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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification
Glenn Greenwald points out that the US and Afghan governments are "evolving" their story. Guess who is at fault for the bombing?
Kunduz MSF/DWB Hospital, afire.
The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification
by Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, October 05, 2015
When news first broke of the U.S. airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the response from the U.S. military was predictable and familiar. It was all just a big, terrible mistake, its official statement suggested: an airstrike it carried out in Kunduz may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility. Oops: our bad. Fog of war, errant bombs, and all that.
SNIP...
But theres something significantly different about this incident that has caused this mistake claim to fail. Usually, the only voices protesting or challenging the claims of the U.S. military are the foreign, non-western victims who live in the cities and villages where the bombs fall. Those are easily ignored, or dismissed as either ignorant or dishonest. Those voices barely find their way into U.S. news stories, and when they do, they are stream-rolled by the official and/or anonymous claims of the U.S. military, which are typically treated by U.S. media outlets as unassailable authority.
In this case, though, the U.S. military bombed the hospital of an organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)) run by western-based physicians and other medical care professionals. They are not so easily ignored. Doctors who travel to dangerous war zones to treat injured human beings are regarded as noble and trustworthy. Theyre difficult to marginalize and demonize. They give compelling, articulate interviews in English to U.S. media outlets. They are heard, and listened to.
SNIP...
As a result of all of this, there is now a radical shift in the story being told about this strike. No longer is it being depicted as some terrible accident of a wayward bomb. Instead, the predominant narrative from U.S. sources and their Afghan allies is that this attack was justified because the Taliban were using it as a base.
CONTINUED...
https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/the-radically-changing-story-of-the-u-s-airstrike-on-afghan-hospital-from-mistake-to-justification/
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)It's not the voters or the President. Based on the evidence before our eyes, traitors, warmongers, war profiteers and psycho killers run the nation's war machine.
Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group
Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013
According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.
For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.
And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the companys gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the companys financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.
Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: " got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience."
CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group
Wouldn't it be great to live in a democracy, a republic built on equal justice for all? That way, traitors, warmongers and banksters would be in jail instead of printing money.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)And the main beneficiaries are tied to Kissinger's masters.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/wikileaks-kissinger-cables-bradley-manning
YoungDemCA
(5,714 posts)daleanime
(17,796 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Then I show you where you're wrong. And then you pop up to paint me a Conspiracy Theorist again. Like clockwork.
tishaLA
(14,176 posts)this is a war crime.
And it is.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Or at least from her monied husband's worldview.
Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m
"Money trumps peace." -- George W Bush, Feb. 14, 2007, White House press conference where no follow up was asked.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)They would throw a Chelsea Manning to the wolves in a heartbeat, a David Petraeus gets rather more gentle treatment.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)And they were raping Iraqi children in front of their parents to get information for CIA and Cheney's Facebook page. Just because the parents had nothing to do with 9-11 and their country sits on top of our -- I mean, Mr. Kissinger's -- oil has nothing to do with it.
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)They were expecting to pin it on some hapless EM but the fuckup is just too major and attracting far too many eyeballs thanks to those doogooding MSF assholes so it ends up getting dropped in the Afghan's lap.
There is some epic butt covering going on here.
Truprogressive85
(900 posts)Just as no one went to jail for waterboarding
No one will go to jail for this disgusting act
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Actually, for reporting war crimes. The war criminals walk free, to the shame of my country.
Officers of the United States should be in the dock, not PFC Manning
Truprogressive85
(900 posts)shame the good guys always gets thrown in jail
YoungDemCA
(5,714 posts)nt
FlatBaroque
(3,160 posts)own investigation and find that the actions of the US forces were justified, we will have officially become the IDF.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)...Ray McGovern's spelled it out: O.I.L. for Oil, Israel and Logistics.
Man, talk about integrity.
msongs
(67,394 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)...whoever outranks, on-scene in Afghanistan who sent a C-130 flying battlewagon to circle and destroy the hospital. It's a flying machine gun and machine gun grenade launcher with wings, a four-prop aircraft built tough enough to fly into hurricanes. I'm no expert, but from I understand, unlike drone (presidentially approved CIA/Blackwater picked assassination) missions, its commander are in charge of the combat in Afghanistan. Someone, somewhere gave an order.
malaise
(268,913 posts)the air strikes.
Fugging BS!!!
One of the usual hacks is calling it a PR disaster - forget the 22 dead folks.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)...living in a world dominated by warmongers, and a democracy hijacked by same.
No compassion for those killed, wounded at all. And the numbers must be over 2 million dead in Iraq and Afghanistan by now. That's NAZI.
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Missy Ryan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
The Washington Post, October 6 at 10:14 AM
Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the strikes on a Kunduz hospital were not intended to kill medical staff or patients.
A hospital was mistakenly struck, Campbell told lawmakers. We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility.
SNIP...
Army Gen. John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told reporters Monday at a news conference that Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from U.S. forces. Campbell made it clear that this differed from initial reports that said U.S. forces were under attack and called in the airstrikes for their defense.
Campbells remarks differed from two previous comments, including one made by Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter on Sunday that said U.S. forces were under attack.
At some point in the course of the events there [they] did report that they, themselves, were coming under attack. That much I think we can safely say, Carter told reporters Sunday.
CONTINUED...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-us-general-in-afghanistan-hospital-was-mistakenly-struck/2015/10/06/0da262e8-6c34-11e5-9bfe-e59f5e244f92_story.html
YoungDemCA
(5,714 posts)Defending the First Amendment rights of white supremacists.
marmar
(77,072 posts)This one is pretty high up.
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)daleanime
(17,796 posts)quality.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Like the time you wrote: "The poster in question is (in)famous for this sort of thing." You even had the nice emoticons to emphasize your smear:
My reply:
Both of these guys had ancestors and cronies in the slave trade.
Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, share a moment and some information, back in the day.
The people who tried to overthrow FDR in 1933 had kids.
And their offspring* and connected cronies in crime are the ones* screwing America now.
What's different today, is we don't have Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.
* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.
Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained more wealth than all of history put together. Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the wealth of the many to themselves.
And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero on a white horse, as planned in 1933, their weapon since Pruneface made his first payment to the Ayatollah has been "Supply Side Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down.
Rothschild and Freshfields founders had links to slavery, papers reveal
By Carola Hoyos
Financial Times
Two of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies, documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking familys 19th-century patriarch, and James William Freshfield, founder of Freshfields, the top City law firm, benefited financially from slavery, records from the National Archives show, even though both have often been portrayed as opponents of slavery.
Far from being a matter of distant history, slavery remains a highly contentious issue in the US, where Rothschild and Freshfields are both active.
Companies alleged to have links to past slave injustices have come under pressure to make restitution.
JPMorgan, the investment bank, set up a $5m scholarship fund for black students studying in Louisiana after apologising in 2005 for the companys historic links to slavery.
CONTINUED (with registration, etc) ...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c0f5014-628c-11de-b1c9-00144feabdc0.html
Generation upon generation, knowing only service to power and property.
Kevin Phillips called them a ''multigenerational family of fibbers.''
The Barreling Bushes
Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest
by Kevin Phillips
Published on Sunday, January 11, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times
EXCERPT...
During these years, Bush's four sons - George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin - were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini moneymen and cozying up to BCCI. The Middle East was becoming a convenient family money spigot.
Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late 1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessmen who served as the North American representative for two rich Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) - billionaire Salem bin Laden and banker and BCCI insider Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put $50,000 into Bush's 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using Bin Laden-Bin Mahfouz funds.
In the late 1980s, after several failed oil ventures, the future 43rd president let the ailing oil business in which he was a major stockholder and chairman be bought out by another foreign-influenced operation, Harken Energy. The Wall Street Journal commented in 1991, "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken - all since George W. Bush came on board - likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."
Other hints of cronyism came in 1990 when inexperienced Harken got a major contract to drill in the Persian Gulf for the government of Bahrain. Time magazine reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, in their book "The Outlaw Bank," concluded "that Mahfouz, or other BCCI players, must have had a hand in steering the oil-drilling contract to the president's son." The web entangling the Bush presidencies was already being spun.
CONTINUED...
http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kevin_phillips.htm
Of course no one's heard of the BFEE. While they wonder how Saddam got WMDs, Wall Street gets ahead.
uhnope
(6,419 posts)marmar
(77,072 posts)Someone's worldview is BS, but not Greenwald's.
rather lame attempt
marmar
(77,072 posts)uhnope
(6,419 posts)Would not want to be inside a mind that thinks that way
nationalize the fed
(2,169 posts)I remembered when the Clinton War Machine bombed the Chinese Embassy, during the first PNAC war on Serbia**. The CIA said it was "bad maps".
Then I remembered the other civilian casualty incidents during that PNAC war:
The bombing of a Civilian TV station
The bombing of a Civilian Train
The bombing of a hospital in Belgrade
The clusterbombing of a marketplace in Nis
And all the other civilian bombing deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_during_Operation_Allied_Force
Nothing new here, especially the fact that in a few days this will be forgotten by most and the US is preparing for the next "incident". We're killing people in Afghanistan now why exactly? The US is morally, fiscally, spiritually and every other way a corrupt, bankrupt nation.
**link:http://web.archive.org/web/20030210080835/http://www.newamericancentury.org/balkans.htm
bemildred
(90,061 posts)marmar
(77,072 posts)uhnope
(6,419 posts)marmar
(77,072 posts)cwydro
(51,308 posts)They've had all weekend to work on it.
And has the president commented yet?
Nah, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize is gonna duck and cover with this one.
Shame, shame, shame.
cheapdate
(3,811 posts)for control of the city of Kunduz. Urban warfare, street-by-street. They called in for U.S. air support. I don't see what's so implausible or hard to believe about that.
nitpicker
(7,153 posts)What if a local medical provider got irritated about MSF providing free care (thus taking away customers) and somehow managed to get the Afghan government to claim that terrorists were hiding out in the hospital?
Boom- competition eliminated!
((It makes as much, or little, sense as other "why this happened" theories...))
Rex
(65,616 posts)Did they know it was a hospital? At one time I would just automatically say yes...the military always checks out it's targets before they deploy to not kill (as many) innocent people. That is not policy anymore...9/11 changed everything from defense to offense. So now we rush information and blow up a hospital.
Just admit to it, for ONCE. Is all I ask. Instead of this bullshit story of, "well see we had to there were bad guys inside the building." That shit is lame and weak and people are tired of hearing lie after lie after lie.
I kid...the MIC answers to nobody but the Pentagon...again kidding! It's all a huge pile of fuckup and nobody cares anymore. If you are your own judge, you never commit any crimes.
Who could have guessed?