The Guardian reports that the US keeps changing its story on how we happened to bomb that MSF hospital in Kunduz.

US special operations forces – not their Afghan allies – called in the deadly airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, the US commander has conceded.

Shortly before General John Campbell, the commander of the US and Nato war in Afghanistan, testified to a Senate panel, the president of Doctors Without Borders – also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – said the US and Afghanistanhad made an “admission of a war crime”.

Shifting the US account of the Saturday morning airstrike for the fourth time in as many days, Campbell reiterated that Afghan forces had requested US air cover after being engaged in a “tenacious fight” to retake the northern city of Kunduz from the Taliban. But, modifying the account he gave at a press conference on Monday, Campbell said those Afghan forces had not directly communicated with the US pilots of an AC-130 gunship overhead.

So, what, then – the pilots read their minds? Made a wild guess?

The airstrike on the hospital is among the worst and most visible cases of civilian deaths caused by US forces during the 14-year Afghanistan war that Barack Obama has declared all but over. It killed 12 MSF staff and 10 patients, who had sought medical treatment after the Taliban overran Kunduz last weekend. Three children died in the airstrike that came in multiple waves and burned patients alive in their beds.

On Tuesday, MSF denounced Campbell’s press conference as an attempt to shift blame to the Afghans.

22 people killed – 12 more than were killed in Roseburg.

Robert Reich on Facebook:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in an interview published today that individual Wall Street executives should have been prosecuted for their actions leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, but that the U.S. Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused instead on investigating or indicting entire firms. “A financial firm is of course a legal fiction; it’s not a person. You can’t put a financial firm in jail,” he said. “It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.”

Well, thank you Ben. But why didn’t you say this at the time? (Are you saying it now because you have a memoir coming out?) You were chairman of the Fed, for crying out loud. The Fed is a major bank regulator. Your voice would have put enormous pressure on the Justice Department to go after the individuals responsible. Yet you chose to remain silent. It’s been the silence of people in positions like yours that allowed Wall Street executives to escape all responsibility for the frauds they committed, which led to millions of people losing their jobs, homes, and savings. And now that the big banks are far bigger than they were then (in 2007 they had 25% of total bank assets, now they have 44%), it’s likely we’ll have another near meltdown because no one was held responsible for the last one.

I think Ben Bernanke had a responsibility when he was Fed chair to say publicly that bank executives should be held personally responsible for what occurred.

Well if he had said it at the time, it might have had consequences.

Nick Cohen is appalled by the way some on the left go after liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims who campaign against Islamism.

I have enjoyed the Guardian for decades. But too many of its contributors have lost their wits and abandoned their principles over radical Islam. They show no signs of finding either soon. As a matter of course, they publish a defence of the silencing of Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim feminist, or a piece denouncing Maajid Nawaz, the Muslim leader of the anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation.

In academia, speakers at Bath University, surely the most malign[ed] higher education institution in Britain, call ex-Muslims “native informants”, as if the decision of free men and women to decide for themselves what they should believe is the equivalent of collaborating with a colonial oppressor. For the religious right and the political and academic left, a liberal Muslim is their trussed-up version of the enemy, the alien, the “other”.

None of the above is astonishing. It’s been going on so long that we accept it as the “new normal”.

It’s not astonishing but it is reprehensible.

If you search “Meryl Streep feminism” on Twitter you will find an absurd controversy in action: people expressing shock and horror that Streep wore, for the cover of Time Out, a t shirt that says

I’D RATHER BE A REBEL THAN A SLAVE

The cover story is about a new movie in which Streep plays Emmeline Pankhurst. The movie is titled Suffragette. It’s about the suffragettes. The slogan was coined by Emmeline Pankhurst.

Tweeters are freaking out because omg Streep is white, that’s appropriation, doesn’t anybody know any history?!

History. Slavery has been a thing throughout human history. It has been used as a metaphor throughout human history. It is not the exclusive property of Americans, not even Americans whose grandparents were slaves. Another widely used and related metaphor is the one about being in chains (Rousseau, Marx); that too is universal, not parochial.

End of morning history lesson.

The ACLU and ACLU Michigan have opened a second front against the bishops and their stinkin’ “ethical directives.”

DETROIT — The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan announced a federal lawsuit today filed on behalf of their members against Trinity Health Corporation, one of the largest Catholic health systems in the country,  for its repeated and systematic failure to provide women suffering pregnancy complications with appropriate emergency abortions as required by federal law.

Yes. Yes yes yes.

“We’re taking a stand today to fight for pregnant women who are denied potentially life-saving care because doctors are forced to follow religious directives rather than best medical practices,” said ACLU of Michigan Staff Attorney Brooke A. Tucker. “Catholic bishops are not licensed medical professionals and have no place dictating how doctors practice medicine, especially when it violates federal law.”

Trinity Health Corporation, which is headquartered in Michigan and owns and operates more than 80 hospitals around the country, and receives public funding, requires that all of its facilities abide by the Ethical and Religious Directives promulgated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.   These directives prohibit a doctor working at a Catholic hospital from terminating a woman’s pregnancy even when the failure to do so puts her health or life at risk.

The way Galway University hospital in Ireland did to Savita Halappanavar, with the result that she died of a massive infection. That became public because her husband went to the press, and had the medical knowledge to realize her death wasn’t just one of those sad things that happen. It’s a safe bet that there have been many such cases in Ireland that did not become news. And the same is true here.

“A hospital policy like the Directives that limits what physicians can tell and offer our patients and prohibits us from providing our patients with the best possible care is extremely dangerous,” said Timothy R B  Johnson MD FACOG, Chair of OB/GYN at University of Michigan. “The ACLU’s suit is based on a simple principle that medical decisions should be between doctors and our patients.”

A hospital’s failure to provide pregnant women appropriate emergency care, including an abortion when the circumstances warrant, violates a federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, known as EMTALA.  A public health educator in Michigan discovered that at one of Trinity’s hospitals alone, at least five women who were suffering from miscarriages and needed urgent care were denied that care because of the Catholic directives.

We don’t have to let Catholic bishops tell doctors what to do. We can tell Catholic bishops to stay in their churches and mind their own business – but it will take a lot of work.

“To put it simply and humanely, patient welfare must be the number one concern of health care professionals,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Alexa Kolbi-Molinas. “Every pregnant woman who enters an emergency room should be guaranteed that she will get the care she needs, and should not have to worry that she won’t get appropriate care because of the hospital’s religious affiliation.”

Catholic hospitals receive public money and ten of the 25 largest hospital systems in the U.S. are Catholic-sponsored.  Nearly one of nine hospital beds in the country is in a Catholic facility. The directives bar doctors at those hospitals from offering — or even discussing — certain reproductive health care services, even when those services are necessary to protect a woman’ s health. As U.S. hospitals becomeincreasingly affiliated with religious organizations, the health of American women is threatened by the refusal to provide medically appropriate and often times lifesaving services.

They mention the Tamesha Means suit, which is currently being appealed.

Earlier this month, the ACLU of Michigan sent a demand letter to Genesys Hospital run by Ascension Health in Grand Blanc, Michigan, on behalf of Jessica Mann, a pregnant woman with a life-threatening brain tumor who was denied a request for a tubal ligation at the time of her scheduled cesarean section delivery next month.  Ms.  Mann’s doctors have advised her to have the tubal ligation at the time of her delivery because another pregnancy would increase the risks to her posed by her tumors, as would forcing her to undergo an additional procedure after the delivery.  The hospital has continued to refuse to provide the medically necessary treatment. Instead, Ms. Mann has been forced to switch hospitals to a new doctor — one who has no relationship with her and no experience treating her serious medical condition — with less than a month left in her pregnancy.

The bishops are hindering the best treatment for a woman with a life-threatening brain tumor, for bad bogus wrong religious reasons. It’s a god damn outrage.

Good luck to the ACLU.

Pema Chodron said a thing on Facebook on March 13, 2013. That thing has 3,637 likes and 1,976 shares. I think that’s 3,637 and 1,976 too many.

ABANDON HOPE (AND FEAR)

Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
(From Pema’s book When Things Fall Apart.)

Thank you Shambhala Publications for our Weekly Heart Advice. To receive yours, sign up at

www.shambhala.com/heartadvice/

I get it. I get that attachment entails suffering. I get that sometimes – in some circs, for some people – getting rid of attachment is worth it, to lessen the suffering. But as a general guide to life? I reject it.

Linda Cox

Remember the captain of Iran’s women’s football team, Niloufar Ardalan, whose husband wouldn’t let her travel to the match in Malaysia? The BBC reports on the aftermath:

The standard marriage contract signed by all newlyweds in Iran allows the husband to decide whether his wife can travel abroad, where the family will live, whether she can go to work, and whether she can ask for a divorce. In this instance, Ardalan says her husband, prominent sports journalist Mehdi Toutounchi, wanted her to be present for their son’s first day at school.

But husbands can choose to waive the provisions of the marriage contract, and now, inspired by Ardalan’s story, dozens of Iranian men who’ve done just that are sharing pictures on social media to advocate gender equality.

They are sending the images to Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist now living in the US, and creator of the “My Stealthy Freedom” Facebook page.

It’s true; you can click on that link and see them.

Alinejad tells BBC Trending that many women “simply don’t know” they can request amendments to their marriage contract, even after they’ve signed it. “They need to be aware of what they’re signing, and that they can ask for their rights to be returned,” she explains. Alinejad believes there are “a lot of open-minded Iranian men who support women’s rights,” in spite of the country’s conservative laws, although exactly what proportion of Iranian men would support the project is unclear.

The campaign initially called on men to declare that they wouldn’t restrict their wives’ ability to travel abroad, but most men posted statements saying they had passed all rights back to their wives, including the right to work and the right to request a divorce. “I return all rights… to my life partner,” read one man’s statement. “I’m not an owner but a partner for my wife,” said another. “As a human I feel ashamed to have these rights,” wrote a third.

Here’s one:

And another:

I, an iranian man, am ashamed of the article 18 of the passport law, my wife! you are free.

It’s Cindy Sheehan’s turn. Mickey Z at World News Trust talked to her:

Activism often makes for strange bedfellows. The arduous work of coalition-building involves strategic compromises and trade-offs. Most importantly, solidarity necessitates an agreement to disagree… with minimal malice. 

Being an ally, accomplice, or fellow traveler requires a fundamental understanding that disagreement is not the same as oppression or violence. If a particular activist contingent will tolerate nothing less than marching in lockstep, well, that’s not solidarity or ally-ship. It’s thought policing. 

Which brings me to a situation involving my friend and comrade, Cindy Sheehan — someone who has connected with an astonishing array of dissident individuals and groups.

But then…

CS: It started when this letter by the Women’s Alliance was brought to my attention. In it, the authors declare: “Veterans for Peace is aligning itself with a belief system that says that we, as women, are the bigots. VFP is rising up against ‘transmisogyny’ (a term not defined in your statement), but ignores male on female hate speech and violence completely bypassing the matter of misogyny.”

It was based on a new statement by Veterans for Peace on transgender politics in which VFP “affirms the rights, humanity and identity of trans and gender diverse people and will not accept trans-phobic or trans-misogyny behavior or remarks.”

I made a comment supporting the writers of the Women’s Alliance letter, and immediately began to be attacked for my mild support. So, I had the authors of the letter on Cindy Sheehan’s Soapboxand got the most hits for any show I have done recently. To be fair, most of the response has been positive and grateful for the show.

MZ: Have other women reached out to you?

Yes, for example, I was asked to sign a letter of midwives to the licensing org which has changed all of its materials at the bullying of the trans community to exclude the words: breastfeeding, mother, and woman.

Breastfeeding has to now be called “chestfeeding” because the other term that’s been around for centuries offends women transitioning to male who have had mastectomies yet get pregnant. Women, woman, or pregnant must now be called: Pregnant partner and birthing individual.

Incredibly misogynistic to deny women the very thing that our biology makes us uniquely suited for.

MZ: I’ll assume your stance has inspired more than a few personal attacks in response.

CS: Once I supported Lisa Blank, Cheryl Biren, and Anita Stewart in their quest to get answers from Veterans for Peace as to their transgender-related rules and to define some terms it used, I was immediately attacked.

I have been told many times that I am “on the wrong side” of this issue, that I am “transphobic,” that I am a “TERF,” that my support for my three friends means that I have made the entire “antiwar movement” irrelevant and anything I did for Private Manning is also irrelevant because I deny Private Manning her “womanhood.” 

I have also been told that Caitlyn Jenner is more of a woman than I am. The trans-bullies (as I call them) obviously only support the “ideal” of a woman in this culture and can’t even wrap their minds around being gender abolitionists nor around male supremacyand why that prevailing paradigm is so dangerous.

MZ: In other aspects of social justice activism, comrades can agree to disagree but in this case, you are being smeared and ex-communicated for owning a differing opinion. But, to state what should be obvious, let’s be clear: It’s quite possible, of course, to support transgender issues while not agreeing with every aspect of trans politics/queer theory.

CS: I fully support each and every individual’s right to be whomever they want to be. To be with whomever they want to be with. As long as there is no exploitation or anyone else is being harmed. 

…

MZ: How do you believe we can join together to fight for social justice, educate about the upcoming elections, work to save the environment, struggle against militarism, and expose patriarchy while under threat of silencing and thought policing?

CS: I don’t know if I have shared this with you, but everyone I have come into contact with lately (those doing real, revolutionary grass-roots work) are all having the experience of being bullied by transgender activists. From struggles in small southern towns to Black Lives Matter movements around the country, transgender bullies are moving in with their “our way or the highway” approach.

To bully people who would stand with them in their right to safety and to be whoever they wants to be and to tear apart movements for their own narrow identity politics ends is counter-revolutionary.

Well maybe if it’s counter-revolutionary enough it will eventually make its way back around to revolutionary again. Some day.