US forces bomb another hospital

There you go. A fully legitimate military target.

Case closed.

You are saying that "military utility is entirely secondary"........in a military conflict?

WTF!!!!

Dayton3's moral turpitude has now led him to conclude that murdering doctors for the purpose of intimidating their colleagues is fully legitimate as a military measure. He presents this as an established fact, obvious on the face of it.

I'm not sure that there are words sufficient to describe just how low he is.

Wow.

Where adherence to the Geneva Convention concerning the protection of civilians is concerned, yes.
These standards don't exist for nations to apply or not apply them according to their own convenience.

So in a hospital taken over by Taliban who are running around threatening to kill all the non-Taliban patients and every doctor there, we were the ones intimidating people.

Yes they are applied according to "convenience". Because they are only applied when they have no real impact on military operations.

Otherwise, get bent Henryhill and thank a god you don't believe in that you are from a tiny country of no significance in the world.

This is tantamount to a concession that the US military commits war crimes with monotonous regularity, and that you don't care. Thanks for playing.

They were threatening to kill all the women in Kunduz who were helping other women. The Taliban don't like that. They routinely attack schools and recently in Pakistan poisoned 300 girls with toxic gas because they don't like women learning how to read. They killed 141 in a school in Peshawar. They looted Kunduz, leaving it without water or electricity, and mined the roads.

Further, who do you think had been flooding into the hospital during the Taliban attack on Kunduz? Those would be government and militia soldiers who'd been fighting the Taliban. The Taliban doesn't like to let them live, either. They also aren't happy about letting doctors and nurses live if they're going to be providing aid and medical care to the enemies of Allah.

All of this is absolutely unrelated to your fantasy that the hospital had been taken over by Taliban. That is a lie that the US government's dissembling on the matter hasn't (yet) had the gall to resort to.

Get dragged to death behind a 4x4 flying like a bat outta hell down a severely rutted gravel road strewn with broken bottles and rust metal shards. Case closed.

If the Taliban hadn't been in the hospital firing on government and militia forces, why did government and militia forces spend an hour calling in airstrikes on it, given that it was also full of wounded government and militia forces?

Huh. So why would a fully legitimate military target be sporting such a conspicuous paint job?

The U.S. hospital ship is not a legitimate military target given that as far as I know it is not in a war zone.

If it's not in a war zone, why make it so obvious that it's a hospital?

Excuse me, but didn't the Taliban (or was a it Al Quida?) shoot a girl in the head for daring to educate herself? Matter-of-fact I think she survived and now there is a movie about her. So suffice it to say that they would have no problem with taking over (or setting up shop) in a hospital where FEMALE medical staff operate - and not give a shit about letting them die in a military attack? So to recap - the Taliban were minding their own business in a hospital, getting treated for war injuries, and out of nowhere the US military decided to attack said hospital - out of all the other military targets they could have attacked? Mind you having no prior intel that the Taliban were in fact in that hospital? Please elaborate!

I'm not saying the military targeted a hospital on purpose. I'm just asking Dayton for some clarification on why he would think that it would have been a legitimate military target just for treating wounded enemy fighters.

Treating wounded enemy military is not a problem at all - we did it all the time in the sandbox. Yes we did indeed treat seriously wounded enemy over a not so seriously wounded member of our own military. It's called "triage" which is basically setting a protocol for who gets treated first. No doubt about it, the Taliban medics do the same thing.

Those weren't Taliban medics that got blasted. They were Doctors Without Borders.

Which is why it was probably okay to open up on them. Soldiers Without Borders are called mercenaries and soldiers-of-fortune, and the Geneva Convention does not smile upon them. I don't see why stateless medical mercenaries would be treated much differently.

I've got nothing against mercenaries in general. Executive Outcomes did a lot of good in Angola and Sierra Leon before the UN de-fanged them.

Why are mercenaries so harshly condemned anyway? This isn't the 17th Century and the Thirty Years War anymore.

It depends on the mercenaries. Blackwater pulled some fucked up stuff.

Because they're still doing mercenary shit like Doctors Without Borders.

Mercenary: (noun) A medical person who is hired to provide aid (mercy) to civilians and soldiers serving in foreign wars.
from Middle English mercy, Old French merci, Latin merces​

So let the big guns eat!

Blackwater had two or three instances where they killed civilians without justification but beyond that they seldom engaged much in the way of actual combat did they?

So you're pretty much just a hippie, then, is that it?

Break out the tin foil.

I absolutely wouldn't be surprised that the u-boat mentality I described earlier was at play. It's been a popular meme from certain elements within the military and the government that almost any amount of collateral damage is acceptable in the pursuit of the destruction of the enemy. They've used the same mentality to excuse torture and holding people without charge. I agree that this is horrible, but I have to admit that I was curious what a good alternative plan might have been, and from what I can see, ground troops would have been the only other alternative, and it probably would've been a pretty messy affair that way, too. But you don't even give enough of a shit to care.

Because they generally aren't as answerable for any actions they take. Members of the US military are subject to the UCMJ, and follow a strict chain of command that leads back to the civilian government. Mercs aren't subject to the UCMJ, and it can be difficult to prosecute them under the local justice system, especially if there isn't a justice system in place. Theoretically mercs would be under the command of whoever hired them, but this depends entirely on the integrity of the mercs, doesn't it?

^ My newly coined etymology of "mercenary" gives your comment an entirely different reading. The new reading is much more humorous. It puts the focus on Doctors Without Borders.

If you believe otherwise, that adhering to the Geneva Convention is secondary to military utility and can be ignored when inconvenient, then in common with Dayton, you are conceding that the US commits war crimes whenever it suits them.

Nobody said these medics were Taliban! I meant when the Taliban are running their own battlefield clinics during on-the-run heavy fighting they have to have some medical treatment ability. In this case Taliban soldiers were (allegedly) using the hospital as a command center. Some may have been receiving medical treatment as well. The DWB medics were doing what medics do. No doubt they would have to accept the Taliban's presence of course.