US Dispatched a Murderous AC-130 Airborne Gunship to Attack a Hospital

[Judi Lynn]

October 13, 2015
US Dispatched a Murderous AC-130 Airborne Gunship to Attack a Hospital

by Dave Lindorff



The Air Force’s top killing machine, the AC-130J, was sent to attack the
Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.

Evidence continues to mount that the US committed a monstrous war crime in attacking and destroying a fully operational hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on the night of Oct. 3, killing at least 22 people including at least 12 members of the volunteer medical staff of Medicine Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the French based international aid organization that operated the hospital.

This even as the US desperately tries to bury the issue of its perfidy by offering “condolence payments” to victims of the attack, though without accepting blame beyond saying it was a “tragic mistake.”

The “mistake” claim looks increasingly shameless as it becomes clear that this was not, as the US corporate media continue to incorrectly report, a “bombing” gone wrong, but rather was a prolonged hour-long attack by an AC-130 gunship, the deadliest killing machine in the US Air Force’s weapons roster of mayhem. The aircraft, equipped with the latest night-vision sighting equipment, reportedly made five 15-minute assaults on the hospital’s main building housing the emergency operating room and recovery rooms, firing its array of howitzer cannons, 30-millimeter machine canons and other heavy weapons whose standard ammunition includes both high-explosive tips and anti-personnel rounds designed to scatter death in a wide pattern.

This is, in other words, not a precision targeting weapon, but a weapons system designed to spread death over a wide swath.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/13/us-dispatched-a-murderous-ac-130-airborne-gunship-to-attack-a-hospital/

[peacebird]

1. War crimes. The slaughter of medical personel and the extensive use of drone assassinations.

No other way to call it. War crimes. We have sunk to the level of those we fight.
Shameful.

[Fred Sanders]

2. The silence of the American media on this is another media crime among many.

The Pentagon has no shame....over an hour of attack by a single state of the art plane backed up by the force of American military and aerial intelligence............did not know it was a hospital????????

You do the math, America.....let the truth out.

[midnight]

3. America needs to get serious about ending gun violence.

[JayhawkSD]

4. Not exactly an accurate description of the AC-130

The current version, the AC-130J, does not have any 30mm cannons as stated in the article. It is equipped with a single 25 mm GAU-12 Equalizer (a 5-barrel Gatling gun), one Bofors 40mm autocannon, and one 105 mm M102 cannon.

A howitzer is a type of artillery which has a short barrel and uses small charges to fire shells on high trajectories. The AC-130 certainly does not have any "howitzer cannons" as described in the article.

The AC-130 is certainly not "a weapons system designed to spread death over a wide swath." It flies in a tight circle and controls its fire pattern very accurately to deliver overwhelming firepower into a very small target area, using highly sophisticated fire control targeting systems.

That makes the attack on the hospital even more heinous, actually, because that firepower turns out to have been very accurately concentrated on what we no know was known to be a hospital.

[Lefty Thinker]

5. In the US a howitzer is a long-barreled weapon

What is, in other countries, called a gun-howitzer is, in the United States, called a howitzer. Long to very long barrel. Capable of direct or indirect fire. I don't know if 105mm bore would qualify it, but it is at least getting close. And, of course, a canon from an aircraft is not going to fire indirectly. But the United States has definitely, in the past, termed some long-barreled, 105mm cannon "howitzers" (see the M108).

[JayhawkSD]

6. There is no clear-cut definition of "long" or "short" for an artillery barrel.

The M-108 is a self propelled vehicle mounting an M103 howitzer, and if you think that thing has a long barrel, let alone "very long," I just don't quite know what to say to you.

Now here is a long barrel (or three).

But by all means keep the thread going until you prove me wrong, because that's what DU is all about.