The destruction by US bombs of the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz – killing doctors, nurses and patients – comes as a stinging corrective to the media pretence that Russian bombs are somehow uniquely evil and destructive. The West has inflicted far more damage in recent years. But the Russians also showed just how ruthless they can be in their brutal suppression of the legitimate desire for national independence of the Chechen people. It is the Americans who today expose most starkly the evils of attempting to solve complex political questions by bombs.
Kunduz is ethnically Uzbek. I have written of it as the place where Alexander Burnes met the fierce Uzbek chief Murad Beg. Burnes was disguised as an Armenian, and would very probably had been killed if his disguise had been penetrated. Today it is very much the territory of an equally fierce Uzbek warlord, General Dostum, the narcotics kingpin, murderer and serial war criminal who has for decades been a key CIA asset and is now Vice President of Afghanistan. That Dostum can lose Kunduz to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, even temporarily, shows how weak the central authority still is. The decade long official western occupation has brought no significant progress, at a cost of billions in money and the waste of many young lives: except progress in achieving a 1200% increase in heroin production.
How could they not have known it was MSF, when MSF had given the coordinates, and it was the only operating hospital in Kunduz?
Mark Golding I take your points, but judges don’t simply roll over and accept what the prosecution tells them. They generally have some backbone and pride in their own independence.
“They generally have some backbone and pride in their own independence.”
While I don’t doubt some of them have real integrity they do not normaly make it to the top. You see, they cannot be bought. Whereas those like Lord Phillips (I love Qatar) can! 🙂
or even “normally”. 🙂
The wounded would be tying up resources and personnel as well as having an adverse psychological impact on the rest of the fighters. The cruel bastards planning and directing the war will not miss a trick in creating pain, destruction and deaths.
Read some of the US mortuary squads recollections of the war, and fact that they smelt of death resulting in none of the regulars were prepared to sit within an earshot of these, or associate with them.
KoWN
Surely an Islamic funeral, being the last thing they could have possibly have expected to encounter aboard a US ship, is the perfect disguise. It’s brilliant. With such tactics a giant statue of Margaret Thatcher, with a cherub-like Tony Blair looking up at her in adulation, could be floated up the Clyde for a surprise launch of the next NAW campaign. Seriously though alas even a military plane could not have penetrated the Pentagon to that depth, even if a large plane WAS allegedly seen in the vicinity, that was a deep-penetrating missile with it’s explosive payload disabled that actually hit.
Some amusing snippets cribbed from the entertaining WoS:
“Unionist zoomerati”
“Northern UKOKia”
Didn’t Benazir Bhutto confirm the death of OBL before 2007, shortly before she was killed ?
Check the link I have provided further up
Some people follow me around on the internet – and they really are not nice..they give all their venom to me…even threaten me with Violence…and most of them are just taking the piss – just having a laugh -O.K. Different sides of the Political Divide and Some of Them Try and Make out They are Jewish Defending? The Jewish State???
Oh come on…Most Jewish People are Really Nice…They wouldn’t do that…
I don’t try to Pretend that I am anything but the Person I am.
But some people on the internet Really Annoy me..I know I shouldn’t let them get under my skin..but some of these people are complete psychos – extremely lonely people..so this is one of my responses to one of my internet stalkers…
This is for robbersdog, cos he kind of got under my skin trying to criticise the fact that My adult Son Was Still Living at Home…running his own successful independant business…and that his girlfriend also lived here…and that she was pregnant and We are going to be Grandparents soon…
Well My Son’s Girlfriends Little Sisters are here too (just for the night)
And Our Daughter has just moved back home after 6 years away at University and she has brought her female cat…
Both our cats are Females…
So what is that…
Just My Lad and Me or Male…the rest of our house is gradually filling up with Girls.
I Like Girls..especially Female Puuussssy Cats
Not Really into Blokes..well not like that.
What Colour? Are The Cat’s Gay??
Not seen my daughter’s cat yet…she seems a bit shy…but I have told our cats she is family – and they seem ok…
I really do not like cat fights
Tony
And This One Straight To Janet Daley…I Really like some of the stuff she writes…and I have invited her come on – Meet Me, My Wife and Our Friends..And See…
Janet, My Friend’s Son is There in Calais. He Volunteered to Help. She slags him off all the time…Still Living at Home…I said You Should Be Proud of Him..What a Wonderful Thing To Do…(She says I am). What a nice boy…Have you got a Son?
4,000 people in Calais 4 Taps..and her kid helping as best he can.
That is Why Everyone Wants to Come To England.
Because Us English are The Nicest People in The World.
Tony
SomeStars, Relax a little bit, ease off and ride out the cross-winds.
This time of year when they’re widely available and cheap, gorge on some Kentish or other Victoria plums, they really do taste great. They’re always eaten by me with a sense of guilt, as it is said with good cause that smell and taste are closely wired to nostalgia in the brain. Such plums and like small dimpled damsons remind me of ‘spoolied’ fruit, the prize of daring boyhood raids, climbing walls, avoiding slavering howling dogs and irate fist-waving residents with large gardens where such fruits along with apples and gooseberries were annually let go to waste. If you have the motivation and a piece of ground plant some fruit trees and bushes, the least you can hope is that they’ll still be there and give pleasure, sustenance even, after you, me and all of us are no longer here.
Egypt comes out in support of Russia over Syria. Egypt says Russia’s intervention in Syria will counter terrorism.
They will be exposed by there own words and deeds, we are better off being an example by not doing the same. As most ordinary people are much more civilized and kind and caring.
I tell you, being among the ‘left’ has made me a bit of an ass hole.
I was going to start contributing/supporting to lenins tomb. But I don’t believe people who have been in it for so long can shake this corruption or self exultation and thus, it will always be a hostile environment and no real community spirit can grow in these places. There is always an owner, a leader, selling book’s or thinking a lot about themselves imo.
If someone want’s to see an example of giving up, of what I really think of my own views (that I actually hopped to be removed for here) see this..
I bet nobody here could do what i’m going to. Why? because your all too ‘important’. So I challenge people to show that your not and don’t think that of yourself.
Let’s see if action speaks. I bet it will, but i’ll not be sticking around to find out.
my own views (that I actually hopped to be removed from* here)
In My Hall I Have Two Letters in the Mass of Junk Mail From The NHS…
I haven’t opened either of them…
It is going to say something like this..We have had no contact from you in over 12 years..You have never phoned us up to ask for an appointment to see a Doctor..You did not respond to any of our invitations to test you..You just completely ignored us as if we weren’t there…
You Can’t Still Be Alive Now Can You???
Tick This Form To Indicate You are Not Dead.
Tony
This comment from SomeStars is very true –
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/10/corbyns-scottish-dilemma/#comment-555292
Tony M, sorry yes the way I expressed myself there was slightly confusing. I didn’t mean to say they were military planes that penetrated Pentagon air space. I meant to imply that if a simple passenger airliner could do it then any enemy of the United States could have painted its bombers in the colours of United Airlines and taken out the nerve centre of the mighty US military. But of course the notion that a highjacked airliner could have done it was just one of many crocks of shit we have been fed about that day.
Everyone remembers where they were on the morning of 9/11, I was in a huge outdoor complex of girly bars in Bangkok. Ostensibly there to watch the European football(!) I arrived to find every TV set ( and there were many) tuned to CNN. It was at 10 to 9 that CNN turned its programming over to live coverage of the events. (A slight mistake, the perps clearly intended it to switch over at 11 to 9.) Which means that the bar girls of Bangkok were better informed of what was going on over the skies of the US that day than the people in the Pentagon – I mean, there was still 50 minutes to go before the Pentagon was hit.
Intriguingly, Bangkok is the great world crossroads for spooks, vets, soldiers-of-fortune and all manger of shady characters from the dark side. I happened to be sitting next to one. An American who stared moodily into his beer and refused to even look at the stuff on screen. I mentioned it to him and he replied bitterly, without looking up, ‘They knew it was going to happen.’
For a few years after that I just thought he was a nutter, but I don’t think any American alive that day could have faked such ennui in the face of the unfolding events. I think he knew.
“I meant to imply that if a simple passenger airliner could do it then any enemy of the United States could have painted its bombers in the colours of United Airlines and taken out the nerve centre of the mighty US military. But of course the notion that a highjacked airliner could have done it was just one of many crocks of shit we have been fed about that day.”
– – –
What utter nonsense. In terms of identification of imminent threats, planes are not identified by their appearance to an observer looking up in the sky at a 900kph object flying at several thousand metres. Anyone heard of radar profiles? Anyone heard of flight path identification? Anyone heard of ID transponders?
Furthermore, the airspace around Washington is busy with a lot of air traffic that has many planes capable of reaching the Pentagon in less than 5 minutes from the nearest international airport (40km). That’s not much time to identify a threat, contemplate the options, make a decision to shoot down a civilian airliner with hundreds of civilian passengers on board and then execute it. I doubt that there are many cold-blooded military types who have the nerve to ruin their own careers by giving a shootdown order that guarantees massive casualties in order to avoid an unquantified potential catastrophe.
Ken Rothstein (Executive Director (soros) HRW) tells us, but “Assad has been barrel bombing hospitals for years now” !!
Its just uncanny the way the devils unleash a mass apologist cacophony (and nary an email exchanged), I suspect its some kind of as yet unfathomed satanic sync. Perhaps Kempe can (kindly) elucidate!!?
After listening to this mornings’ BBC R4 output, including the paper review, they somehow missed these pages in the Sunday Fail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3259125/MAIL-SUNDAY-COMMENT-Lies-torture-fight-Iraq-truth.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258996/They-don-t-want-sun-Shaker-Aamer-Briton-held-Guantanamo-Bay-gives-searing-account-14-year-ordeal.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3259059/How-UK-knew-evidence-obtained-torture-Shaker-Aamer-s-dramatic-police-statement-reveals-Britain-known-chilling-methods.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258997/The-final-barbarity-SHAKER-AAMER-Guantanamo-Briton-held-14-years-without-trial-gives-account-release-order.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3259088/Beatings-Bagram-hell-Gitmo-Shaker-Aamer-reveals-interrogated-British-agent-called-John-describes-process-force-feeding.html
SomeStars
“I tell you, being among the ‘left’ has made me a bit of an ass hole.
I was going to start contributing/supporting to lenins tomb…”
Best to avoid that arse hole of the left, Richard Seymour, Ishmael. He recently said of Falklands veteran, Simon Weston, who suffered severe and disfiguring burns to 46% of his body,
“Seriously. Who gives a shit what Simon Weston thinks about anything? If he knew anything, he’d still have his face.”Â
Nice.
Hi Craig.
From the outset of my contributing to this space I have always argues that speculation is the first tool of the truthseeker. Obviously we don’t know facts about world events, sitting at our computers in leafy Birmingham etc. But one thing has always been obvious, that the powers that be are prepared to a lot further down the road of criminality than our own imaginations will normally take us.
Over the years,the cautious use of untested speculation, combined with a few anchor points supplied by whistleblowers like yourself, has harvested an understanding of the extraordinary deviousness and criminality of our leaders. So why shouldn’t Peter Beswick speculate that the US may not have told you all the truth? Maybe this questioning of everything will open up a new seam of hitherto undiscovered seediness in the strata of the war on terror.
You often cling to FCO dogma when it is obvious to all around you that the dogma is false. One of the most obvious cases of this is your view on Russia in Syria and yet just the other day you sided with the Iranian view at the UN. You say you are not crazy. But the leaders of USUKIS are crazy and we have to get ahead of their craziness in order to pre-empt their suicidal vanity. after all nutters do daft things when they get hold of guns.
You have claimed in the past, and Fedup recently repeated it, that it was the CIA that toppled Mursi. totally the opposite in my opinion. The thought =police Muslim Brotherhood fostered by USUKIS as a new kind of dictatorship for the MUslims, one which will not stand in the way of global capitalist market expansion like old-fashioned dictators, had been shoe-horned in to Egypt with a licence to spy on its citizens. Saudi Arabia realised that this new system exposed the weaknesses of the ruling classes, the army and political elite toscrutiny by religious hotheads. Much too close to their own territory for comfort. So they squashed it dead.
USUKIS are trying to impose a thought-crime Islam on Syria. Real Muslims won’t have it. We have a direct connection to our Creator through our prayers and we don’t need government questioning our inner beliefs. 2 rakats of prayer to the Knower of the Seen and Unseen who knows all the circumstances of our lives is a lot more use than being judged by a mad mullah who has seen a video clip of you browsing naked sex romps.
Does the mad mullah know how many years you had to turn a blind eye to the adulterous goings on in your family and society, did they see the sexual abuse you might have endured as a child or the sexual exploitation all around you of wealthy people of the poor.The mad mullahs are going to judge you by the second’s evidence they possess. God judges you from complete omniscience. This is why photos are not allowed in Islam, they don’t show the whole picture.
As to Dostum, if he was a CIA asset, we should presume from that information that USUKIS policy in the war on terror is to use its proxies to round up and murder hundreds of thousands of its philosophical opponents. The conclusion I draw from that is that USUKIS are using Russia now as a proxy to murder the Al Qaida and Islamic State participants they, USUKIS, have gathered in Syria and Iraq. Why does Peter Beswick question that Dostum was a CIA asset? perhaps because he does not want us to come to the logical conclusion that USUKIS is supporting the Syrian Revolution only in order to be able to gather its ideological opponents into a conveniently small space to quasi-Dostum genocide.
After all while there are some on this blog who like you like and respect Islam and Muslims, there are others who detest them for their faith while feigning unhappiness about their destruction.
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter.
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none-
And that was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.’
Yeah there’s no way they could have guessed the Pentagon would be a target, right?
Here’s the NBC Pentagon correspondent explaining live on air how a ‘security official’ warned him to stay away from the Outer ring because they would be next.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5BbNmID2sNM
Some of us remember what has been said in the past about MSF and in particular when it was helping Syrian refugees from Assad, so we now that the willingness to climb onto this bandwagon is motivated by something other than humanitarian concern for that fine organisation.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/10/edward-snowden-gets-sam-adams-award/comment-page-6/#comment-434103
To be fair, BBC’s Andrew Marr show did mention Shaker Amer, briefly
Tony (Opmoc), quite enjoy waking up to your midnight diary; filled with love and humanity. You deserve your special place here.
Good alternative to the morning ‘news’, bound to be depressing.
Putin will lose support in Russia over ever more conflict. People the world over are totally sick of this. It just makes people annoyed, sick and angry. Trade and give aid do not invade. It is beyond comprehension. Are they trying to start WW3 with their endless conflict and bickering. Lave the people alone and help them build up their lives. Promote universal suffrage so people can make some sort of choice. Sort out Israel.
Where is the Chilcot verdict?
Andrew Marr show paper review mentioned the UK had obviously been intervening in Syrian war “on the wrong side”