the work that I did, and the people who appreciate it, and I notice that the Physicist use my work, I do not need anything else, I don't think there is any sense to anything else, I don't see that it makes any point, that someone in the Swedish academy decides, that this work is noble enough to receive a prize, I have already got the prize, the pleasure of finding things out.

Prizes of pleasure of finding the thing out, the discovery, the observation that people use those are the real things, the honors are unreal, to me"

 

[Dudeofteenage]

What I find amusing is that a lot of the people castigating Obama here were also castigating him in the ISIS thread for not bombing ISIS hard enough.

 

[XYZpdq]

What I find amusing is that a lot of the people castigating Obama here were also castigating him in the ISIS thread for not bombing ISIS hard enough.

#fukobeme

 

[DuskEngine]

A Foreign Policy reporter got some photos from inside the remains of the hospital.

Spoiler: Dark shit

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

A Foreign Policy reporter got some photos from inside the remains of the hospital.

Spoiler: Dark shit

That is disheartening to look at.

To think that the US would do that however, I'm not entirely surprised. This is the kind of ass-backwards thing I would have expected them to have done. I'm also getting the sick feeling that it may have been intentional and they're trying to cover it up too. Because it seems like there's more to this story than what we already know about. And I would love to see what kind of defense they come up with over this incident.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

That is disheartening to look at.

To think that the US would do that however, I'm not entirely surprised. This is the kind of ass-backwards thing I would have expected them to have done. I'm also getting the sick feeling that it may have been intentional and they're trying to cover it up too.

Why would they do it intentionally? Are you thinking that they discovered some high value target was in the hospital and they just had to take him out? I guess it's possible but it seems like this is one of those situations were fuck up is more likely than conspiracy.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Why would they do it intentionally? Are you thinking that they discovered some high value target was in the hospital and they just had to take him out? I guess it's possible but it seems like this is one of those situations were fuck up is more likely than conspiracy.

Either way, until we know for sure, all we can do is speculate.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

Either way, until we know for sure, all we can do is speculate.

This is the kind of thing that can never be "known for sure", because a cover-up can never be proven. But we can make an informed guess based on the balance of probabilities.

 

[AnOminous]

I guess it's possible but it seems like this is one of those situations were fuck up is more likely than conspiracy.

It's always possible they simply decided they didn't want the target area to have medical facilities and this was the way to ensure that happened.

That would involve a healthy dose of being outright evil, but let's just say things like this have happened.

The evidence isn't really strong enough to reject the default hypothesis, though, which is that when the military does something that seems to be a fuckup, it probably is.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

It's always possible they simply decided they didn't want the target area to have medical facilities and this was the way to ensure that happened.

That would involve a healthy dose of being outright evil, but let's just say things like this have happened.

I don't have any illusions about the US military (or any military, lest somebody accuse me of anti-Americanisms). I know they're capable of doing something like this if they saw a benefit (bombing of Dresden, anybody?). But I think it's unlikely that they would see the benefit (depriving the enemy of medical facilities) as outweighing the costs (this that we're seeing now - probably going to go down as one of the top ten worse things the US military has done during the War on Terror, and that's a competitive list).

But lest anybody think that I'm excusing them, no, they're still responsible. Even if it is an error, it's akin to accidentally hitting somebody while drunk driving - you didn't choose to hit them, but you chose to do things that made hitting them very likely. If you're going to knowingly throw bombs around, you can't claim it's just fate when one of them hits a civilian.

 

[millais]

The British firebombed Dresden, not the Americans, and as much as people like to bitch and moan about Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, his handiwork was amateur compared to what the Americans did to Tokyo under Curtis LeMay.

 

[AnOminous]

The British firebombed Dresden, not the Americans, and as much as people like to bitch and moan about Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, his handiwork was amateur compared to what the Americans did to Tokyo under Curtis LeMay.

It was a joint US/UK operation.

 

[Jace E. Denton]

Wars are messy and inaccurate. I obviously can't say this argues any form of justification for something like this happening, but anyone who knows history knows this happens in war, it doesn't matter which combatants are involved or if there is a first-world military with a lot of technology involved.

You should know that once a war is ongoing, nobody in the warzone(s) is ever safe from the action, even in the so-called green zones you will sometimes see absurd shit happen, but it's a war. Horrific unintended damage to the safety and property of non-combatants is as old as war itself, at least as old as the use of fire and city sieges in warfare, you could go back to the bronze age and there would still be the collateral damage from razing structures, catapaults, archery sieges and the uncontrollable spread of diseases.

War is fucked up and nobody on either side of the fighting is ever really innocent, there is rarely ever a clearly defined 'good side' and nobody is safe. In chat I sometimes joke about wanting WW3 to happen so we can form a Kiwi-only stronghold somewhere, but it's usually because I'm bored or drunk and I want to see what kind of unique skills other Kiwis have to offer, I don't genuinely take the idea of war lightly for many reasons. It's a twisted, fucked up morass of shattered lives for almost everybody involved except the most exceptional sociopathic motherfuckers.