Originally Posted by
Biggus
Notice the deliberate lie and spin already in the media, provided by an MSF spokesman.
"It could be a mistake, but the fact of the matter is it's a war crime," MSF country director Hassan Boucenine told the Reuters news agency.
It isn't a war crime if it's a mistake. That is the fact of the matter.
If it
was intentional and the whomever struck with that foreknowledge, there is a case to be made in support of his claim. The Saudi's are at this point saying "need an investigation" ... but the story does have a curious one-two punch to it:
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says one of its hospitals in northern Yemen has been destroyed by several air strikes. The first, which occurred around 22:30 (19:30 GMT) on Monday, hit part of the facility in Saada province that was not being used, according to the charity. All staff and patients had been evacuated by the time the second strike hit about 10 minutes later. However, the Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen's Houthi rebel movement denied that it had bombed the hospital.
Based on that one two punch, I will be more charitable in assessing this gent's belief that it was deliberate. What nobody knows, or reported, is if that position has been used as a fighting position recently or in and around the time of the attack. MSF will protest that it hasn't, but as they aren't the ones with guns, someone else may have done so regardless of what the medics desired.
"There's no reason to target a hospital. We provided [the coalition] with all of our GPS co-ordinates about two weeks ago," he added.
Technically true in general, except when someone establishes a fighting position at a hospital. At that point, it's no longer safe ... but whether or not that is part of the matter here is unknown.
To sum up: it doesn't mean you were deliberately targeted simply because a bomb hit. What it does mean is that your preventative measure, offered in good faith, still wasn't enough thanks to whatever the C2 and decision making among people with weapons did on a given day.
Why ... remains to be seen.
Conclusion: might have been deliberate, based on the one two punch. Might have been an accident. In this case, I will put my ten bucks with the MSF report thanks to the follow up attack.
What is unknown: did whomever targeted that building know it was a hospital? Don't know yet, and given that it's the Saudis, whose reputation for transparency isn't stellar, that may remain unknown.