WASHINGTON -- About 16 U.S. military personnel, including a two-star general, have been disciplined for mistakes that led to the bombing of a civilian hospital in Afghanistan last year that killed 42 people, a senior U.S. official said Thursday.
According to officials, no criminal charges were filed and the service members received administrative punishments in connection with the U.S. airstrike in the northern city of Kunduz. A number of those punished are U.S. special operations forces.
And while none was sent to court-martial, in many cases a nonjudicial punishment, such as a letter of reprimand or suspension, essentially can end a military career. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, and spoke on condition of anonymity.
One officer was suspended from command and ordered out of Afghanistan. The other 15 were given lesser punishments: Six were sent to counseling, seven were issued letters of reprimand, and two were ordered to retraining.
Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, is expected to announce the administrative actions today at the Pentagon. He will not release names of the 16 because some are overseas or in units that are regularly deployed.
Tim Shenk, a spokesman for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, said Wednesday that the aid organization would not comment on the punishments until the military publicly released its investigation.
Last month, The Associated Press reported that more than a dozen U.S. military personnel had been disciplined in connection with the bombing, and that they were all largely administrative.
The hospital, run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, was attacked by a U.S. Air Force special operations AC-130 gunship, one of the most lethal in the U.S. arsenal. Doctors Without Borders has called the attack "relentless and brutal."
"The gravity of harm caused by the reported failures to follow protocol in Kunduz appears to constitute gross negligence that warrants active pursuit of criminal liability," Donna McKay, executive director of the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, wrote in a letter Monday to the White House and Pentagon.
Last November, the U.S. military said the crew of the AC-130, which is armed with side-firing cannons and guns, had been dispatched to hit a Taliban command center in a different building, 450 yards away from the hospital. However, hampered by problems with their targeting sensors, the crew relied on a physical description that led them to begin firing at the hospital even though they saw no hostile activity there.
The medical charity had informed U.S. and Afghan officials of the hospital's GPS coordinates numerous times in the days before the airstrike because of fighting in the area, the military has acknowledged, and the facility was on U.S. list of prohibited targets.
A preliminary investigation last fall found that "fatigue and high operation tempo" had played a role after several days of intense fighting.
Gen. John Campbell, then-commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in November that the "cause of this tragedy was ... avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures."
Campbell said decisions on whether to prosecute anyone would be made by him and the U.S. Special Operations Command, where Votel was commander before he was assigned to Central Command.
Campbell, who retired last month, ordered discipline for 12 of the 16 personnel involved. He suspended an officer, issued three letters of reprimand, ordered six into counseling and sent two to retraining.
A separate U.S. report said the AC-130 aircraft fired 211 shells at the hospital compound over 29 minutes before commanders realized the mistake and ordered a halt. Doctors Without Borders officials contacted coalition military personnel during the attack to say the hospital was "being 'bombed' from the air," and the word finally was relayed to the AC-130 crew, the report said.
The attack came as U.S. military advisers were helping Afghan forces retake Kunduz, which had fallen to the Taliban on Sept. 28. It was the first major city to fall since the Taliban were expelled from Kabul in 2001.
Afghan officials claimed the hospital had been overrun by the Taliban, but no evidence of that has surfaced. The hospital was destroyed and Doctors Without Borders ceased operations in Kunduz.
Information for this article was contributed by Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press and by W.J. Hennigan of Trinbue News Services.
A Section on 04/29/2016