Spy vs. Spy: The Kunduz Doctors Without Borders Hospital Info War

One week ago AP reporter Ken Dilanian broke a story, "US analysts knew Afghan site was hospital," which argued that the lethal attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz was premeditated, not an accident, and that its purpose was to kill a Pakistani agent from the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI operative was purportedly directing the Taliban assault on Kunduz from the Doctors Without Border hospital.

Dilanian has been busted in the past for being a spook conduit. So we have to interpret his "ISI agent using the Kunduz hospital as a command and control outpost" story as a "limited hangout."

The "newspaper of record" has studiously avoided the Dilanian story. Yesterday it published what is known in the propaganda industry as a  "modified limited hangout."

Eric Schmitt and Matthew Rosenberg never refer directly to Dilanian in "Hospital Attack Fueled by Units New to Kunduz." Instead they proffer the position that the hospital attack was due to the inexperience of Fort Lewis Special Forces troops who were new to the theater, as were their Afghan counterparts. In other words, the destruction of the hospital and the murder of civilians was all just a regrettable accident, just another sorrowful tale chalked up to the fog of war.

Towards the end of the Schmitt-Rosenberg piece the reader receives a dismissal of the Dilanian hypothesis:

Since the strike, a number of Afghan officials, including Masoom Stanekzai, the acting defense minister, have publicly claimed that the Taliban were fighting from the hospital, and that the insurgents were storing heavy weapons there. There has also been talk of operatives from Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, using the hospital as a base from which to help direct Taliban fighters in Kunduz.

But the Aghan security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid directly contradicting other officials, dismissed all those claims as “unfounded — there is no hard evidence.” 

The hospital had treated many wounded Taliban fighters over the years, and some may have been there at the time of the strike. But “they were not fighting right then,” the official said.

Eric Schmitt is the Gray Lady's numero uno conduit for spookery. So what we have here is spy vs. spy. Schmitt vs. Dilanian. The overall purposes is to sow confusion, to go from limited hangout to modified limited hangout in an attempt to obscure a shocking U.S. war crime.