A Caution On "War Crime" Screamers http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245413 2022-03-15 07:00 by Karl Denninger in Editorial We've heard the screaming about "bombing hospitals" over in Ukraine. Be careful taking that at face value folks. It might be -- but it might also not be. As I pointed out when this started the first casualty of war is truth. The corollary to that is when there's a war on, regular war or not both sides "arrange things" to make it appear that something beneficial to them happened when it really didn't, especially if there is no cost to the side doing the arranging. Notice something about the alleged "bombed" hospital(s) we've seen: There's nobody in there -- dead or otherwise. Yes, the building was a hospital. And clearly, it was bombed. Was it actually a functional hospital with patients in it at the time it was bombed? Or were Ukrainian forces in (or taking shelter using) a building that was a hospital but had been abandoned for some reason? Why would it have been abandoned for its original purpose? Well, perhaps because there was no electricity or supply of the things a hospital needs. Like compressed (or liquid) oxygen, for instance, which has to be brought in by truck, never mind medicines and other similar items. In the middle of a war zone when the power is cut off and the trucks can't get there to make deliveries you move the patients when it looks like that will happen or starts to happen to safer quarters, since an operating room with someone in it when the power goes off is bad news, and if the generator (assuming there is one) has no fuel you're screwed and people die. So again: Was it a hospital at the time it was hit with actual patients in it or was it somewhere that actual combatants were operating out of and/or hiding in that got blown up? I don't know, but what I do know is that if it was a hospital and got blown up with a bunch of pregnant women and babies in it there would be dead pregnant women, children and pieces of both, along with the evidence that this had happened all over the damaged building. Which I've seen no evidence of. Part of war includes manipulating public opinion so as to try to cause uninvolved people to hate your enemy. All sides in an armed conflict do this. Provoking a strike on an abandoned building carries no cost for the warring parties but has tremendous propaganda value to the side that does it. It is of especially significant propaganda value if the claim includes the merciless and wanton slaughter of non-combatant women and children. I'm not saying that is or isn't what happened. I'm simply pointing out that there are wild incentives to commit such acts in that there is no price for doing so, and the benefits are significant. Cast a slant-eye on all such claims no matter who makes them. They may well be true but before you take them up as true you probably want to see the actual evidence that you're not being played.