Originally Posted by
Cazalet33
Has MSF called this "error" a war crime?
Sure, attacking a known hospital is, de facto, a war crime. No doubt about that.
Deliberately targeting and attacking a hospital, when you know it is a hospital, is a war crime. That statement by MSF is thick with political attitude. "Brush this off as a mistake" is one of many untruths and pieces of spin imbedded in that lengthy press release. I suppose it doesn't matter to that person that there is a difference in intention between an error and a deliberate act, even though this "spokesperson" addresses intention in the opening paragraph.
I want you to think about the kind of political bias you have to have to assume that the Americans deliberately attacked a hospital. Why, it smells like your attitude. To even raise that point, which was all over the press in less than 24 hours, even though "war crime" was in scare quotes, takes something
other than a neutral attitude.
Back to the nuts and bolts of the matter:
I'd be interested to find out just what is behind this tragic
up.
A few posts back up the page someone pointed out that Doctors Without Borders provides GPS coordinates to ... whom? I tend to believe that, since we all live in the era of Silver Bullet Warfare and are inundated with information about precision weapons.
Given that this NGO has worked in conflict zones before, I believe that their organization is sharp enough to realize that they have to communicate with people handling military hardware. Won't comment further about how they do that.
So, assuming that point is true (I'll bet the over on it)
who did they inform
, how did the inform them, and then ... where I begin to
care how it happened ...
What was done with that information?
Who had it, or didn't, and how was it disseminated through the chain of command and through various Afghan/Coalition/ISAF organizations?
How did that information (or lack of it) fold into a subsequent targeting decision?
I have some pretty concrete ideas but will not further speculate. I'll leave that to those of you with an agenda.