WASHINGTON — Mistakes by the crew flying an AC-130 gunship, compounded by equipment and procedural failures, led to the devastating attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan last year, and 16 U.S. military personnel, including a general officer, have been punished for their roles in the strike, the Defense Department announced Friday.
The punishments for the attack, which killed 42 people, will be "administrative actions" only, and were not more severe because the attack was determined to be unintentional. The punishments include suspension and removal from command as well as letters of reprimand, which can seriously damage a career. But none of the service members being disciplined will face criminal charges.
The new top officer of the military's Central Command, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, made the announcement during a Pentagon news conference. He said the military had conducted "a thorough investigation" that was "painstaking" in seeking an "accurate account" of what occurred.
Its conclusion was that the crew members of the gunship who fired on the hospital "did not know they were striking a medical facility" and that the attack on the hospital was the result of human errors compounded by "process and equipment failures."
The AC-130, whose assignment was to support a U.S. Special Forces team that was working with Afghan forces, came under fire from a surface-to-air missile, Votel said, and received incorrect coordinates for the source of the attack. Its crew, communicating with ground forces, came to believe that the hospital basically matched the description of a Taliban-controlled building about a quarter of a mile away, and fired at the hospital.
The crew of the gunship did not get all the information it should have received about "no strike areas" that included the hospital, which was categorized as a protected facility.
"This was an extraordinarily intense combat situation," Votel told reporters. The troops on the ground, he added, "were doing a variety of actions at the same time — they were trying to support their Afghan partners, they were trying to execute resupply operations and they were trying to protect themselves."
Certain personnel "failed to comply" with the rules of engagement, but these failures did not amount to a war crime, according to the military review as described by Votel.
The release of the investigation's findings and the announcement of the disciplinary measures, some of which were first leaked by defense officials last month, was unlikely to satisfy Doctors Without Borders and other rights groups, many of which have said the attack may have constituted a war crime and called for an independent criminal investigation.
"The most notable point in today's briefing was that the report found that U.S. personnel violated the laws of armed conflict," said John Sifton, the Asia policy director of Human Rights Watch. "And yet we are also told that the U.S. military has failed to charge even one person criminally. This is, simply put, inexplicable."
"Gen. Joseph Votel's assertion that a war crime must be deliberate, or intentional, is flatly wrong," Sifton added, saying that there were legal precedents for war crimes prosecutions based on acts that were committed with recklessness, and that many criminal acts under the United States military code could be committed with recklessness or negligence.