The media are reporting that president Obama personally called the leaders of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to apologize for the bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. But MSF is saying that his apology is not enough and they are calling for an independent investigation into what they strongly feel is a war crime. The article looks into all the factors that make plausible the case that this was a war crime, because no warning was given of an impending attack and a hospital is considered a protected facility that warrants such an action.
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[UPDATE: Carson has now come out with an anecdote about how he once had a gun put in his ribs, presumably to demonstrate his coolness under threat. Not only does the story not reflect well on him (he told the gunman to aim at someone else), frankly it sounds bogus to me. I wonder if any reporter will try and track down the actual event.]

In an interview that Carson gave with Kai Ryssdal of the radio program Marketplace (you can read the transcript or listen to the full interview here) Carson revealed that he is an even bigger nonsense spouter than Donald Trump. He made grandiose claims for what he would do while speaking in only the vaguest generalities about how he would actually do them. He wants a balanced budget amendment. He says that you can get a balanced budget by having across the board cuts of 3% in government to ‘get rid of the fat’ (though if that is also applied to Social Security payments and Medicare that would be political dynamite, while if not, the cuts elsewhere would have to be much larger), lowering taxes to a flat value of about 15% (which everyone agrees would reduce revenues by at least 25%), while vastly increasing spending on the military (so that the US can achieve space and military domination).
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Fiorina continues to make the most outrageous claims about seeing an abortion video that have been debunked repeatedly by medical professionals who argue, point by point, that it shows a miscarriage, not an abortion. Furthermore, there is evidence that the film was not taken at a Planned Parenthood clinic but in a hospital and that we don’t know that it was even in the US or that the woman’s consent was obtained.
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The US and NATO commander in Afghanistan General John Campbell has now come out and said that the bombing of the hospital in Kunduz was a ‘mistake’ and that US forces were called in at the request of Afghan forces. But he also admitted that the strike had been approved after going through the US chain of command. He said that “Even though the Afghans request that support, it still has to go through a rigorous US procedure to enable fires to go on the ground. We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires,” which means that the special forces would have been involved in calling for the strike. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says that what the US has said so far amounts to an admission of a war crime.
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Like clockwork, following an atrocity like the bombing by the US of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, we see the five stages of public relations manipulation by the US government, aided by its media allies. The first is: We didn’t do it, it must have been someone else. Next we have: Well, let’s not jump to conclusions but wait and see for a full and thorough investigation that may take months or even years. The third is: We may have done it but we’ll have to look into what might have gone wrong. The fourth is: It looks like we did it but if we did it was justified because those devious enemies tricked us into doing it. The fifth is: Yes we did it but we didn’t mean to, it was an accident due to the ‘fog-of-war’ etc. and we will pay compensation to the victims (ignoring the fact that there was absolutely no fog involved).
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In a recent post, I said that I felt that the attention being given to an allegation involving British prime minister David Cameron engaging in a sex act with a dead pig while a student at Oxford University was excessive, given that he was a young man at the time and young people do stupid things. I suggested that we give people a pass for the things they did before the age of 25 and not hold it against them later in life.
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Bernie Sanders continues to draw huge crowds, the largest of any candidate in either party, the latest event being in Boston that had over 30,000 people attending inside the Convention Center with the overflow crowd watching on a TV screen in the cold, wet outdoors.
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