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Pregnant woman and child killed in Israeli air raids on Gaza

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Injured Palestinian father, Yahya Hassan holds his son Ahmed Hassan’s hand as they wait to receive treatment at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on October 11, 2015.
Palestine Information Center – October 11, 2015

GAZA – An Israeli aerial attack on the Gaza Strip at dawn Sunday destroyed a Palestinian home, killing a pregnant woman and her little girl, and injuring three other family members.

A spokesman for the health ministry said that Nour Hassan, who was five months pregnant, and her two-year-old daughter Rahaf Yehya were both killed when their home collapsed as a result of an Israeli air raid on a nearby location in Azzeitoun neighborhood east of Gaza City.

Three other people from the same family also suffered injuries in the attack.

Rescue efforts are underway to search for others under the rubble, the spokesman added.

Eyewitnesses said the house was reduced to rubble as a result of the strong blast that was caused by an Israeli airstrike on a nearby resistance training site.

The Palestinian Information Center reporter in Gaza said that an Israeli warplane fired two missiles at two separate training camps belonging to al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas in the City, adding that one of those sites was close to the house.

In this regard, the Israeli occupation army claimed its airstrikes were launched after its anti-missile defense system, the Iron Dome, intercepted a Palestinian rocket fired from Gaza.

October 11, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

US can’t rescue CIA-trained terrorists in Syria: American officials

Press TV – October 10, 2015

Militants trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fight against the Syrian government are now under Russian missile strikes with little prospect of rescue by their American supporters, according to US officials.

Russia has directed parts of its military campaign against US-backed terrorists and other extremist groups in an effort to weaken them, The Associated Press reported on Saturday, citing unnamed US officials.

The Obama administration has few options to defend those it had secretly trained and armed, the officials say.

US Representative Mike Pompeo, a Republican from Kansas who serves on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, told The Associated Press the Russians “know their targets, and they have a sophisticated capacity to understand the battlefield situation.”

The CIA began its covert operation in 2013 to arm, fund and train terrorists to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The covert CIA program has floundered for years, so much so that some lawmakers in Congress proposed cutting its budget.

Some CIA-trained terrorists have been captured; others have defected to other extremist groups, such al-Nusra Front.

“Probably 60 to 80 percent of the arms that America shoveled in have gone to al-Qaeda and its affiliates,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

Since 2013, the CIA has trained approximately 10,000 terrorists. The effort was separate from a failed US military program to train “moderate” militants to supposedly fight the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.

That $500 million Pentagon program is widely considered a failure, and on Friday, the US Defense Department announced it was abandoning those efforts and instead opting to arm existing groups to fight Daesh.

The US Defense Department had spent $42 million (out of $500 million set aside for the training program) to vet, arm and pay dozens of militants. The original goal of the program was to train 5,400 in the first year.

October 10, 2015 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Perverse Rise of Killer Robots

By Cesar Chelala | CounterPunch | October 9, 2015

The development of “killer robots” is a new and original way of using human intelligence for perverse means. Human directing machines to kill and destroy in a scale not yet imagined is a concept that not even George Orwell could have imagined. In the meantime, the leading world powers continue their un-merry-go-round of destruction and death -mostly of innocent civilians- without stopping to consider the consequences of their actions.

Killer robots are fully autonomous weapons that can identify, select and engage targets without meaningful human control. Although fully developed weapons of this kind do not yet exist, the world leaders such as the U.S., the U.K, Israel, Russia, China and South Korea are already working on creating their precursors.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that in 2012, 76 countries had some kind of drones, and 16 countries already possessed armed ones. The U.S. Department of Defense spends $6 billion every year on the research and development of better drones.

South Korea is presently using the Samsung Techwin security surveillance guard robots, which the country uses in the demilitarized zone it shares with North Korea. Although these units are currently operated by humans, the robots have an automatic feature that can detect body heat and fire a machine gun without human intervention.

Israel is developing an armed drone called Harop that could select targets with a special sensor. Northrop Grumman has also developed an autonomous drone called the X-47B which can travel on a preprogrammed flight path while being monitored by a pilot on a ship. It is planned to enter into active service by 2019. China is also moving rapidly in this area. In 2012 it already had 27 armed drone models, one of which is an autonomous air-to-air supersonic combat aircraft.

Killer robots follow the generation of drones and, as with drones, their potential use is also creating a host of human rights, legal and ethical issues. Military officials state that this kind of hardware protects human life by taking soldiers and pilots out of harm’s way. What they don’t say, however, is that the protected lives are those of the attacking armies, not those of the mostly civilians who are their targets, whose untimely deaths are euphemistically called collateral damage.

According to Denise Garcia, an expert in international law, four branches of internationally law have been used to limit violence in war: the law of state responsibility, the law on the use of force, international humanitarian law and human rights law. As currently carried out, U.S. drone strikes violate all of them.

From the ethical point of view, the use of these machines presents a moral dilemma: by allowing machines to make life-and death decisions we remove people’s responsibility for their actions and eliminate accountability. Lack of accountability almost ensures future human rights violations. In addition, many experts believe that the proliferation of autonomous weapons would make an arms race inevitable.

As the United Nations is trying to negotiate the future use of autonomous weapons, the U.S. and U.K. representatives want to support weaker rules that would prohibit future technology but not killer robots developed during the negotiating period. That delay would allow existing semi-autonomous prototypes to continue being used.

The need for a pre-emptive ban on the development and use of this kind of weapon is urgent. As Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions stated recently, “If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons, then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in.”

Dr. Cesar Chelala is an international public health consultant. He recently received the Cedar of Lebanon Gold Medal from the House of Lebanon in Tucuman, Argentina.

October 9, 2015 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

That Awkward Moment When One Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bombs Another

By Dan Sanchez | ANTIMEDIA | October 6, 2015

US/NATO planes bombed a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan on Saturday. The attack lasted an hour, and continued even after medics “frantically phoned NATO and Washington” to tell them what they were bombing.

It was no use. The attackers already knew full well what their target was. Doctors Without Borders had long ago provided them with the GPS coordinates of their facilities. And the US-installed Afghan government, which had raided that very same hospital in July of this year, had requested the strike, claiming the hospital was being used by insurgents.

The attack killed 22 people, including 12 medical workers and 10 patients. Three of the patients were children. The first bombardment targeted the Intensive Care Unit, where an eyewitness nurse said, “Patients were burning in their beds.” And a hospital caretaker said that he could hear women and children, “screaming for help inside the hospital while it was set ablaze by the bombing.”

Doctors Without Borders won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. President Obama was awarded his in 2009. As Commander-in-Chief of the military that bombed the Doctors Without Borders hospital, this makes Obama perhaps the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to bomb another Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Or maybe not? Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, and he masterminded the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos for President Nixon around that time. Shortly thereafter, it came to light that in that campaign, hospitals were routinely targeted for bombing. As The Nation recently reported:

“A letter from former Army captain Rowan Malphurs said that in 1969 and 1970, he analyzed aerial photographs where B-52 bombs (the ones ordered by Kissinger) fell on Cambodia: “I saw on several occasions where possible hospitals had been bombed…. On another occasion I observed a red cross on a building that was partially destroyed by bombs.”

By then, the Red Cross had already been awarded its three Nobel Peace Prizes.

Sorry, Obama, it looks like that’s one “historic first” you can’t claim. That old fox beat you to it.

If it makes you feel any better, Kissinger seems to think your mass-murder record actually beats his. (I know this will warm your heart, since you once bragged, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”) When confronted about bombing Cambodia on a recent book tour, Kissinger said in his own defense:

“I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerrilla-type wars, that the Obama administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon administration ever did. (…)

And I bet if one did an honest account, there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been from American drone attacks.”

Whether that dubious claim is true or not, it’s the thought that counts. Consider it a compliment: a gold star from teacher. Or even an elder statesman’s passing of the torch: from one peace-prize winning war criminal to another.

October 8, 2015 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

US slams Russia for striking terrorists

Press TV | October 7, 2015

The United States has condemned Russia for striking the Western-backed militants in Syria and denied that it is cooperating with Moscow in this regard.

Speaking at a press conference in Rome, Italy, on Wednesday, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called the airstrikes against terrorists “a fundamental mistake”.

“I have said before that we believed that Russia has the wrong strategy — they continue to hit targets that are not ISIL. We believe this is a fundamental mistake,” Carter claimed, using an acronym for the Daesh terrorist group.

“Despite what the Russians say we have not agreed to cooperate with Russia so long as they continue to pursue a mistaken strategy and hit these targets,” he added.

Earlier in the day, the Russian Defense Ministry said it was considering proposals from the US to coordinate operations against ISIL terrorists.

“On the whole, these proposals could be put in place,” defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

He added that US and Russian military officials were discussing technical details on Wednesday.

“What we will do is continue basic, technical discussions on the professional safety procedures for our pilots flying above Syria,” Carter said.

“That’s it. We will keep the channel open because it’s a matter of safety for our pilots,” he added.

A new US intelligence assessment has found Russia has targeted militant groups backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Syria.

The assessment, shared by commanders on the ground, has led American officials to conclude that Russian warplanes have intentionally struck CIA-backed militants in a string of attacks running for days, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, US foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski, a strong supporter of the Obama administration, says the United States should retaliate if Russia does not stop bombing its assets in Syria.

Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski

Moscow’s apparent decision to strike CIA-trained militants “at best” reflects “Russian military incompetence,” and worst, “evidence of a dangerous desire to highlight American political impotence,” Brzezinski, the national security adviser for former President Jimmy Carter, wrote in an article published by the Financial Times on Sunday.

He added that if Moscow continues to target these people, then Washington should retaliate against Russians.

Obama administration officials are debating how the United States can come to the aid of its proxy forces on the ground without risking a broader conflict, according to the Wall Street Journal.

US officials said Russia’s moves in Syria posed a direct challenge to the Obama administration’s foreign policy on the Middle East.

October 7, 2015 Posted by | Mainstream Media, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US lies and excuses for bombing hospital

By Jonathon Cook | The Blog From Nazareth | October 7, 2015

Here is the US changing its story for the FOURTH time of why it launched an air strike on the Doctors without Borders hospital in the Afghan town of Kunduz at the weekend, massacring at least 22 patients and hospital staff.

As Glenn Greenwald has doggedly pointed out, the western media have been faithfully changing their account repeatedly and largely uncritically of what happened to keep in line with US claims. CNN and the New York Times have been particularly egregious offenders. The media monitoring group FAIR has also produced a revealing overview of the NYT’s coverage of the strikes on the hospital.

Almost all of the corporate media began by distancing the US from the attack, with some indicating that it was possible the hospital’s destruction simply coincided with US air strikes in that area. The BBC used the painfully evasive “Afghan air strike” in an early headline, suggesting the possibility of an illusory Afghan air force, to keep the US out of the picture.

Then, the US admitted it was responsible but claimed the strike was an accident. The problem, however, was that this story too was not credible: Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) had given the US and Afghan forces the GPS coordinates of the hospital and called the US military to tell them of the attack during the strike to no avail.

Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, exemplified the western liberal community’s torturous efforts to avoid considering US responsibility for such a serious war crime. He wanted us to think about Assad rather than Kunduz in this astonishing, deflectionary tweet (since deleted).

(Note that this a familiar practice by the HRW team: I wrote at length about similar efforts by their investigators to try to accuse Hizbollah of more serious breaches of international law than Israel when considering the same war crimes.)

Next, the US admitted it had intentionally targeted the medical facility, but did so because, it claimed, there were Taliban fighters using it as a base, even though no evidence was produced and Doctors without Borders staff absolutely denied that had been the case.

Now a US general is blaming Afghan forces for directing the US to strike the hospital.

This slipperiness by the US is visible only because Doctors without Borders, a western organisation, ran the hospital, their staff were among those killed, and they have been waging a relentless campaign exposing the US authorities’ mendacity, forcing the army – and its media stenographers – to keep changing tack.

Had this been a local Afghan-run hospital, or a wedding party, the US claims would have gone entirely unchallenged, and the media would have treated them unquestioningly, as they initially tried to do here.

Thanks to the Doctors without Borders, we have now reached the point where the US has been forced both to admit and justify a very serious war crime.

The intense reluctance of the western media to use the same language of outright condemnation faced with the fact of a US war crime that it regularly employs when offered (usually by the same US authorities) an allegation of a similar war crime by an official enemy – say, Russia or Syria’s Assad – exposes quite how much of a propaganda role our media willingly fulfils.

War crimes are war crimes, except, it seems, when they are committed by us and reported by our media.

October 7, 2015 Posted by | Mainstream Media, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Britain to order 4 new Trident nuclear submarines – Cameron

RT | October 7, 2015

Britain will order four new nuclear submarines, Prime Minister David Cameron has announced at the Conservative party conference in Manchester.

In a clear message to anti-Trident Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the PM said four new submarines would be ordered to replace the existing fleet, which will be retired.

In his first conference speech since the Tories won a parliamentary majority in May’s general election, Cameron used the occasion to present a strong opposition to Corbyn’s foreign policy stance, highlighting the importance of a strong nuclear deterrent.

He told a packed hall that the nuclear deterrent is the country’s “ultimate insurance policy,” adding that the government would commit to the NATO defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP.

October 7, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Afghan Doctor Slaughter Pulls Back Curtain

By Nicolas J S Davies | Consortium News | October 4, 2015

On Dec. 26, 2009, a U.S. Special Operations team flew from Kabul to Ghazi Khan village in the Narang district of Kunar province. They attacked three houses, where they killed two adults and eight children. Seven of the children were handcuffed before they were shot. The youngest was 11 or 12, three more were 12, and one was 15. Both the United Nations and the Afghan government conducted investigations and confirmed all the details of the attack.

U.S. officials conducted their own inquiry, but no report was published and no U.S. military or civilian officials were held accountable. Finally, more than five years later, a New York Times report on Joint Special Operations Command’s (JSOC) Seal Team 6 named it as the U.S. force involved. But JSOC operations are officially secret and, to all practical purposes, immune from accountability. As a senior U.S. officer told the Times, “JSOC investigates JSOC, that’s part of the problem.”

Accountability for the U.S. attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz on Saturday, killing at least 22 people, is likely to be just as elusive. The bilateral security agreement that President Karzai refused to sign, but which President Ghani signed in September 2014, provides total immunity from Afghan law for U.S. forces and officials. So whoever should be held legally responsible for the massacre at the hospital will only be subject to accountability under U.S. military and civilian legal systems, which routinely fail to prosecute anyone for similar war crimes.

What makes this attack unique is not that U.S.-led forces attacked a hospital or killed civilians, but that, for the first time in many years, a Western NGO found itself operating behind enemy lines in territory controlled by Anti-Coalition Forces (ACF) or Taliban. Doctors Without Borders (or MSF for its French initials) thus found itself subject to U.S. rules of engagement under which Afghans have lived and died in their thousands for the past 14 years, effectively excluded from the protections formally guaranteed to civilians, the wounded and medical facilities by the Geneva Conventions.

While UN officials have condemned the attack on MSF in Kunduz, the UN itself has been complicit in the under-reporting of civilian casualties in ACF-held territory in Afghanistan. The UN has issued reports on civilian casualties based only on the small number of civilian deaths that it has fully investigated. When Western officials and media have cited these numbers as estimates of total civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the UN has failed to correct that misleading and dangerous impression.

For instance, when the UN documented 80 civilian killings in U.S. night raids in 2010, this was based on completed investigations of only 13 of the 73 incidents reported to the UN that year. Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who worked on the UN report, estimated that 420 civilians were killed in all 73 incidents.

But Nadery still failed to make it clear that these 73 incidents were only the ones reported to the UN, which had little or no access to ACF-held areas that were targeted by thousands of U.S. night raids and the bulk of 5,100 U.S. air strikes in 2010. U.S. officials and the Western media have used these absurdly low estimates of civilian casualties in Afghanistan to whitewash the deadly effects of 60,000 U.S. air strikes and thousands of special forces night raids over the past 14 years.

‘War Is Not Pretty’

As a former U.S. Navy Seal told the New York Times, “War is not this pretty thing the United States has come to believe it to be.” But it is not really “the United States” that has come to see war as a “pretty thing.” Rather it is our leaders who have targeted the American public with propaganda or “Stratcom” – “strategic communications” — to disguise the horrific reality of war, while providing JSOC and other U.S. forces with secrecy and legal cover to systematically violate the Geneva Conventions.

As retired Admiral James Stavridis told the Times, “If you want these forces to do things that occasionally bend the rules of international law, you certainly don’t want that out in public.”

While U.S. forces feel free to disregard the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, the People On War survey conducted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found that ordinary people in war-torn countries like Afghanistan hold strongly to the international legal conventions that are supposed to protect them.

This ICRC report did find the United States exceptional, not in believing war to be “pretty,” but in its failure to educate its people and its soldiers about the Geneva Conventions and the protections they guarantee to civilians in wartime.

While three-quarters of people in other developed countries knew that soldiers in war “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone,” only 52 percent of Americans were aware of this basic principle of military law. Twice as many Americans as people in other countries subscribed to an erroneous and lower legal standard that military operations should only “avoid civilians as much as possible.”

The ICRC concluded that, “Across a wide range of questions, in fact, American attitudes towards attacks on civilians were much more lax.”

U.S. officials claim that their air strikes are carefully designed and vetted by military lawyers and planners to ensure minimum “collateral damage,” but William Arkin discovered a dirty little secret about this process when he was invited to observe an attack on an alleged ACF leader in Afghanistan from the safety of the U.S. Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Qatar.

Arkin watched on a large TV screen as A-10 Warthog planes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a convoy of vehicles. U.S. officials explained that 1,000-pound bombs would have caused more casualties, while 150-pound Hellfire missiles might have missed their target, so the 500-pound bombs were carefully chosen to kill the target without causing unnecessary casualties.

But then one of the planes did something unexpected. It turned to make a second pass and blanketed the whole area with 30mm armor-piercing shells from its Gatling gun, which fires 65 shells per second. A “precision strike” had just turned into an indiscriminate massacre. A U.S. official quickly told Arkin that this was “not unauthorized.”

The dirty little secret Arkin had discovered was that, once such an operation is under way, special forces ground controllers in the area take full control, and the plans drawn up by lawyers and controllers far from the action no longer apply. Similar rules may have applied to the U.S. air strikes on the MSF hospital in Kunduz, making it difficult for anyone in Washington or Kabul to stop them once they were under way.

Erroneous Raids

Senior U.S. military officers have told Dana Priest of the Washington Post that more than 50 percent of U.S. special forces night raids target the wrong person or house. But that didn’t stop President Obama making them a central tactic in his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, boosting the number of night raids from 20 raids in May 2009 to 1,000 per month a year later.

There is no reason to believe that U.S. air strikes are more accurate or based on better intelligence than night raids by special operations forces. British military adviser Kamal Alam explained to the BBC last Friday that Russian air strikes in Syria are likely to be more accurate than U.S. ones because they have the critical advantage of being guided by Syrian military intelligence on the ground.

Alam noted that even the Iraqi government depends on Syrian military intelligence in its campaign against the Islamic State, and added that this is a source of embarrassment to U.S. officials, who have no such human intelligence capabilities in Syria or Iraq.

Maybe the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz will force more Americans to confront the ugly reality of the devastating air war our country has waged across half a dozen countries for 14 years. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Endless Air Wars.”]

Whether any institution can succeed in holding U.S. officials legally accountable for the bombing of the MSF hospital or not, it may finally bring home the horrors and the indiscriminate nature of our country’s endless air war to millions of Americans. U.S. propaganda will try to portray this as a tragic isolated incident. It is not. It is a war crime, and only the latest in a 14-year-long policy of systematic war crimes.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.  He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

October 5, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

MSF demands independent probe into hospital airstrike in Afghanistan

RT | October 4, 2015

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has demanded an independent international body investigate the suspected US airstrike that killed 22 people at a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The charity’s official said MSF cannot trust the US military probe.

“Under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed, MSF demands that a full and transparent investigation into the event be conducted by an independent international body,” MSF General Director Christopher Stokes said in a statement on Sunday.

“Relying only on an internal investigation by a party to the conflict would be wholly insufficient,” he added.

The US military launched a probe into the incident on Saturday.

He said MSF condemns the attack, which constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law.

“We reiterate that the main hospital building, where medical personnel were caring for patients, was repeatedly and very precisely hit during each aerial raid, while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched,” he added.

“The hospital was full of MSF staff, patients and their caretakers. It is 12 MSF staff members and 10 patients, including three children, who were killed in the attack.”

The US military launched a probe into the incident on Saturday. The US military has confirmed its air forces conducted a strike “in the vicinity” of a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz near the time the facility was hit.

MSF said on Saturday that “all indications” suggest US-led forces carried out the bombing and demanded a transparent account from the Coalition regarding its activities in Kunduz.

On Sunday, NATO said that its preliminary multi-national investigation to determine whether it conducted the airstrike should be wrapped up in a matter of days.

October 4, 2015 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

No militants at MSF hospital in Kunduz during US strike

Press TV – October 4, 2015

Doctors Without Borders has dismissed claims that members of the Taliban militant group were firing against Afghan and US forces from the clinic run by the charity group in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, before a US airstrike on the medical facility.

The group, known by its French acronym as the MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres), in a statement issued on Sunday rejected the claim about the presence of the militants at its facility, saying, “The gates of the hospital compound were closed all night so no one that is not staff, a patient or a caretaker was inside the hospital when the bombing happened.”

The Afghan Defense Ministry earlier said Taliban militants had attacked the hospital and were using the building “as a human shield.”

The militants had entered the compound of the medical center and used “the buildings and the people inside as a shield” while firing on security forces, said Brigadier General Dawlat Waziri, the Defense Ministry’s deputy spokesman.

Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqqi, said 10 to 15 “terrorists” had been hiding in the clinic at the time of the US strike, adding, “All of the terrorists were killed but we also lost doctors.”

The US military said it conducted an airstrike “in the vicinity” of the hospital, as it targeted Taliban militants who were directly firing on US military personnel.

“US forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz city at 2.15 a.m. (local), Oct 3, against insurgents who were directly firing upon US service members advising and assisting Afghan Security Forces in the city of Kunduz. The strike was conducted in the vicinity of a Doctors Without Borders medical facility,” said General John F Campbell, the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan.

The MSF said in a statement that at 2:10 a.m. local time on Saturday (2040 GMT) its trauma center in Kunduz was hit several times. It added that the aerial assault continued for more than half an hour after US and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed.

According to the statement, the Saturday attack left 19 people dead and dozens more seriously injured.

The survivors of the US airstrike on the clinic say those patients unable to move were burned to death during the assault.

The MSF facility is the only one in the northeastern region of Afghanistan capable of taking care of major injuries.

According to the MSF, over 100 patients and their caregivers, as well as more than 80 international and local MSF staff were in the hospital when the airstrike took place.

On September 28, Taliban militants overran Afghanistan’s northern city of Kunduz, but were later forced to withdraw from much of the city in the face of a government counterattack. Sporadic clashes continue as Afghan troops struggle to clear remaining pockets of the militants.

Kunduz is strategic as it is located on a crossroad that connects key regions of the country. It is also along the country’s border with Tajikistan and could offer the militants the opportunity to establish a base in the country’s north.


Patients were burned to death in US airstrike on clinic in Kunduz, survivors say

Press TV – October 4, 2015

The survivors of a US airstrike on a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, say those patients unable to move were burned to death during the assault.

“Those people that could, had moved quickly to the building’s two bunkers to seek safety. But patients who were unable to escape burned to death as they lay in their beds,” recalled Heman Nagarathnam, the head of programs by the charity group, known by its French acronym, MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres).

It was also said that a patient was left in the operating room on the table “dead, in the middle of the destruction.”

“The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle round,” Nagarathnam said, adding, “There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. This happened again and again.”

The MSF said in a statement that at 2:10 a.m. local time on Saturday (2040 GMT) its trauma center in Kunduz was hit several times. It added that the aerial assault continued for more than half an hour after US and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed.

According to the statement, the Saturday attack left 19 people dead and dozens more seriously injured.

Lajos Zoltan Jecs, an MSF nurse and a survivor of the horrific bombardment, described the US airstrike as “absolutely terrifying.”

The nurse, who was inside the facility during the strike, said, “We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. 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,” Jecs added. … Full article

October 4, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Victims of Franco Dictatorship Call for Truth Commission

teleSUR | October 3, 2015

A group of victims of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco called Friday for the creation of a truth commission that would investigate the crimes of the dictatorship that ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.

Spain, which never fully investigated the era of dictatorship, is set to have legislative elections on December 20 and the Platform for Truth Commission, which brings together various victims groups, is asking for all political parties to support the creation of a truth commission during the next legislative period.

Jordi Gordon, spokesperson for the coalition, told AFP that the goal was to “establish a parliamentary commission of truth, to recognize victims of the Franco regime as such and establish the facts.”

“We are talking about 150,000 missing, at least. Then there are the 2,381 mass graves that have been located that have not yet been opened.”

Gordon said that this makes Spain the country with the most disappeared after Cambodia.

“The Franco regime wanted to get rid of the bodies, the documents and even remembrance,” he told the French news agency.

Franco consolidated his power when his forces of General Francisco Franco declared victory over Republican forces in the Spanish civil war in 1939.

In 2007 the government of then Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero approved the Law of Historic Memory that was meant to create an office for victims of the dictatorship but that office was gutted with the arrival of the People’s Party to power in 2011. The People’s Party is considered a descendent of the dictatorship.

The victims group is also calling for the Valle de los Caidos, a mausoleum built partially through the forced labor of Franco’s opponents, to be repurposed into a center to remember the era of the dictatorship instead of serving as a monument to Franco, who is buried there.

October 3, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

‘Inexcusable, possibly even criminal’: UN rights chief says Kunduz bombing may be war crime

RT | October 3, 2015

An air strike on a hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz that killed at least 19 people is “utterly tragic, inexcusable, and possibly even criminal,” said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, calling for a transparent investigation.

“This deeply shocking event should be promptly, thoroughly and independently investigated and the results should be made public,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in a statement on Saturday.

“The seriousness of the incident is underlined by the fact that, if established as deliberate in a court of law, an airstrike on a hospital may amount to a war crime.”

“International and Afghan military planners have an obligation to respect and protect civilians at all times, and medical facilities and personnel are the object of a special protection. These obligations apply no matter whose air force is involved, and irrespective of the location.”

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the bombing of its hospital full of staff and patients in a statement on Saturday.

“The bombing in Kunduz continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed by MSF that its hospital was struck. MSF urgently seeks clarity on exactly what took place and how this terrible event could have happened,” it said.

They added that the precise locations of its facilities had been communicated to all parties in the military conflict on multiple occasions, with the latest communication being on September 29.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) strongly condemned the violence against patients, medical workers and facilities, saying it was “deeply shocked,” in a statement on Saturday.

“This is an appalling tragedy. Such attacks against health workers and facilities undermine the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it,” said Jean-Nicolas Marti, head of the ICRC delegation in Afghanistan. “Neutral and impartial humanitarian assistance is crucial today in Afghanistan,” he added.

The ICRC called on all parties to ensure the safety of the civilian population, medical staff and facilities.

A hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz has been hit and partially destroyed in an “aerial attack” that killed at least 19 people in the early hours of Saturday. Among the victims were 12 Medecins Sans Frontieres staff and seven patients, including three children.

NATO coalition spokesman Colonel Brian Tribus said US forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz at 2:15am on Saturday. He admitted the strike might have “resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.”

The head of US-led forces in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, has apologized to Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, Reuters reported citing the Afghan president’s office.

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Saturday that Washington had launched an investigation in coordination with the Afghan government. The area around the hospital has been the scene of intense fighting between US-Afghan troops and Taliban fighters in recent days, he added.

October 3, 2015 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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