US conducted ‘false flag’ by attacking Afghan hospital: Analyst

The US recently carried out a “false flag” attack on the Afghan hospital in Kunduz to divert public attention and provide cover for its next moves in the world’s political chessboard, says an American counter-terrorism analyst.

“The possibility of this being an accident, the possibility of this being an unknown site that was mistaken for an enemy center is laughable,” Scott Bennett told Press TV on Friday.

“I look at this as a typical false flag operation designed to skew, delude and pull attention into a direction so that public attention is taken off another theater,” he added.

The Associated Press reported on Thursday that American special operations analysts had been monitoring the Afghan hospital well ahead of a US military attack that leveled it on October 3.

According to the report, US forces proceeded with the deadly attack because they believed the hospital was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity.

“It is called the bait and switch. They bait people into paying attention to a poor hospital that has been destroyed in Afghanistan and at the same time they move other pieces of a chessboard around without drawing a lot of attention,” he noted.

“There is something very fishy, there is more intelligence that needs to be examined, it should be considered a war crime and it should be brought up in the international United Nations court to really discern what was going on,” Bennett posited.

The analyst told Press TV that the doctors working in the facility were French nationals and had to clear their location and their work assignments with the US State Department and its French equivalents in order to obtain work permits and access to these locations.

“That would have been coordinated with the US State Department that has control to a large extent over Afghanistan and the US Department of Defense,” he noted.

“So any notion or claim that the US did not that doctors were working in that facility, from France or any other nation, is a complete lie, an exaggeration to try and confuse the issue,” he maintained.

'US erasing evidence of war crime'

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has condemned the attack as a war crime. According to the organization, the strike killed 14 hospital staff and 10 patients, and that death toll may rise.

The international medical charity group says the US may have destroyed evidence of potential war crimes when one of its tanks on Thursday forced its way into the bombed hospital. MSF says the unannounced entry damaged property and destroyed potential evidence related to the recent US airstrike on the group’s hospital in Kudnuz. The charity adds that it was informed only after the intrusion that a delegation from a joint US, NATO and Afghan team was investigating the air attack.

“This was not a bombing in any sense of the word; this was an hour-long attack by a C-130 gunship that fires a canon and 50 mm bullets out of a machine gun at a hospital. That is an enormous visual to take into consideration,” Bennett said.

Doctors Without Borders says the US the AC-130 gunship airplane made five separate strafing runs over an hour, unleashing heavy fire on the main hospital building, which contained the emergency room and intensive care unit. Surrounding buildings were not struck, they added.

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