‘More Questions Than Answers’: MSF Not Buying Pentagon Probe into Hospital Attack
November 29, 2015 in News by RBN
What about the hour-long attempts to stop the bombing? Why is this damning report being released the day before Thanksgiving? And what does this say about the competency of the U.S. military?
“The frightening catalogue of errors outlined today illustrates gross negligence on the part of U.S. forces and violations of the rules of war,” said MSF director general Christopher Stokes. (Photo: Andrew Quilty/Foreign Policy)
Doctors Without Borders is challenging the Pentagon over the findings of internal probes into the bombing of a hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz on October 3, saying the military’s conclusions offer “more questions than answers” and that claims of “human error” simply don’t correspond to the available facts.
The pair of investigations, which trickled out by way of the mainstream media, reduced theattack on the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital to series of human errors and technical glitches. The findings claim to show that despite the medical charity’s documented efforts to alert commanders to the onslaught, those signals did not reportedly reach the trigger team until it was “too late,” resulting in the deaths of at least 31 civilians and injuring 28 more.
Among observers—including the head of MSF—the findings have raised some eyebrows as well as questions such as: What about the hour-long attempts to stop the bombing? How does this compare to MSF’s own investigation? Why are these damning reports being released the day before Thanksgiving? And what does this say about the competency of the U.S. military?
“The U.S. version of events presented today leaves MSF with more questions than answers,”said Christopher Stokes, MSF general director.
Responding to the news that gunmen erroneously relied on a physical description of the compound to carry out the attack and had intended to strike a building 450 yards away, Stokes continued: “It appears that 30 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of people are denied life-saving care in Kunduz simply because the MSF hospital was the closest large building to an open field and ‘roughly matched’ a description of an intended target.”
“The frightening catalogue of errors outlined today illustrates gross negligence on the part of U.S. forces and violations of the rules of war,” he added, reiterating the organization’s call for independent and impartial investigation into the attack.
A series of tweets from journalists who covered the ongoing story of the attack further captured the cynicism surrounding the release:
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