October 3rd, 2015: A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

As Halloween approaches, it seems like only yesterday that October reared it's head around the corner and was upon us. Indeed, few can forget the horrific event that rang in the new month: the mass murder of 9 innocent people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. This senseless act sent shock waves across the nation, with thousands mourning and President Barack Obama himself addressing the country shortly afterwards. In his speech, he offered condolences to the families affected, praise for the emergency service personnel acting on the scene, and most notably vitriol for what he termed our "inaction" in the face of gun violence (as opposed to violence in general). "Somehow, this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We've become numb to this," he lamented, before pronouncing judgment on the American people, like an indignant Old Testament prophet: "This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those who lose their loved ones because of our inaction." Unsurprisingly, the president's display of opprobrium proved to be very controversial, with some arguing that he was exploiting the Oregon shooting to push an anti-gun agenda, while others commended him for taking a stand against the gun lobby and pushing for "common sense" gun legislation. The reaction of all parties involved would be very different, however, when another massacre occurred just two days later, albeit under very different circumstances.

On October 3rd, under cover of darkness, a low-flying, heavily-armed AC-130 gunship made it's way towards Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz Province and the fifth largest city in Afghanistan. The previous month, the city had fallen to the Taliban, marking the group's first successful seizure of a major population center since a U.S.-led coalition invaded the country in 2001 and turning the area into a heated battleground between Taliban fighters and American and Afghan government forces. It was against this bloody backdrop that the gunship was deployed, and before the night was over, it would contribute most indelibly to the ongoing carnage. As the plane lumbered across the Afghan sky, the crew, taking a closer look at their orders, phoned their superiors. Something didn't seem right: their target, if they understood their orders correctly, was a hospital, specifically the Medecins Sans Frontieres (known in the English-speaking world as the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity Doctors Without Borders) hospital that was renowned in the area for treating wounded soldiers and civilians alike. The crew questioned the legality of their mission, but judging by what followed, the brass assuaged their doubts and gave them the go.

One can only assume the majority of the hospital's patients, variously afflicted by bullets, ordinance and disease, had been asleep for some time when the first bombs were dropped in the wee hours of the morning. And 15 minutes later, another round of bombs was dropped. And another 15 minutes later, another. Several patients burned to death as they lay in their beds, incinerated by their purported liberators. Another was lying on an operating table ready to undergo examination by hospital staff when the bombing started. Fearing for their lives, the doctors fled, leaving the patient to die as he waited to be operated on. Half an hour into this airborne onslaught, the staff finally figured out what was happening and immediately phoned American and Afghan authorities, urging them to tell the plane to stand down. The end result of the phone exchange can be seen in a shocking statement provided by MSF spokeswoman Dalila Mahdawi: "The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed."  When the bombs finally stopped falling after an hour, 30 people, including 10 patients, 13 MSF staff, and 7 unidentified individuals, were dead, dozens more wounded, and the only health facility of it's caliber in the region was destroyed, denying such life-saving services as high-quality surgeries, post-operative and rehabilitation care to countless Afghans for the foreseeable future.

Understandably, the hospital's parent organization (as well as a great many others) was outraged. MSF General Director Christopher Stokes referred to the air strike as a "war crime" and demanded that an independent, third-party investigation look into the incident and hold the perpetrators responsible. Others chimed in to condemn the bombing, with anti-war group Voices For Creative Nonviolence calling upon activists in the U.S. and around the world to congregate in front of hospitals with signs and banners that read "Dropping bombs here would be a war crime!" and "The same is true in Afghanistan," and oddball Republican-turned-Democratic candidate Lincoln Chafee obliquely referencing it at the Democratic debate on CNN, in an attempt to appeal to liberals' traditional noninterventionist leanings (going by his recent exit from the race, it didn't do him much good). Indeed, the act was so blatantly egregious that even President Obama issued what The New York Times dubbed a "rare" apology to MSF (how merciful of him!). It wasn't, however, a televised statement like the self-righteous one in which he once again wagged that finger of his at Americans for being too stupid to agree with him he gave on national television a couple days before, but, tellingly, a short, meek statement issued by his Press Secretary and published on the White House website, where only people who were informed and interested in the subject matter would go out of their way to find it. Prefacing his apology with a disclaimer that he spoke "On behalf of the American people," (were these the same American people he chided for among their many sins, "inaction" just two days before?), he extended his "deepest condolences" to everyone killed and injured in the air strike. He (and he added, his wife Michelle too, for good measure) offered their "thoughts and prayers" to all civilians involved, as well as to their family members. He even promised to "work closely with President Ghani, the Afghan government, and our international partners" to continue their war against the remnants of the Taliban. But he flatly refused to consent to an independent investigation of the Kunduz air strike, insisting that a joint military, NATO and the Afghan team remain at the lead of any inquiries into the bombing. If the arrival of the team at the compound where the hospital was located, in which the team arrived on the grounds in a tank and almost surely destroyed potential evidence in the case, is any indication, it will be a whitewash.

There will be no accountability. On the off-chance that there is, the crew of the gunship will be held entirely responsible, court martialed, and maybe even executed, while the higher-ups, however high it goes up, will get off-scotch free. It won't matter that they were just following orders, that they had doubts but their superiors insisted that they bomb the hospital anymore than it mattered that Second Lieutenant and convicted war criminal William Calley was, as he maintains to this day, ordered by his commander to slaughter 347 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. They will be scapegoats, as instrumental in carrying out this atrocity as they were; a tainted offering to absolve their co-conspirators of their sins. But it will be a long time before it is undeniably established that a sin has indeed been committed. Not by some shadowy, cigar-smoking men huddled around a table in a darkly-lit room, but by the people we have elected to represent us and the people we pay to fight overseas for us. By the people who elected and paid these people. By us.

At this point, I wouldn't blame you for thinking I had descended into a most morbid form of hysteria. Who knows, maybe I have. But say what you will, considering everything you have learned all your life about living in a democratic society where the government represents you, where it cannot take action without the demonstrated support of the people, and where it's armed officers, agents, and enforcers are paid for by your taxes, whose actions do you really feel responsible for: Christopher Harper-Mercer's or the crew on that gunship's? Whose salary did you pay? And who did you vote to send to the site of their respective massacres? If you answered with the former, please forward me your address so I can direct a SWAT team to it. 

It is for precisely this reason that October 3rd, 2015 will forever more live in infamy. It is not only a day in which the premeditated destruction of a facility that aimed to heal the sick and aid the weak and the gruesome, state-sanctioned murder of innocent lives occurred, but it is also a day in which the perpetrator, after vowing to crusade against violence days before, shrugged their shoulders, essentially said "sorry, sh-t happens", and moved on. A day in which America announced that it felt more responsible for the acts of a lone wolf gunman than for the acts of it's legally constituted armed forces. A day in which "inaction" was held to be worse than immoral actions. A day in which we abdicated our responsibility. A day in which we abdicated our humanity.