Mainstream reporting on the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan by U.S. warplanes is being soundly attacked for obscuring our responsibility for the deaths of patients and doctors.

“CNN and the NYT Are Deliberately Obscuring Who Perpetrated the Afghan Hospital Attack,” is the way Glenn Greenwald framed the issues today at The Intercept. He accuses both news outlets of using passive phrasing and open avoidance to obfuscate the fact that the hospital was hit in a series of U.S. bombing runs.

Greenwald cites a featured CNN story which reported the incident this way:

Aerial bombardments blew apart a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the battleground Afghan city of Kunduz about the time of a U.S. airstrike early Saturday, killing at least 19 people, officials said.

“The United States said it was investigating what struck the hospital during the night,” CNN said.

Here’s Greenwald’s take on it.

We’re bravely here to report that these two incidents perhaps coincidentally occurred at “about” the same time: There was a hospital that blew up, and then there was this other event where the U.S. carried out an airstrike. As the blogger Billmon wrote: “London 1940: Civilians throughout the city were killed at about the same time as a German air strike, CNN reports.”

The entire article is designed to obfuscate who carried out this atrocity. The headline states: “Air attacks kill at least 19 at Afghanistan hospital; U.S. investigating.” What’s the U.S. role in this incident? They’re the investigators: like Sherlock Holmes after an unsolved crime.

The Intercept ran a second piece by Greenwald, “The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification.”

This is a must read, as it lays out the view that the attack on the hospital may have resulted from the medical organization’s policy of treating all patients without regard for their politics. It’s their humanitarian mission, one that has apparently irked U.S. and Afghan military officials for years. Greenwald quotes a news report of a 2009 raid on the same hospital by U.S troops, driving a conclusion that this latest deadly attack on the hospital was likely intentional.

And the watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has a similar story (“Media Are Blamed as US Bombing of Afghan Hospital Is Covered Up“).

FAIR uses the website, newsdiffs.org, to trace the changes in the NY Times story and headline about the hospital bombing. Interesting reporting and a potentially very useful website.