forces, pushes them back. it s interesting here. the president calls this a counterterror operation against al qaeda particularly. remember, when kunduz fell, you had u.s. troops there helping to call in air strikes. in fact, as you remember, you had an american air strike that hit the msf hospital there. it is not just a counterterror operation. you still have u.s. troops doing combat support for afghan forces because afghan forces on their own haven t been able to fight back taliban. there s fudging there. the president said all major combat operations have stopped. that s true, major has stopped but combat has not stopped because afghan troops need support. the president said, that s vital not only to the security of the country but also preventing afghanistan being used as a base for terror strikes against the u.s., as they did during 9/11. the concern he didn t mention it, but it is true, it s not just al qaeda they re concerned
briefed us here moments ago, is a forthright commander. he was in the u.s. at the time of the airstrike preparing for hill testimony this week at the time of the strike. he will testify tomorrow before the senate armed services committee at 9:30 eastern. his chief investigator, brigadier general richard kim, is on the ground in kunduz today getting to the bottom of what happened. the bottom line is u.s. personnel were not under fire, their lives were not at risk when they called for the airstrike, but i do understand from sources that taliban fighters were firing from the msf hospital. bill: wow. so piece this together as best you can. how do these new facts change the story about what appeared to have happened? well, what we learned is it was not a fixed-wing aircraft that struck the msf hospital. according to general campbell, it was an ac-130 which hired heavy rounds of machine gunfire. the afghans called for the
the panic of the air strike, do you have any sense of how your staff tried to alert u.s. authorities that they were under attack? were they working by phone? did they know who to contact? were they trying to e-mail? how do you go about telling a plane flying above you to stop firing? again, nobody can be 100% sure so far. that s why we re calling for an independent investigation of what really happened. it s true that everything does point to a coalition plane having conducted this attack. so we were in contact with the u.s. authorities very quickly, actually during the one-hour period of this attack we had contact with the u.s. authorities to inform them that the msf hospital was under attack. now the u.s. military has launched an investigation. you re calling for an investigation. is that the investigation you want? will you have confidence in what u.s. authorities tell you about what happened? we need an investigation that s as independent and as transparent as possible.