Terrorists, funsters and all the other nice people

[kladner]

In light of Bob's endorsed comment above, I will put this story on the MSF Hospital attack in this terrorism thread. Basically, I don't believe these BS excuses. Besides, how was it that they went about a lethal mission with malfunctioning systems? I don't believe that this was an accident.

How tech fails led to Air Force strike on MSF’s Kunduz hospital
Sensor and network failures put crosshairs on the wrong target.

On November 25, General John F. Campbell, the commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, announced the findings of an initial investigation into the air strike by an Air Force AC-130 gunship that hit a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) trauma center in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3. The strike—in which the AC-130 attacked using its onboard cannon, killing 30 patients and members of the MSF hospital staff and injuring another 34—lasted nearly a half-hour.


Campbell called the strike "a tragic, but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error." But among the secondary factors cited in the report, he noted, there were several contributing technical failures, including a networking failure that could have provided information that would have prevented the mistaken targeting of the hospital. Furthermore, information systems available to the command responsible for the aircraft failed to alert those on duty in the operations center that the target selected by the aircraft was on a no-strike list.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by kladner

I don't believe that this was an accident.

Can't speak to that.

But this LATimes article might relate.

[gd_barnes]

Originally Posted by xilman

+2 !!

[kladner]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Can't speak to that.

But this LATimes article might relate.

Another brick in the wall.

I can't present anything but opinion on the hospital attack. I just think the Rube Goldberg chain of alleged causes is a bit too involved.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kladner

I just think the Rube Goldberg chain of alleged causes is a bit too involved.

Have you ever looked into accident investigations, like the Tenerife airport disaster or all the factors that lead up to the Apollo 1 fire (like Gus Grissom's Mercury incident)?
Strange and improbable things can and do happen. Hanlon's razor and all.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Have you ever looked into accident investigations, like the Tenerife airport disaster or all the factors that lead up to the Apollo 1 fire (like Gus Grissom's Mercury incident)?
Strange and improbable things can and do happen. Hanlon's razor and all.

Or the Titanic?

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Have you ever looked into accident investigations, like the Tenerife airport disaster or all the factors that lead up to the Apollo 1 fire (like Gus Grissom's Mercury incident)?
Strange and improbable things can and do happen. Hanlon's razor and all.

In Kunduz, I strongly suspect, at best assumptions, that the "Government Work Principle" as in, "Close Enough for Government Work", was in play. "We were supposed to blow something up. We blew something up."

There are worse possibilities. From early on, it was said that Afghan forces did not like MSF because they would treat anyone, including Taliban wounded.

Then, there is the general history of US forces, especially in the air, of having a Wild West Shoot 'em Up attitude toward whatever, or whoever, is on the ground. They're all just T****-heads and Sand-n******, anyway.

EDIT: This page presents the MSF viewpoint.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by kladner

"We were supposed to blow something up. We blew something up."

This post is possibly irrelevant. But then again, maybe not...

Last night my girlfriend and I went to the drive in to see "Sicario". Good ratings, but I found it largely "USA good, Mexico bad". (As an aside, the Bajans in the other cars honked their horn in support of the killing of Mexicans early on in the movie, but then drove off when the thinking about justification got a little heavy.)

A couple of evenings earlier we watched "American Sniper". Again, good reviews. But again, almost entire "USA good, Middle East bad". Linda walked away half-way through in disgust.

Many years ago we saw "The Hurt Locker". Same thing...

My point is:

What very little of the mass media shows is a balanced perspective... Specifically, two main points:

1. If drugs weren't illegal, then there wouldn't be a profit motive.

1.2. If there wasn't a profit motive for illegal activity, then it wouldn't happen.

1.2.1. This probably would reduce the amount of drug-supply related deaths.

1.3. To be clear, I'm not saying that "hard" drugs should be encouraged. But almost without question marijuana is less harmful than, say, alcohol, to society as a whole.

1.4. It might make sense to spend the billions of dollars spent on the "drug war" on treatment and rehabilitation, rather than having a large percentage of the population who continue to use drugs to fund criminals.

2. If fossil fuels weren't so embedded in our economies, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much conflict in many oil-rich regions.

2.1. I am hopeful (perhaps naively) that this will actually be solved within our lifetimes.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

Indeed. So much for being "pro-life". They are anything but.

I believe that statistics back up the following claim:

Within the US over the past dozen years or so, domestic terrorists have taken
more lives than "outsiders". Yet it is only the latter that are the targets of hate.
Can you say "tribal mentality"????

The so-called Christians/Evangelicals/White Trash Supremicists/Rednecks.....
in this country do not aim their vitriol at domestic terrorists
because "they may be SOBs but they are OUR SOBs". As long as the
people committing the terrorism are seen as part of one's tribe or belonging
to the same ideology, it is "OK".

Indeed. This last statement/quote is also made very clear by the
"Black Lives Matter" movement. I strongly agree that Black people in the U.S.
are subjected to regular racism by the police. But they seem to focus on
a fairly small number of murders (and yes they are murders) by the police
while ignoring the fact that the VAST majority of Black homicides are committed
by other Black people. This is another example of "tribal mentality, US vs. THEM".
Consider for example, the 9 yr. old who was gunned down in Chicago. Where
is the Black outrage over that incident?

And yes, I count the police among domestic terrorists.

I think anthropologists agree that much of current human behavior is driven by
tribal mentality that we inherited from our (more) primitive ancestors. Which is
not to claim that we ourselves are not primitive.

See also:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double...terrorism.html

and

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a..._carolina.html

[ewmayer]

The First French Massacre | Eric Margolis

Last week’s massacre in Paris was not, as almost every writer mistakenly claimed, the worst atrocity in the City Of Light since World War II.

As the renowned Mideast expert Robert Fisk quickly pointed out, an even worse atrocity occurred in Paris 54 years ago, on 17 October, 1961.

Paris chief Maurice Papon, a former Vichy official, who had sent over 1,000 Jews to their deaths during the war, unleashed his brutal riot squads on 30,000 Arab demonstrators calling for the independence of Algeria from French colonial rule. In an orgy of killing, some 200 Algerians were killed. Many were beaten senseless, then thrown from the Pont St. Michel bridge into the Seine River. 11,000 Algerians were arrested and cast into internment camps or a sports stadium.

I was in Paris when this mass killings occurred. Six months later, I was again visiting Paris when four retired French generals tried to stage a coup d’etat against the government of President Charles de Gaulle and Prime Minister Michel Debré which planned to grant Algeria independence after 132 years of French colonial rule.

And here is an 11/23/2015 interview with Margolis on the Scott Horton radio show (h/t NC reader 'Pavel').

[kladner]

Radical Christianity.