Joanne Liu (L) President of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) International, talks with Bruno Jochum, Director General of MSF Switzerland, before making her statement in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday calling for an independent international fact-finding into the U.S. bombing of the MSF-staffed hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
President Obama
phoned Joanne Liu, the head of the French-based Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders Wednesday, to apologize for the U.S. air-strikes on an Afghanistan hospital that killed 12 of the group's staff and 10 of its patients Saturday. The apology was made in the midst of international outrage and efforts to untangle the exact circumstances surrounding the bloody strikes in Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan that is a prosperous trade gateway:
“When the United States makes a mistake, we own up to it, we apologize,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters.
Here is the readout of the president's phone call:
President Obama spoke today by phone with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) International President Dr. Joanne Liu to apologize and express his condolences for the MSF staff and patients who were killed and injured when a U.S. military airstrike mistakenly struck an MSF field hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. During the call, President Obama expressed regret over the tragic incident and offered his thoughts and prayers on behalf of the American people to the victims, their families, and loved ones. Acknowledging the great respect he has for the important and lifesaving work that MSF does for vulnerable communities in Afghanistan and around the world, the President assured Dr. Liu of his expectation that the Department of Defense investigation currently underway would provide a transparent, thorough, and objective accounting of the facts and circumstances of the incident and pledged full cooperation with the joint investigations being conducted with NATO and the Afghan Government.
Earnest said the investigation by DOD will be "transparent," "thorough," and "objective."
Not good enough for the MSF. The organization, which provides free medical aid in 20 nations and won a Nobel Peace prize for its work in 1999, has called for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC), an investigative arm of the Geneva Conventions.
Liu said an independent investigation matters “given the inconsistencies in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened over recent days.” MSF officials, who said staff made frantic phone calls for 30 minutes after the hour-long attack began trying to get the U.S. military to stop, called the strikes on the hospital a "war crime."
More about this can be found below the fold.
In testimony before a Senate panel on Tuesday, Gen. John Campbell said “we would never intentionally target a protected medical facility”:
“Protected” is a critical word for any war-crimes investigation. But the Afghans have said that Taliban fighters fired on their forces from within hospital, which would potentially compromise its protected status. MSF has unequivocally denied that there was any firing from inside its hospital. Campbell, in his Senate testimony, said US personnel were not under fire and stopped short of saying that Afghan forces had received fire from the medical facility.
But should the US special operators or AC-130 crew have believed the hospital was a legitimate target, international law still requires them to provide notification to personnel within that a strike was to take place, according to experts.
“Any serious violation of the law of armed conflict, such as attacking a hospital that is immune from intentional attack, is a war crime. Hospitals are immune from attack during an armed conflict unless being used by one party to harm the other and then only after a warning that it will be attacked,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell of the University of Notre Dame.
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions,
Article 19, military units are supposed to warn hospitals and other protected facilities before any attacks are launched:
The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded. The fact that sick or wounded members of the armed forces are nursed in these hospitals, or the presence of small arms and ammunition taken from such combatants which have not yet been handed to the proper service, shall not be considered to be acts harmful to the enemy.
The Pentagon has rules about warnings, too. This is from the
June 2015 Department of Defense Law of War Manual:
The Pentagon has changed its original story on how the attack against the hospital came about. According to testimony by Gen. Campbell, the request for an air-strike originated with the Afghan special forces fighting in Kunduz. They relayed their wishes to American special operation forces who in turn called in the strikes.
But those forces apparently didn't follow the rules of engagement:
The American commander in Afghanistan now believes that United States troops probably did not follow their own rules in calling in the airstrike that decimated a Doctors Without Borders hospital when no American and Afghan troops were in extreme danger, according to officials with direct knowledge of the general’s thinking. [...]
The Special Operations Forces most likely did not meet any of the criteria, the commander, Gen. John F. Campbell, has said in private discussions, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
Ryan Grim
reports that Afghan special forces raided the MSF hospital on July 1 looking for insurgents. According to a
condemnatory July 3 statement from the hospital the special forces entered the hospital and fired their weapons in the air. Grim writes:
"The armed men physically assaulted three MSF staff members and entered the hospital with weapons," the statement continued. "They then proceeded to arrest three patients. Hospital staff tried their best to ensure continued medical care for the three patients, and in the process, one MSF staff member was threatened at gunpoint by two armed men. After approximately one hour, the armed men released the three patients and left the hospital compound."
While the motive of the raid is unclear, Afghan forces have long protested the practice of providing medical treatment to insurgents. But international law says that as soon as a fighter is in need of treatment, he is no longer a combatant.
It's clear from that 3-month-old raid the Afghan military was fully aware the facility was a hospital before it asked the Americans to attack it. But one of the questions that investigators—at least,
independent investigators—would surely ask is whether that information was conveyed to U.S. special forces at the time the Afghans called for the air-strikes. American forces' ignorance, real or feigned, regarding the purpose of the facility seems likely to be the claim, one that would allow the hospital massacre to continue being labeled an "accident," and "mistake."
Meanwhile, Marcy Wheeler, at emptywheel, continues to dig through the statements and their contradictions in pieces worth reading, such as The Two Strands of (Non) Accountability on Kunduz.