This Can't Be Happening!

Evidence continues to mount that the US committed a monstrous war crime in attacking and destroying a fully operational hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on the night of Oct. 3, killing at least 22 people including at least 12 members of the volunteer medical staff of Medicine Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the Swiss-based international aid organization that operated the hospital.

This even as the US desperately tries to bury the issue of its perfidy by offering “condolence payments” to victims of the attack, though without accepting blame beyond saying it was a “tragic mistake.”

The “mistake” claim looks increasingly shameless as it becomes clear that this was not, as the US corporate media continue to incorrectly report, a “bombing” gone wrong, but rather was a prolonged hour-long attack by an AC-130 gunship, the deadliest killing machine in the US Air Force’s weapons roster of airborne mayhem. The aircraft, equipped with the latest night-vision sighting equipment, reportedly made five 15-minute assaults on the hospital’s main building housing the emergency operating room and recovery rooms, firing its array of howitzer cannons, 30-millimeter machine canons and other heavy weapons whose standard ammunition includes both high-explosive tips and anti-personnel rounds designed to scatter death in a wide pattern.

This is, in other words, not a precision targeting weapon, but a weapons system designed to spread death over a wide swath.

It explains why the building itself was not leveled, the typical outcome when, for example, a drone fires Hellfire missiles at a building or a plane drops a bomb. Rather, the still standing hospital was deliberately set ablaze by incendiary weapons, and those people inside not incinerated were killed or grievously wounded by a shower of bullets and anti-personnel flechettes.

Horrific enough to attack a hospital, but to attack it with a weapons system designed to slaughter as many people as possible is almost beyond comprehension.

The hospital in Kunduz was a well-known and long-established institution with a distinctive shape operating in a city that until recently was under full government control. That the US/NATO command did not clearly know the function of that structure is inconceivable, despite US government efforts to claim that a specific provision of the hospital’s coordinates to US forces by Medicine Sans Frontieres days before the attack “must have” gotten waylaid somewhere along the way. (see aerial photo of the hospital in Kunduz).

The Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz is large and unique in shape, easily distinguished from the air, even at high altitude, giving the lie to official claims that the US attack was a “mistake” and not a war crime
 

Really? The best that Nobel Peace Laureate President Obama can do after the US bombs and destroys a hospital in Afghanistan, killing 22 people, including at least 12 volunteer doctors and medical staff from Doctors Without Borders, is to say, “We’re sorry”?

No wonder people around the globe hate the US.

A decent human being in the White House would be calling for an independent international investigation into the incident and would be insisting that heads would roll! After all, the initial reports out of the Pentagon were that the strike had been called in to protect threatened American troops — an action that would be a clear war crime since hospitals have special protected status under the internationally accepted laws of war. Only later did the Pentagon backpedal and claim that the strike was a “mistake” that had been called-in by Afghan government forces. But that alibi founders on reports from Doctors Without Borders that days before the assault on their facility in the Taliban-held city of Kunduz, their organization had provided the US with clear coordinates of the hospital, so as to avoid any such “accident.”

But hey, this is America. We don’t do justice. We don’t have to because, as “the exceptional nation,” we are always just in our actions. We kill and maim and then we say we’re sorry (but only if Westerners get killed and maimed as in this instance). And then we move on.

Hospitals? The US always claims it’s an accident, or “collateral damage,” when they get hit. It’s never a matter of deliberate targeting.

But people on the ground where the bombs and rockets fall know better: That the American military has been targeting hospitals and ambulances deliberately for decades. The US bombed hospitals in North Korea in the 1950s. And it bombed them in North Vietnam with a regularity that made a joke of claims to the contrary.

In fact, painting a red cross or a red crescent on the roof of a hospital in an area where the US is conducting one of its many illegal wars is simply an invitation to be bombed.

What's left of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz following an over hour-long bombing and gunship attack that killed 22, including 12 medical personnel and three already injured children
 

Editor’s Note:

This article from Ferguson In Paris, an anti-police brutality group in France, does not contain a byline. The reason for this is because members of that group say they must maintain anonymity as much as possible remain to avoid abusive retaliation from authorities and others in France. “We publish under the name of the organization because of fierce repression regarding activists dealing with police brutality,” explained a Ferguson In Paris member during a recent email exchange with ThisCan’tBeHappening.net. The claimed support by French government authorities and other for freedom of speech following the fatal shootings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine office last January 2015 apparently do not extend to French activists opposed to brutality by French police. (Ferguson In Paris, an organization that fights against police brutality and racism/discrimination in France, works in solidarity with anti-brutality groups in the United States.)
 

AN UGLY UNDERSIDE OF FRANCE: RAMPANT POLICE BRUTALITY
 

In 2005, the human rights monitoring organization Amnesty International published a report titled: “France: The search for justice.” That Amnesty report examined allegations of serious human rights violations by law enforcement officials across France between 1991 and 2005. Those human rights violations by law enforcers included unlawful killings, excessive use of force, torture, and other mistreatment. Racist abuse was reported in many cases examined by Amnesty and racist motivation appeared to be a factor in many more. As that report noted, the persistent targets of police abuse in France are “foreign nationals or French nationals of foreign origin.”

On the basis of the evidence examined, Amnesty International concluded that a pattern of de facto impunity existed with regard to police and other law enforcement officials in France. Failures by French officials “to address” police abuses have created a “climate of effective impunity for law enforcement officers,” the report stated.

That report identified a number of factors contributing to this impunity. Those factors included gaps or flaws in legislation; reluctance or failure of police, prosecutors and courts to thoroughly investigate and prosecute human rights violations involving law enforcement officials; and sentences which were not commensurate with the gravity of the crime. Like Ferguson and most other places in the United States, the Amnesty report stated that convictions of abusive police across France are “relatively rare, or when they occurred, sentences have mainly been nominal.”
French cops spray teargas directly into a protester's face during a demonstration against police abuse
 

 
 
Pray for the day
When the gun-god turns to salt
And melts away.
 
Grieve our helplessness
To change what we believe in.
 
I had a gun once
With a silver bullet,
A gold bullet,
A diamond bullet.
I loved my gun so much,
I loved the bullets.
 
I shot the silver bullet into a cloud
And it rained.
I shot the gold bullet into a dream
And it landed on my pillow.
I shot the diamond bullet at a star.
It circled the earth
And it came down
And told me stories.
 
But I wanted more from my gun and bullets.
 
I had one more bullet
That was made of clay.
I shot that bullet into the ocean.
It didn’t change a thing.
I threw away my gun.
I turned to the land of my home
And I walked
Toward the far horizon,
Grieving and praying.
 
 
—Gary Lindorff

Republican presidential aspirants Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum all describe themselves as devout Catholics and, like most Republican candidates, they argue that religion should play an expanded role in American politics and government. However, on matters related to global warming, Messrs. Bush and Rubio both agree with Mr. Santorum, stating that we should, “…leave science to the scientists.”
 
Fortunately for these Republican candidates, Jorge Bergoglio, a chemist from Argentina, has stepped forward to address the concerns of those who think that global warming issues should be only confined to scientists. Recently, Bergoglio, analyzed the available data and produced a most remarkable treatise titled “Care for Our Common Home.” His book is well worth reading.

Bergoglio has an interesting past. In 1929 his family fled fascism in Mussolini’s Italy and migrated to Argentina, where he was born in 1936. He is well credentialed. He attended Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles, a school of the Salesians of Don Bosco, in Ramos Mejía, Buenos Aires, and entered the technical school Escuela Técnica Industrial #27. After graduation he began work as a chemist at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory in Buenos Aries (to finance his education, he also worked as a bouncer in an Argentine bar). 
 
Thanks to a most magnificent, almost lyrical writing style Bergoglio’s book should be be easily understandable by the general public — and even by politicians. His words are firm. He resolutely reflects on the general state of our environment, and particularly on the contribution of modern society to environmental degradation. He writes:
 

Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths.” He continues, saying that society creates a  “… pollution that effects everyone, caused by transport, industrial fumes, substances which contribute to the acidification of soil and water, fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and agrotoxins in general. 
  

Seeing little hope in industrial technology as a solution, he states:
 

Technology, which linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create another.

As global warming melts Greenland’s massive ice cap, its surface exposes centuries of soot and ash, becoming ever darker and melting ever faster — just one of myriad vicious climate change circles.
  

The Los Angeles Times sent one of its managing editors to Cuba a few months ago, to report on the status of the society, culture, etc. Good that they sent a big gun, instead of just a run-of-the-mill reporter. Here are two of the stunning findings from this report. (brace yourself!):
 

If you travel to Cuba, be prepared for a squash fest. At every lunch and dinner, we were offered pumpkin soup or cooked butternut squash or squash stew. It was rarely bad but never great, which was true of much of the food we consumed.
 

Annnnnd. . .
 

Cuba doesn’t have the agriculture, the infrastructure or the economy to support anything resembling the flatbreads, house-cured pastrami and vinegared cauliflower that we’ve come to expect in Venice or Los Feliz or DTLA.
 

Well! That darn Cuba! Here the USA has reestablished relations, and Cuba does not even have the goddamned decency to offer squash stew that is “great.” Sheesh. Harrumph! How dare those tyrannized, dirt-poor people! Good thing the LAT sent one of its managing editors to get this scoop. I mean, think of how an inexperienced reporter might have handled the assignment!

XX

And then we have the vital, earth-shattering news that Cuba does not have the “agriculture, infrastructure, or economy” to produce the “flatbreads, house-cured pastrami, and vinegared cauliflower that we’ve come to expect in Venice, Los Feliz or DTLA” (the new “hipster” way of referring to downtown L.A..) Darn that Cuba again! Here Obama went to all that trouble to let American citizens haul their fat asses down there, and my God, those Cubans don’t have the courtesy to produce pastrami as good as Venice, Los Feliz, and “DTLA.” Unforgivable! Didn’t they know that U.S. citizens with big, rumbling guts and discriminating palates were coming? Thank God for this hard-hitting, incisive, pithy, empathetic, moving account of life in Cuba under Castro! Can a Pulitzer be far off?

A legal case, virtually unreported in the U.S., could very well unhinge a major component of this country’s surveillance system. In any case, it certainly challenges it.

Yves Bot, he Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (the European Union’s litigation arena) just published an “opinion” that the privacy and data sharing arrangements between the EU’s 28 countries and the United States are “invalid”, must be revised and cannot now be used to regulate data transfer.

This is to surveillance what an earthquake would be to a city: it wouldn’t halt surveillance but it would destroy one of its major components. While the EU court’s 15 justices have yet to issue their ruling on the opinion, they seldom deviate very much from their AG’s advice and, given that they published his opinion and circulated it to the media, it’s a good bet they are going to approve something close to it. They’ll make that ruling later this year.

Maximillian Schrems: taking on a giant!
 

But the opinion alone is undoubtedly sending shudders through the halls of the NSA which gets all kinds of data from cooperating big-data companies (like Facebook and Google) and steals data from the ones that don’t cooperate through a program called PRISM.

 
A political society endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.
                              - Pope Francis speaking to the US Congress
 
Pope Francis’ speech to the US Congress struck me as a message with strains long demanded in the corrupt halls of our government. It was a message that took me back 30 years to my travels in Central America during the Reagan years, which was a pivotal moment in modern US history for the rise of a money class and the problems of inequity we currently face.

Pope Francis arriving by Fiat and speaking in front of VP Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner

I was raised an atheist by a right-wing militarist. As a little boy, when my father worked in research for a pharmaceutical company in suburban New York, there came a time he aspired to enter the corporate end of the business. So I was sent to Sunday school for a brief period. There I learned that Jesus Christ was this cool guy in robes who loved people and was nice to them.

My father’s honeymoon with the corporate side of the company did not last long. I imagine it was a bitter affair, because soon enough he collected his wife and three sons and moved to a house in the truck farming area of south Dade County below Miami. I recall him saying he was going “bohemian.” He got a job lecturing in physiology at the University of Miami Medical School and he set up our rural property as an amateur nursery, where he worked a hobby of botany, treating seeds aimed at the creation of strange new versions of sub-tropical plants.

You might say dear old Dad was a bit eccentric. He had been a PT boat captain in the Solomon Islands, Peleliu and Okinawa for a couple years and, though it wasn’t an issue then, he must have had some variant of PTSD that contributed to his eccentricities. He and I fought most of our lives over politics, me taking a critical, leftist line, especially following my stint in Vietnam. Still, he was a complicated man and I recall him saying about me in public more than once, “Sometimes, at night, I wonder whether you might be right.” The one thing we saw absolutely eye-to-eye on was a disbelief in some kind of supernatural deity who knew or cared what we humans were thinking and doing. What he believed in was biology.

One of the things we regularly fought over was Ronald Reagan. “If I could I’d vote for him five more times,” he said at the end of Reagan’s second term. I once responded to him by saying, “When you were in your PT boat hiding in terror in the mangrove from the Japanese, some starlet was rubbing suntan oil on your hero Ronald Reagan’s ass beside a pool.” He grimaced and said, “You really know how to hurt a guy.”

In a recent interview on Progressive Radio Network’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” program, Temple Law Professor Marina Angel says her university’s president and board of trustees are deluding themselves if they think that by ignoring or denying the burgeoning scandal of celebrated Temple grad and (until recently) trustee Bill Cosby and his long history of drugging and then allegedly sexually assaulting young women, it will all go away. Rather, like the Penn State Sandusky scandal, she warns it will get worse, dragging the school down, and its dismissive leaders with it.

In the latest development, a prosecutor in neighboring Montgomery County, PA says she is considering whether to refile criminal sexual assault charges against Cosby, based on the release of his once-sealed deposition transcript in a civil suit brought by one of his victims, Andrea Constand, a Temple employee at the time. Constand’s criminal case, once dropped by a prior Montgomery County DA who felt he didn’t have enough solid evidence to convict, is still within the 12-year statute of limitations for the next four months, and Cosby’s deposition, now public, is devastating, as is the testimony of some 47 other women who have subsequently come forward with similar stories of being drugged and then molested, assaulted or raped by Cosby while rendered unconscious or semiconscious.

Temple law Prof. Marina Angel, Andrea Constand,Bill Cosby and Cosby lawyer and Temple Board Chair Patrick O'Connor
 

Temple’s problem, according to Prof. Angel, is that its current Board of Trustees Chair Patrick O’Conner was Cosby’s attorney and a Temple trustee during the Constand case, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed payment by Cosby. Since Constand had to sign a non-disclosure agreement as part of that settlement, and the Cosby deposition was sealed, nobody outside the case knew of Cosby’s admission under oath to providing knock-out drugs to the young women he was offering to “mentor,” and with whom he admitted having sex. But clearly O’Connor, as Cosby’s attorney at the time, knew exactly what Cosby had said. He also knew that before the case was settled out of court, 13 other women had offered to testify about similar alleged abuse by Cosby (no doubt a factor in Cosby’s decision to settle).

Angel says Cosby’s belated resignation from his trustee position is not enough. She further says O’Connor, partner in one of Philadelphia’s most powerful law firms, had a serious conflict of interest in serving as as a trustee of the university at the same time as he was representing fellow trustee Cosby in a case involving abuse of a junior level employee of the university (a violation not just of law but of Temple’s sexual abuse regulation). She says O’Connor should have either resigned his position or been forced out by the rest of the board. Instead the board later elevated him to chair of that body which runs the school — a position he still holds, and from which he still defends Cosby.

Hear the full interview, which aired last week on PRN.fm’s weekly program This Can’t Be Happening!

The United States of America ain’t what it used to be. The expansive, frontier energy of our past is a lost dream. Good fortune is assumed, taken for granted, leading to laziness and arrogance. Imperialism on the down-slope is not pretty. The long, festering list of shortcomings symbolized by the nation’s neglected infrastructure has a cost. For someone like Donald Trump, it’s an opportunity.

The rocket-like advance of technology dazzles us as it gnaws away at the dignity and integrity of our lives. Fear of the other and outsiders rules from the NSA down to local police departments; it’s a favored flogging topic for pandering politicians. Power is never static. The world created out of the ashes of World War Two — when the US assumed the mantle of top dog — is shifting before our eyes. People dream of getting it all back in the box. Formerly colonized nations now compete directly in a globalized capitalist market against former colonizers. Resentment from abuses of the past strain relations. This is especially true in the Middle East. Citizens flee for their lives into the perceived safety of Europe from the confusing wreckage that was once Syria. And let’s not forget Iraq and Afghanistan as they both try to sort out the aftermath of US intervention and occupation.

.
 

Russia, which exists not all that far away from Syria, has announced it’s sending troops and establishing a military base in Syria. President Barack Obama, whose nation is 12,000 miles away from Syria, is debating whether to talk with President Vladimir Putin about Syria when he comes to speak at the UN September 28th. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Putin views Mr. Obama as weak, and Mr. Obama views Mr. Putin as a thug.” Not a lot of rapport there. Donald Trump, on the other hand, said during the recent debate, “I would talk with (Putin) and I would get along with him.” He probably would.

Elton John, the gay British rock star, was recently scammed with a phony call from a putative Putin. Once it was clear the call was bogus, Putin said he’d be glad to chat with John, who said, “I’d love to sit down with him and talk to him. The world faces much bigger problems than gay people.”

We can only hope Mr. Obama shares Mr. John’s willingness and will schedule a long, no-nonsense and complicated conversation with Mr. Putin in New York. Talk is good. Mr. Obama doesn’t have to arm wrestle Mr. Putin — just talk with him directly and candidly about how to facilitate fixing the god-awful mess created in Syria, much of it the result of a vague but determined US policy of regime change ala Saddam and Gaddafi. The idea that our leaders cannot talk with leaders they disagree with and may even see as an “enemy” has become a major hurdle to sanity in the world. The Iran Deal is a rare exception. Likud Israel and Republican America would rather talk tough, posture in the mirror like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver and build more weapons — than actually enter a mature dialogue.