Not-for-profit medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), whose hospital in northern Afghan city of Kunduz was attacked by U.S. air force and resulted in loss of 22 lives, has said an apology from US President Barack Obama is not enough.
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The White House also said Obama told Liu that the USA could implement policy changes so similar tragedies will be less likely in the future.
“When we make a mistake, we are honest, own up to it and apologize”, Earnest said at his daily briefing. Currently, there are three investigations, one by the Defense Department, one by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and another by a joint United States-Afghan group.
MSF said statements from the Afghan and USA forces implied they worked together to deliberately target the hospital, which amounts to an admission of a war crime.
“It is unacceptable that the bombing of a hospital and the killing of staff and patients can be dismissed as collateral damage or brushed aside as a mistake”, Liu said at a news conference in Geneva. On Monday, Campbell said only that United States forces had responded to a request for support from Afghan forces.
“The president assured Dr. [Joanne] Liu that the Department of Defense investigation now underway would provide a transparent, thorough, and objective accounting of the facts and the circumstances of the incident”.
“It is just shocking that the USA government is standing before the world and saying, we have been accused of committing war crimes by this organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, Doctors Without Borders, and we will refuse to allow anybody other than ourselves to investigate ourselves”, Greenwald added later.
“If it’s necessary to hold individuals accountable, that will be done” in the aftermath of the attack that MSF has said continued for more than an hour in the early morning hours last Saturday, Earnest said.
“A hospital was mistakenly struck”, Campbell admitted. MSF says it is talking with Switzerland about mobilizing the 15-member commission of independent experts, Reuters reports.
The Pentagon initially attempted to shift responsibility onto the Afghan security forces, claiming that they requested the airstrike.
He insisted that “there is no evidence… has presented that this was anything other than a bad, tragic mistake”. The Conventions, whose roots date to 1864, lay out rules on the conduct of armed conflict notably over protecting noncombatants – including civilians, aid workers, medical personnel and prisoners of war.
The MSF described patients burning to death in their beds.
Deputy spokesman Zafar Hashemi said: “This could at times slow down the speed of our military operations as we put the utmost effort into not harming civilians”.
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On Wednesday, Doctors Without Borders called for an unprecedented independent investigation by the worldwide Humanitarian Fact Finding Commission, which has been around a quarter century, but never actually used.
