Hypocrisy of Cluster Bomb Usage

Not to defend Libya for allegedly using cluster bombs, but to show the slant U.S. personnel put on its often government-handed-out "news" articles, a New York Times article (April 16, 2011) condemned Libya's alleged use of cluster bombs and used words to imply to the uninformed that the United States would never do that. An internet search of factual data shows, for instance:

• That the United States (and the United Kingdom) had used cluster bombs for decades, and still does, including today in Afghanistan and Iraq. The NGO Human Rights Watch claims that at least two million cluster munitions bombs were used by the United States during the invasion of Iraq by the US and the UK in 2003. During the 1970s, the United States dropped thousands of cluster bombs among civilians  in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. These cluster bomblets continue to kill and maim civilians to this day. Reports estimate that up to 300 people a year are killed or maimed in Vietnam alone. The United States dropped thousands of cluster bombs during the 1993 Gulf War.
   
  • While over a hundred countries have called for outlawing the cluster bombs, the United States has repeatedly refused to do so.
     
  • In 1999 the United States and Great Britain reportedly dropped over 1,400 cluster bombs in Kosovo during the NATO war against Yugoslavia.
     
• Israel used cluster bombs supplied by the United States during the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon; the 1982-2000 occupation of Lebanon; the 2006 Lebanon War; the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in 1982; and at other times.
   
  • The United States provided Israel two types of cluster bombs to be used against civilians in land invaded by Israel: the CBU-58, using the BLU-63 cluster, and the MK-20 Rockeye made by the Honeywell corporation. Israel also manufactures the M-85 cluster bomb.
     
  • Human rights groups and the United Nations have condemned Israel for sending over 4 million cluster bomblets into Lebanon during Israel's invasion of that country.

Libya has denied using cluster bombs. Since lying by U.S. government personnel and U.S. media is such a historic fact, one can also give Libya a slight benefit of the doubt. Remember the U.S. lying about Libya being involved in the bombing of Pan Am 103 when the evidence proves Libya had no role in it, and a U.S. president, U.S; Attorney General, and Department of Justice personnel were heavily involved in criminal acts that protected the actual groups responsible for the 270 deaths at Lockerbie. See www.defraudingamerica.com/lockerbie_index.html, and the books, Lockerbie to 9/11, and History of Aviation Disasters: 1950 to 9/11.

The New York Times article stated in part, in the beginning:

Misurata, Libya—Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi have been firing into residential neighborhoods in this embattled city with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world and ground-to-ground rockets, according to witnesses and survivors, as well as physical evidence. Both of these so-called indiscriminate weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precis4ely. When fired into populated areas, they place civilians at grave risk.

The use of such weapons in these ways could add urgency to the arguments by Britain and France that the alliance needs to step up attacks on the Qaddafi forces, to better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians. It could also apply conflicting pressures on the United States. President Obama has spoken strongly about how American air power help avert a humanitarian crisis in Libya, but also insisted on pulling back that air power and ceding control of the campaign to NATO earlier this month, a handoff that seemed to embolden the Qaddafi forces. At the same time, the United States has used cluster munitions itself, in battlefield situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in a strike on suspected militants in Yemen in 2009.

When asked about the munitions at a news conference in Berlin, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, "I'm not surprised by anything that Colonel Qadaffi and his forces do," [as if totally ignorant of the same and worse of what she and her associates had authorized the U.S. to do].

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