Assassin Obama: U.S. Gunship Killed Kunduz Hospital Staff as They Fled

Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) yesterday released its internal document reviewing the Oct. 3 “relentless and brutal aerial attack by U.S. forces” on its 140-bed Kunduz Trauma Center (KTC) in Afghanistan.  MSF’s International President, Dr. Joanne Liu, revealed in her letter introducing the report, the horrifying fact that “some patients burned in their beds, medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs, and others were shot by the circling AC-130 gunships while fleeing the burning building.“  [emphasis added]

Dr. Liu points out that although the MSF launched a call for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact Finding Commission (IHFFC), this has yet to begin, because the U.S. and Afghanistan have not given their consent.  Yesterday, she added, “we are handing over this internal report to both the public and the IHFFC.” Today, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said the Defense Department has received the MSF’s report, but is continuing its own investigation, and had no response to the report.

MSF reviews the details of each day leading up to the Oct. 3 attack, including the Oct. 1 phone call it received  from a U.S. official in Washington, asking whether the hospital “or any other of MSF’s locations had a large number of Taliban ‘holed up.'” MSF replied that the staff was working at full capacity, and that the hospital was full of patients including wounded Taliban combatants.  In its conclusions, MSF states that its rules in the hospital “were implemented and respected, including the ‘no weapons’ policy,” and that MSF was in “full control of the hospital at the time of the airstrikes…. There were no armed combatants within the hospital compound, that there was no fighting from, or in, the direct vicinity of the KTC at the time of the airstrikes.”

Despite this, “a series of multiple, precise and sustained airstrikes targeted the main hospital building, leaving the rest of the buildings in the MSF compound comparatively untouched.” The first room to be hit was the ICU; airstrikes then continued from the east to the west end of the main hospital building, destroying the ICU, archive, laboratory, ER, x-ray, outpatient department, mental health and physiotherapy departments, as well as all operating theaters.  The attack “destroyed our ability to treat patients at a time of their greatest need…A functioning hospital caring for patients cannot simply lose its protected status and be attacked,” Dr. Liu said.