Of course, the BBC has always been an instrument of the British state, established by statute in 1928 and run by a governor appointed by the Prime Minister. As Seumas Milne has pointed out: “There is no point in romanticizing a BBC golden age. The corporation was always an establishment institution, deeply embedded in the security state and subject to direct government control in an emergency…[with] around 40 percent of the staff… vetted by MI5.”
The attack on our hospital in Kunduz destroyed our ability to treat patients at a time when we were needed the most. We need a clear commitment that the act of providing medical care will never make us a target. We need to know whether the rules of war still apply.
On October 24, MSF announced that 30 people had now tragically died, up from the initial toll of 22. The humanitarian organisation, also known as Doctors Without Borders, continued to call for an independent international investigation into what it has called a ‘war crime’. Associated Press has just reported new evidence ‘that U.S. forces destroyed what they knew was a functioning hospital’
“We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings,” said the nurse. “I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit, six patients were burning in their beds.”
“We looked for some staff that were supposed to be in the operating theater. It was awful. A patient there on the operating table, dead, in the middle of the destruction. We couldn’t find our staff.”
One of the defining features of the corporate media is that Western crimes are ignored or downplayed. The US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on the night of October 3, is an archetypal example.
Pentagon officials knew it was a hospital, yet attacked it anyway – multiple times for over an hour, killing 24 doctors, other medical staff and patients, injuring 37 others.
Make no mistake! This was a deliberately planned war crime. An AP report said “US analysts knew (the) Afghan site was (a) hospital.”
The apparent U.S. slaughter of at least 22 people at an Afghan hospital, including Doctors Without Borders medical staff, is part of the grim reality of indiscriminate death when U.S. Special Forces undertake their secret raids and often toss aside the rules of warfare, reports Nicolas J S Davies.
