3 ms·
They don't really feel the blowback of a PR disaster when 1. most are uninformed, and 2. of the few informed there are enough people like you who will cover for
by sooheon 11y ago
They don't really feel the blowback of a PR disaster when 1. most are uninformed, and 2. of the few informed there are enough people like you who will cover for them and give them benefit of the doubt. If a hospital on US territory is bombed, it would be out of the question whether it was simply an oopsie. But if in the carriage of justice and liberty some humanitarian workers find themselves collaterally damaged, it was a "terrible mistake", which the men with grave furrowed brows, clean suits, and heavy burdens to bear no doubt weighed against imminent national security concerns.
- jacobolus 11y agoI’m certainly not “covering for them”. The bombing of the hospital is a violation of international law, and whoever made the call to bomb it should be court-martialed and held accountable. On the other hand I don’t think it is reasonable to presume that the hospital was targeted deliberately by someone in the US military without further knowledge of what happened. US military leaders aren’t all sadistic cartoon villains sitting around twirling their mustachios and cackling about civilian deaths. If it is true that some of our “allies” on the ground in Afghanistan directed the US military to bomb that location, as was reported somewhere I read, then that is no excuse for such a colossal fuckup – especially considering that the MSF had previously told all sides the hospital’s coordinates – and whoever in the US military took that information at face value should take proper responsibility, and whoever directed them should also be dealt with. If instead it was, as themgt speculates, a deliberate choice by someone in the American military to target the building with full knowledge that it is a hospital, then that person should be tried for war crimes.