U.S. warplanes destroyed a Doctors Without Borders clinic in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3, 2015, four days before the fourteenth anniversary of the U.S. attack on that country.  It always takes Pentagon officials a while, two days in this case, to acknowledge their negligent homicides.  Reports usually come from the place attacked, Pentagon spokespersons won't confirm or deny the veracity, and finally, it turns out that when civilians are slaughtered by U.S. ordinance, survivors and investigators arriving on site soon after don't invent stories about corpses of women and children.
     In Kunduz, a city recently attacked by Taliban forces and fought over by the U.S.-backed Afghan Army, the Doctors Without Borders clinic was a refuge for war weary injured people.  The organization's policy that no weapons are allowed in their facilities suggests that the Afghan forces who requested the U.S. airstrike were lying or mistaken when they said Taliban fire was coming from or near the clinic.  Doctors Without Borders lost ten personnel in the attack.  Twelve others died, women and children mostly; six civilians, according to one witness, were burned in their hospital beds.
     It's a war crime, Doctors Without Borders declares, and they're right, but then, first world powers commit war crimes and get away with them year after year.
     Pentagon officials always shuffle their papers when U.S. forces commit atrocities.  Today, a general assured us they will conduct a thorough investigation.  I always feel comforted at the thought of someone committing manslaughter and being allowed to investigate himself.
     If I sound pissed off, I'm not sorry.  I decided years ago I'm utterly opposed to the glibly used term collateral damage.  The same things get said every time: "We regret that..."  "The Taliban [or Hamas, or insert whatever enemy] conducts their operations in urban areas, near civilians, and unfortunately, accidents happen."
     I know the U.S. has come a long way from Curtis LeMay and Robert McNamara, indiscriminately blowing up thousands upon thousands of civilians, deliberately and mathematically.  Still, trying to solve war issues with air power, the Obama Remote Push Button Doctrine, leads to the same LeMay-like callousness, if on a smaller scale.  On that small scale, though, imagine being injured in a war-torn city in a raped country, lying on your hospital bed, and then getting shot at by an AC-130 gunship making regular passes for about an hour, targeting specifically the building you're stuck in, unable to rise, due to previous wounds, from the bed that will consume you in flames.  It astonishes me that there are people in our government, in our society, in our world at large, who never think about this kind of thing, who never question generals and politicians conducting this diseased and endless war most popular with those selling weapons, like Pentagon arms dealers.
     In another war, the Obama administration has sold ninety billion dollars' worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, providing also logistical support for the latter country's devastating war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, a country on the verge of mass famine and every bit as screwed up as Syria.           Obama expressed his frustration with mass shootings in America in the aftermath of the Oregon community college killings.  How does he feel about forces under his command killing children and women with far bigger guns than those used by the Oregon shooter?  At what point will he say, "Enough!"
     When will any of the motherfuckers who lead us, fourteen years away from 9/11 and the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan, have the guts to speak out against the inhumanity embraced by this country as it blindly seeks to avenge the inhumanity of 9/11?  It takes a hive mind of shit-for-brains Pentagon fools and their supporters in Washington to believe in a strategy more effective at creating enemies than stopping them.

                                                                             Vic Neptune