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    PoodletimeBrendan O'Connor
    4/15/16 9:29pm

    Error, my ass. They kept bombing that hospital for 30 minutes after calls came in letting them know they had the wrong target. The Air Force and the Army decided it was militarily important enough to get to whomever they thought was holed up there to kill dozens of doctors, families, and patients. A little honesty would go a long way in this case.

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      Lampost452Poodletime
      4/15/16 9:42pm

      That doesn’t really hold water though.

      Gunship sorties are both expensive and high profile. If the army wanted the taliban in the hospital dead, they would have just sent in a much cheaper and more discreet ground team via chopper; which also would have spared all the Doctors Without Borders personnel and other civilians. Think about it - there’s no way to cover up blasting the hospital away, since Doctors Without Borders and any other entity keeping track of who is there would obviously find out this had happened. Essentially, why would the Army make such a clumsy, high profile mistake to kill some guys when it has so many other low profile ways to do it?

      I think the old saw is, ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’. I think this is just a good old fashion military fuck up rather than anything nefarious. The *actual* nefarious shit is way more low key and hidden.

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      e.nonPoodletime
      4/15/16 9:43pm

      http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/sites/usa/file…

      it’s also worth noting that those attempting to flee while the attack was underway were targeted by an ac130 that was flying overhead...

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    MarkyDeSadeBrendan O'Connor
    4/15/16 10:40pm

    Our hapless military is creating generations of bin Ladens with its “drone warfare” program. It’s basically video game assassins sitting in an air-conditioned bunker and making semi-educated guesses on targeting. Add this to the estimated 1.3 million lives lost in our “war on terror” and it’s pretty easy to see why so many “Muslim extremists” fucking HATE the U.S. of A.

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      GarThweMarkyDeSade
      4/15/16 10:43pm

      The drone program deserves a lot of criticism, but this has nothing to do with drones.

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      suppiluliumasMarkyDeSade
      4/16/16 3:35am

      it’s pretty easy to see why so many “Muslim extremists” fucking HATE the U.S. of A.

      Extremists are shit no matter how they justify their crimes, so please drop the quotation marks there. They are irhabiyeen, khawarij, mujrimeen, mufsideen, munafiqeen, hirabahists, terrorists, sowers of fitna... whatever term you use, don’t use quotation marks to imply that they’re anything other than exactly what they are.

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    Floating Adam WestBrendan O'Connor
    4/15/16 9:20pm

    I have a preview copy of the report:

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      southeastern_proletariatlibertyBrendan O'Connor
      4/15/16 9:35pm

      This is worse than when Russian used dumb bombs. There is absolutely no excuse when AC130 gunship can probably see the face of the person its bombing.

      Have you seen the videos of the AC130gunship in Iraq. How it picks its target. how it can zoom so close to see if a person has a weapon.

      What I want to see are the combat footage on board the AC130.

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        DarbyQueensoutheastern_proletariatliberty
        4/15/16 10:11pm

        Have you seen the videos of the AC130gunship in Iraq.

        Yeah actually I have. And no the video quality of a gunship circling from several kilometers away at speeds of about 200 knots is not good enough to pick out weapons on individual people, especially if they’re taking cover. Most of the time they’re not relying on their cameras to fire, but coordinates provided by the ground teams to fire anyway. There’s a reason why friendly forces usually mark themselves with an IR strobe when calling in fire support like that and even then you’d better double check where you're calling in that fire.

        Also the comparison to Russia’s continued bombing campaign is asinine at best. They deliberately carpet bomb known civilian centers with unguided munitions in the hopes of hitting terrorists. And when they inevitably kill civilians they just don’t care. I’m not saying what the US did here was right, or that people don’t deserve to be punished; but it’s certainly not worse than what Russia is doing in Syria.

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        ElevenKneesDarbyQueen
        4/15/16 10:26pm

        Just... no.

        The higher our technology gets the lamer this kind of excuse sounds.

        The Geneva Convention is the Geneva Convention and “accidents” like bombing hospitals get progressively more difficult to manifest as technology advances.

        My expectation is that they assumed it was a hospital run by “brown people” and just ripped on it. Or, perhaps they were trying to convince DWD that operating that way in a combat zone can be a very dangerous thing and to reconsider providing assistance to “our enemies” (whoever they were that week.)

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      ThatFatScatCat fucking loves muddy puddlesBrendan O'Connor
      4/15/16 9:31pm

      “tragic but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error stupidity.”

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        sk04ThatFatScatCat fucking loves muddy puddles
        4/16/16 11:27am

        It’s not like error and stupidity are mutually exclusive of one another. Gotta have bit of one to have the other.

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      El Oso PeligrosoBrendan O'Connor
      4/15/16 9:21pm

      So what’s the over/under on percent redacted? I’m gonna low ball it with 30%

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        Howard the DuckEl Oso Peligroso
        4/15/16 9:29pm

        I'm gonna be generous and go with 80%.

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        ThatFatScatCat fucking loves muddy puddlesHoward the Duck
        4/15/16 9:33pm

        I’m gonna be realistic and go with 80%.

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      CubedBrendan O'Connor
      4/15/16 9:50pm

      Hopefully something comes of this. They killed how many innocents? At least one of the dipshits responsible should be executed on principle (prefer it be someone that gave the go ahead for the duration). Show the rest of the world we give a sliver of a shit. Otherwise it’s just another case of our military murdering civilians, which happens way too much.

      ETA: I know a guy that’s a gunner. Most bloodthirsty man I’ve ever met. So I don’t think these guys gave a shit who they were killing, they were too busy jerking it to their kills.

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        HarlotOScaraCubed
        4/15/16 10:17pm

        Well since you have anecdotal evidence and a sample size of one, I'm sure you are correct.

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        CubedHarlotOScara
        4/15/16 10:33pm

        That and watching quite a bit of video footage. I saw enough to say that he’s far from the only one. Just he’s the only one that I’ve ever heard say, while playing some pool, “I prefer being over there killing” with sincerity.

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      GeorgeGeoffersonLivesBrendan O'Connor
      4/16/16 1:36am

      So. Many. Hot. Takes.

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        verapsBrendan O'Connor
        4/15/16 11:09pm

        As a friendly follow-up, a U.S./NATO tank crashed through the gates of the facility. It’s hard not to view it as anything other than retaliatory.

        http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military…

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          skefflesBrendan O'Connor
          4/16/16 7:13am

          They are just waiting for the last coat of whitewash to dry, right?

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