Exactly. It would be tantamount to outlawing war, and we simply cannot have that!!
The military didn’t “investigate itself” - it’s not a hive mind. It investigated the individuals responsible.
It depends entirely on the circumstances and is not always true. If the individuals in question acted against orders or against established rules and principles, then the military is investigating and potentially charging and trying individuals. If, however, the individuals were following orders and the atrocities are attributable to either high-level policy or systemic issues in the chain of command, then the military is indeed “investigating itself” and predisposed to find itself innocent.
Which we are all predisposed to do, except that the military is ultimately accountable to no one. It is outside the authority of the normal judicial system, and the highest executive authority in the nation is – surprise! – the commander in chief of the military. Who – no surprise whatsoever – has rejected calls for an independent inquiry on this. As for international judgment, the US famously does not recognize the jurisdiction of either the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, and of course maintains an overriding veto as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
I believe the operative phrase here is “all your base are belong to us”. 
That’s a serious violation of boffking protocol, which requires that one start a thread and then run away, never to be seen in it again, and let everyone else fight it out. I’m sure his one post here was nothing more than a terrible mistake. But it was just a one-liner, and I’m sure he won’t return.
Yeah, no surprise here either. Obama is a gun-loving war-monger who runs around looking for excuses to blow up hospitals. 
Seriously, the military can’t be put on trial just because a hospital was attacked or just because civilians died. The trial would be based on a degree of either intent, recklessness or negligence. They intended to attack a target full of enemy combatants and I haven’t seen any argument to the contrary, so there goes intent. There may be a case for recklessness/negligence in terms of how intelligence was handled and how the target was selected, but I don’t see enough evidence there.
The stronger charge is that the military could have stopped the attack sooner based on phone calls from the hospital. It’s very easy to Monday-morning-quarterback it and say that the military should have called off the attack immediately, but we are fighting an enemy that routinely uses civilians as shields. I’m sure similar phone calls are common, even when they are a blatant lie.
In any event, it takes time to move information through a large organization and a response within an hour seems pretty quick to me.
I don’t think there was any question of intent, but there may well have been recklessness or negligence at some or many levels. We’ll never know, but would that really be a surprise for an institution in which Curtis LeMay was once head of the Strategic Air Command and Chief of Staff of the USAF? I’m not sure how much has really changed at a basic level since then, and even Obama, much as I like and even admire the guy in so many ways, has turned out to be pretty much of a hawk. To be fair, I agree with some of his hawkishness, but still, not exactly a Jimmy Carter.
We will know if there was negligence, because that’s what the report found and why individuals were disciplined. The report expressly found that individuals failed to comply with the rules of engagement and violated the laws of armed conflict.
Maybe. In fact I’m quite willing to believe that this is quite likely what really happened. But let me ask a few questions from a devil’s advocate perspective.
What if it was actually the military at fault, here or in some other situation? As I said upthread, the military is pretty good at investigating and prosecuting the transgressions of individuals, but is it good at investigating itself? Investigating systemic problems within its own organization and its own chain of command? Has it ever publicly done so?
Or how about the concept of de juro and de facto rulebooks? That is, you have a written and publicized set of rules and principles that you follow in theory, but in practice there are unwritten rules and subtle or even overt pressures to achieve your assigned goals and a nod and wink to stretching or breaking the rules. Until someone gets caught, that is. Then the organization sanctimoniously quotes the official rule book, the one no one paid any attention to, and the poor schlubs caught with the smoking gun get thrown under the bus. This whole scenario is practically SOP for so many large organizations that it would be astounding if the military was immune to it.
What it comes down to is what I said earlier, that ultimately the military is accountable to no one, and the US explicitly refuses to recognize the authority of international courts and implicitly (via its SC veto) the authority of the UN as well.
What you’re describing would be a condition only possible within one theater of operation at a time. That is, because of the practicalities of holding military units to an unwritten de jure rule set which runs counter to written military orders, with any sort of discipline in the application of those rules (necessary as hell for something which could result in heavy punitive actions against all involved), they would have to exist solely among some part or the whole of a single command. And that’s just the sort of thing an intraorganizational investigation would look for; hell, that’s the sort of thing that gives military brass nightmares.
The US military is accountable to the civilian government, which is, more or less depending on how cynical or apathetic the electorate is, accountable to the citizens of the US. The nature of hegemonic power being what it is, accountability to the rest of the world depends on the means and methods other countries choose, and the will of those countries (or the international “community” if you want) to force such a thing.
Sometimes the obfuscation begins with a question. I’m not going to be drawn into this argument because I was being sarcastic when I called it fascinating. It won’t be: it will be the same dull dead slog that always happens when semantics are piled high in the attempt to drown facts. But I’ll posit that continuous military presence, mandated territory, and political and economic involvement, are more than enough to justify the term occupation. Not to mention the fact that protection of civilian populations is important enough to justify the most expansive definitions of the laws designed to shield them.
That makes sense, yet one finds that it’s not always true.
The first problem is that even if such a culture of de jure rules was limited to one theater of operation, it’s far from clear that the military would ever publicly acknowledge such systemic violations even if they were internally investigated. The second problem is that it’s not obvious that such a culture could not be, or become, more widespread throughout the organization.
To see at least the plausibility of this conjecture, consider the Abu Ghraib situation. The abuses were uncovered, not by any military investigation, but by Amnesty International and the investigative reporting of the Associated Press, and later by Seymour Hersch at the New Yorker and by 60 Minutes. And even so, during the early stages of the revelations the Brigadier General responsible for Iraq detention facilities denied the allegations.
It’s true that the military investigated and prosecuted many of the perpetrators, but only after the abuses were making headlines around the world. There were allegations that the abuses were known, or at least condoned in principle, high up in the chain of command. It’s questionable what, if any, investigation or consequences there would have been had this not become public and a huge PR issue for the Army. The icing on the cake of all this, as it were, is the allegation by a number of individuals including that same Brigadier General that they personally saw a letter signed by Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, authorizing the use of torture – an allegation that AFAIK is unproven but highly plausible, and which in effect put the entire military in violation of the Geneva Convention and international law.
In theory the military and the entire government is accountable to the citizens, but this accountability is premised on the citizens having the requisite information on which to base their judgments.
As for the international community forcing accountability, that’s kind of hard to do when the US is the sole superpower, and one which systematically rejects the authority of international bodies like the ICJ. Indeed the US has merely a token and somewhat patronizing relationship with the UN itself, and even notwithstanding its Security Council veto, if the UN tried to exert pressure on the US the US would most likely tell them to piss off and withdraw from the organization entirely, thus delighting a great many conservatives.
You most definitely can murder by mistake, felony murder. So maybe you are just being imprecise.
In any case, the bombing was intentional. Were a series of muscle spasms and banana peel slips the cause of the bombing like a morbid Leslie Nielsen movie? No. If a fanatic bombs a Patriots game intending to kill Tom Brady, but leaves him unscathed, he is guilty of murder.