05/04/16 – Phyllis Bennis – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lou Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton, at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our statist enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
Capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audiobook.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show, Scott Horton Show, I'm him.
And sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
And introducing Phyllis Bennis from Foreign Policy in Focus, the Institute for Policy Studies.
And this one is called The Pentagon Shouldn't Get to Absolve Itself for Bombing a Hospital.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, she's the author of the brand new book, Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror, a Primer.
Welcome back to the show, Phyllis, how are you?
Good, great to be with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And, yeah, very important article here.
So before we get to the investigation and the self-acquittal here, it's the American way, remind us about this attack on the Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last October.
Well, this was an attack in the middle of the night on a hospital that was serving about 300,000 people in northern Afghanistan, the only freely available, free trauma hospital available in that part of the country.
It was well known to military officials.
The coordinates of it to show exactly where it is had been provided every week since its existence to the U.S. authorities.
The military knew exactly where it was.
They had all that information.
There was no question about a new hospital or anything like that.
This was a place that had been in place for years and was a very important institution to save lives, not only in terms of the war, not only in terms of war wounded on all sides, but for ordinary civilians who were trying to live in war-torn Afghanistan.
The attack came in the middle of the night.
The bombing went on for about an hour.
And throughout that time, the staff from the Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders Hospital were desperately calling in to the U.S. officials, to the liaison officers, saying, stop the bombing, stop the bombing, you're hitting a hospital, you're hitting a hospital.
And it took almost an hour for that set of calls that were going on over and over again to be taken seriously.
They somehow couldn't independently confirm it.
They didn't know if it was really true.
They didn't know who was calling them.
And the bombing continued and the bombing continued.
And at the end of the day, 42 civilians were killed.
I think the breakdown was 23 were patients, 14 were doctors and other medical staff, and four were caretakers of the grounds.
And dozens more were injured.
So it was – and the hospital, of course, was completely destroyed.
It was a horrific – it was a horrific crime.
Okay.
Now, well, jeez, there's a lot there.
I guess first of all, and this goes to the kind of self-investigation here, is there any way to really know or have they said credibly one way or the other whether the pilot of the gunship knew personally whether it was a hospital that he was firing on?
Because you know that – I mean, what would be the obvious thing to do would just be to hide behind, well, yeah, everybody in the entire military except the guy shooting knew.
But, huh, oops, nobody told them.
No, they're claiming – and actually there's no reason to think that these factual things are not true.
They're claiming that not only the pilot didn't know, there's a whole series of things that went wrong.
And I think it's probably true that systems didn't work, people made mistakes.
All of that is true.
The pilot thought that he was firing on a compound that was about a kilometer away where there had been reports of Taliban – the Taliban having taken over the compound.
This is in the context of the Taliban taking over parts of the city of Kunduz around that time.
And their equipment – they had – the plane had left quickly and they had not yet loaded the computerized information showing exactly what the coordinates were of the supposed target.
And instead they were relying on visual sightings and that was why they hit the hospital.
All of that may well be true.
We don't really know because almost all of the 3,000-page investigation report is classified.
It's all been redacted virtually.
So there's very little available.
But even assuming all of that is true, that doesn't change the fact that this is a war crime.
The claim of the military – and nobody is claiming at this point that it was a deliberate effort to attack the hospital.
But the military's point is if it wasn't intentional, it's not a crime.
And that's despite the military knowing about it, despite the calls from the staff, all of that, that there was no crime.
Now the problem is that international law, the definition of these war crimes, does not work that way.
It's not what we would call in criminal law a specific intent crime.
You don't need the intention to commit the crime.
The Geneva Convention, that's Article 18 of the Geneva Convention, and it's very clear.
It says, quote, civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, etc., may in no circumstances be the object of attack.
Period.
Full stop.
It's not – you shouldn't intentionally attack them.
It's that in all circumstances, which means that even if it was negligence rather than deliberate, it's still a war crime.
By the way, does American policy officially reflect that and say you never, ever attack a hospital, at least on paper?
American policy, the military handbook says under virtually no circumstances, something like that.
It's a little bit vague.
It's not as absolute as the Geneva Convention.
But the U.S. is a signatory to the Geneva Convention, so it's obligated to abide by that.
It doesn't really matter what the language is of the military handbook.
The military handbook in many ways does not reflect international law.
That's one of them.
But this is straight-up definition of what are the Geneva Conventions, which goes to the question of how do you protect civilian populations in a war zone.
That's what we're talking about.
Just to make sure to cover the basis here, Phyllis, when the Geneva Convention is written like that, I'm fairly certain you would say that there's no question that it's very intentionally written like that.
If they wanted an accident to be a loophole, it would say so.
Right.
That's exactly right.
I think we should note there are some crimes.
For example, the crime of genocide requires not only the actions but the intentions.
It has to be acts that are carried out with the intention of destroying in whole or in part a population or a group based on race, religion, ethnicity, etc.
It's not just an attack.
It's an attack with a specific intent.
This crime, the violation of Article 18, does not have that specific intent.
So clearly if they had wanted to include it, they would have.
Okay.
Now here's the other thing, too, and I'm sorry.
I'm just going from memory here, but I believe that there were at least three or possibly even four or five different stories that the government put out as to why they attacked the hospital when they attacked it.
And it's just a rule of thumb.
This is not concrete.
But usually when the government puts out different stories and at least one or two of them are pretty incriminating, those seem to be the more credible ones.
Right.
So like in this case, they at one point said, well, there was a Pakistani spy in there we were trying to kill.
So at that point, I go, aha.
Now I don't necessarily believe that there was a spy in there, but I do believe them that they intentionally bombed the building when they go ahead and admit that they did so intentionally.
Yeah, I actually, ironically enough, in this case, I don't think that's as logical as the current situation.
Of course, the real problem is this is why we need an independent international investigation.
This is why the Pentagon investigating itself is not sufficient.
Absolutely not sufficient.
So we can, you and I can speculate over which is more likely.
There was another claim early on that the Taliban had taken over the hospital.
Now the explanation is that the Taliban had taken over this other compound and they thought they were attacking that compound when it was actually this compound.
All those things are perfectly reasonable to assume, but that doesn't mean that we should or could accept as legitimate this kind of an internal investigation, which were not even provided with the names of the people who were involved.
The 16 people were not given any information about how high up the chain of command it goes.
We do know pretty clearly from what has been leaked of the report that it does not include anybody from the planning side, anybody who created, let alone created the war in Afghanistan as a whole, which if you follow it up the chain of command, this really is an inevitable part of launching wars against a civilian population, which is what they're doing in the so-called global war on terror.
But I think that the bigger problem is we don't know exactly which version is true, but none of them provide a defense to a war crime.
If it was an accident that might affect sentencing, that's reasonable enough.
You don't give somebody the same sentence for being negligent as you do for a deliberate homicide, but that doesn't mean it's not a crime.
It doesn't mean it's not a crime, and that's what we're being told here in this incredible set of quotes from General John Campbell, the Army General who was the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, who used this really slippery language saying, The label war crimes is typically reserved for intentional acts, intentionally targeting civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects.
Well, the problem is, where are they getting that?
He's just making that up.
Intentionally has nothing to do with this.
The reality is in the United States, war crimes are virtually never charged against anybody in the U.S. military under any circumstances, not the bombing of wedding parties in Afghanistan, not for torture in Iraq.
War crimes are simply not used, but even from that, this notion that typically it's used for intentional acts, well, maybe so, but this wasn't an intentional act, you say, but it's still a war crime.
So that's the problem that we face here.
It's these definitions.
These generals can say whatever they want about, well, I don't think it's a war crime because it wasn't intentional, but that's not what the law says.
Well, and a couple of things there.
So, first of all, it seems like those different explanations that they've given to the media that, you know, as you say, you know, we can speculate which ones seem to fit and which ones don't, whatever.
But we can't know until we have an independent investigation.
It seems like the fact that they put out three or four or five different stories to the media would be, you know, would tend to indicate that it's that much more necessary that we have an independent investigation.
Since they made it clear pretty much from the very beginning that they weren't really interested in getting at the truth, but at protecting themselves.
And then I guess a follow up there would be, what does the U.S. law say is supposed to happen in a case like this?
If they bomb a wedding or if they bomb a hospital, they call it an accident.
Is this just standard operating procedure is you hire a general to investigate his buddy and then that's the end of that?
Or is there any other process for civilian review or Congress?
That's standard operating procedure.
And they're apparently allowed to get away with ending up with the with this long detailed report that we can't see.
That is all classified.
In other words, if there was to be a check and balance here, it would be the Congress holding hearings and all that kind of thing.
Like if there was such a thing as or appointing a special prosecutor or putting it into the civilian courts for a for a civilian prosecutor to take it up.
There's a bunch of different options.
You could also rely on the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, just for instance.
But none of that has ever been done in this country.
This is the standard operating procedure is for the Pentagon to investigate itself.
And we're supposed to be willing to accept that, you know, the president apologized.
That's on some frontier.
This was back in October, just a few weeks after the attack, apologized for it.
MSF noted the apology.
They did not accept the apology because they believed then, as they do now, that there must be an international independent investigation.
And they are still sticking to that.
There's too many unanswered questions.
And there's simply no way to reasonably rely on what exists so far.
Well, I guess that's, you know, sort of the silver lining on this is it wasn't just a hospital.
It was a Doctors Without Borders hospital.
So they've really angered a lot of people and all the, I guess, global NGOs, society and whatever.
Everybody who knows and cares about these people and who are involved in all this international law that you're talking about in other capacities.
So absolutely.
And the irony, of course, is that another Doctors Without Borders hospital has just been attacked this last week in Syria by, quote, the other side.
And we heard a great deal about that, as is appropriate.
That needs to be condemned as well.
But it's one of these things that somehow the U.S. expects its own population, the Congress, etc., the media, to accept the notion that our investigation of, our military's investigation of itself should be sufficient.
Where imagine what they would say if the Syrian government said next week that, oh, we made a mistake in bombing this hospital and we're going to investigate it.
Immediately the cry would go up that that's not acceptable.
There needs to be an investigation by outside forces, by an independent investigation, etc.
We don't hear that when it comes to the United States.
Well, it's amazing to, you know, Max Abrams, professor, I think, at Northwestern or Northeastern or something.
I'm sorry, I forget.
Self-appointed terrorism expert professor guy.
I was tweeting out this morning how I guess it was a different hospital, but it was another hospital in Aleppo that was attacked this time by CIA backed jihadists.
And so they're just rebels.
Any other time it would be a horrible terrorist war crime.
But in this case it's rebels doing their very best, which, you know, also included firing on a hospital a little bit here.
So that same American immunity applies to al-Qaeda now as long as they're on our side.
Exactly.
American exceptionalism once again.
The reality is the global war on terror is very much a global war on civilians.
And that's happening on all sides.
And because the U.S. is leading that war, we bear the brunt of the responsibility.
Well, yeah, I mean, and that's the real important point, right, is that the Taliban was defeated as a government in about a week and a half or two weeks or whatever it was back in the fall of 2001.
And since then, it's basically just a war against any civilians who resist, whether they actually have anything to do with the Taliban or the so-called Haqqani Network or not.
And if we look at that, what we're seeing is, you know, as you say, we've been at war with terrorism for 15 years.
Terrorism is doing just fine.
It's people who are not.
Yeah.
OK, now let's see.
There's one more thing I wanted to follow up on here was about the calls to the headquarters, as you spoke about at the beginning, that as soon as the attacks started and it was one of these where the C-130, I guess, is flying in circles and attacking every 15 minutes for a while, that kind of thing.
So they keep trying to call headquarters to call off the attack.
And I mean, I guess it was just my assumption or maybe I had read somewhere back then that, well, they just couldn't get into communication with the right people.
But it sounds like you're saying that wasn't it.
It was more like they wouldn't believe the people calling, screaming for help on the line.
It was a combination.
I don't think it was necessarily the individual on the phone didn't believe that the person talking to them, screaming at them, wasn't telling the truth.
It wasn't exactly that.
It was that they couldn't confirm where the firing was actually happening.
They needed to do a separate confirmation.
There was one report, which I don't know if this was the majority report of the full investigation report because, hello, it's still classified.
But there was one leak of something that one officer said later that there was still a report at that time that there might have been Taliban present in the hospital.
And therefore, they couldn't call off the strikes because there might be a damaging military effect of that.
So none of it makes any sense.
They were calling.
They were screaming for over an hour on the phone.
They got through to people.
It wasn't like they were getting a busy signal or something like that.
They did get through to people, but somehow it wasn't going through the bureaucracy, layers and layers of what turns out to be a lethal, deadly bureaucracy.
That, well, I'll put this on to the right people.
Hold on.
It's like, OK, and we're being killed in the meantime.
So none of that was taken nearly as seriously as it needed to be.
Yeah.
I could just see it like a scene out of Brazil where there's, oh, that's information retrieval.
This is information services and you just got to it's going to be that, you know, till the day after tomorrow before anybody starts calling the actual attack.
Exactly.
Exactly right.
Amazing.
All right.
Now, so then just to wrap up, who's doing something about this?
You've written a great article here.
Obviously, there are a lot of people at Doctors Without Borders and other places like that that agree with you.
But who's really pushing to get an independent investigation here?
What can people do to help?
We haven't heard much.
We haven't heard much from the Congress.
It is being taken up in the mainstream press.
The New York Times had a very good editorial about it, you know, saying that this investigation is not sufficient.
And also had an op ed from one of the top leaders of Médecins Sans Frontières.
We're seeing the same thing across Europe and in other places where MSF operates.
What we haven't seen yet is any indication from the Obama administration, from the White House, from the State Department, from the Congress to say this isn't good enough.
This isn't good enough.
They should start by opening up the report.
And then there should still be the demand for an independent international investigation.
Yeah.
You know, I have no idea how to accomplish this or anything.
But it occurs to me that you could even get some members of the war party on board for this and say, hey, listen, if we make terrible mistakes, like, you know, blowing up a hospital while we're saving mankind out there, then that can be bad PR for our mission.
And we're such a great democracy.
Ask Paul Wolfowitz.
He'll tell you how important the rule of law is and everything.
And we've got to make sure that we have accountability and transparency here for the better of the future of our mission conquering Central Asia.
It's true.
On the other hand, we have so many war parties, it's hard to know where to start.
Exactly.
That's true, too.
All right.
Well, listen, it's great work.
Very important work that you're doing, as always.
I really appreciate your time on the show, Phyllis.
Thank you, Scott.
All right.
So that is Phyllis Bennis.
Her new book is called Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror.
A primer.
Yeah.
Just when you thought you were over the last one, right?
She is the director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
And the piece is at FPIF.org.
The Pentagon shouldn't get to absolve itself for bombing a hospital.
We'll be running it on Antiwar.com tomorrow.
Thanks, y'all.
All right.
Thanks again, y'all.
Sign up for the podcast feed at ScottHorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow and help support at ScottHorton.org slash donate if you like supporting things.
Thanks.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
If you've got a band, a business, a cause or campaign and you need stickers to help promote, check out TheBumperSticker.com at TheBumperSticker.com.
They digitally print with solvent ink, so you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old style screen printing.
I'm sure glad I sold TheBumperSticker.com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it.
There are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me, too.
Let TheBumperSticker.com help you get the word out.
That's TheBumperSticker.com at TheBumperSticker.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.