Overnight, Medecins Sans Frontiers, or the "Doctors without Borders" medical group which suffered a tremendous loss of life at the hands of US bombardment this past Saturday, stepped up its criticism of what it has previously called a US "war crime."
As Reuters reports [9], earlier today it called for an independent international fact-finding commission to be established to investigate the U.S. bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which it deems a war crime, and which it would use to decide whether or not to file criminal charges, although it was unclear against whom precisely: perhaps 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama?
Why independent: because as MSF said "we cannot rely on internal investigations by U.S, NATO and Afghan forces."
Instead, the medical charity said that the commission, which can be set up at the request of a single state under the Geneva Convention, would gather facts and evidence from the United States, NATO and Afghanistan. MSF said it sent a letter on Tuesday to the 76 countries who signed up to the additional protocol of the Geneva Convention that set up the standing commission in 1991.
There is one problem: neither the United States nor Afghanistan are signatories and Francoise Saulnier, MSF lead counsel MSF, said that the consent of the states involved is necessary.
Good luck getting it.
Assuming the US does "agree" to comply with this fact-finding mission, we expect the full data dump - after all the necessary scrubbing of the evidence of course - to take place, some time in 2019.
For now, however, the MSF is not backing down: "If we let this go, we are basically giving a blank check to any countries at war," MSF International President Joanne Liu told a news briefing in Geneva. "There is no commitment to an independent investigation yet."
MSF is in talks with Switzerland about convoking the international commission of independent experts.
"Today we say enough, even war has rules," Liu said.
Again, good luck with all of that.
Then again, none other than US persona non grata #1 has provided a quick and easy solution:
AC-130 warplanes record the gunner's video and audio. It's time to release the tapes to an #IndependentInvestigation [10]. pic.twitter.com/jtFyVCJ7Uw [11]
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 7, 2015 [12]
Yes, quick and easy, unless it is mysteriously revealed that all the AC-130 audio and video record is stored on the clintonemail.com server. We all know what happens then.