by James Glaser
December 19, 2002

No matter where you live in this world, if someone kills your son, daughter, or a child down the street, you are being terrorized.

If the killers are a bunch of religious fanatics we brand them "Terrorists," but if they have on uniforms we call them soldiers. To the person that lost a loved one both groups are terrorists, when they kill innocent people.

The American forces in Afghanistan are just as terrible a group of terrorists to the local people whose children we have killed, as those terrorists in New York that killed Americans. Scale has nothing to do with it, innocent blood is innocent blood no matter how much there is of it.

Human Rights Watch just released a report from New York titled, "Fatally Flawed: Cluster Bombs and Their Use by the United States in Afghanistan." In this 70 page exhaustive report on America's misuse of this terrible weapon, our nation becomes a terrorist state.

"The U.S. Military violated international law in Afghanistan by indiscriminately dropping cluster bombs on populated areas" said Human Rights Watch in the report released yesterday.

Jim Wilkinson, A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa denied that the United States indiscriminately uses cluster bombs and faulted the Taliban and al Qaeda for conducting military operations in populated areas.

So there you have it folks, it wasn't our fault we killed those children, it was those bad guys hiding in with the kids, so you can see we just had to kill those kids to kill the adults. There, doesn't that make you feel a lot better? But that piece of "Bull" is not the whole story.

Cluster bombs are big bombs that release 202 bomblets at a preset altitude. These 202 "little bombs" float down on parachutes and detonate when they hit the ground killing everything in a 400x800 foot oval. So far we have dropped 1,228 cluster bombs in Afghanistan, which means 248,056 of these little bombs were dropped.

Cluster bombs are a "dumb" weapon. You just drop it and hope it hits where you want, but they have a problem. Not all of those little bombs go off and they lay on the ground and become land mines. With a 5% dud rate that is about 12,028 land mines laying around waiting to kill some little kid picking it up.

As I have told you in the past in other columns we, the United States of America decided to paint these "little bombs" the same color as the food packets we dropped to feed those starving Afghan Kids. Now you want to tell me we are not Terrorists?

Now I understand why this Pentagon spokesman, Jim Wilkinson doesn't want to admit that we are killing kids. Heck the guy probably has his own kids and it is real hard to sit at dinner looking at your own kids and then picture in your mind what we are doing to the children in Afghanistan.

If you read this report at (http://www.hrw.org) you will read "Shepherds, farmers, and children collecting firewood have been common victims in Afghanistan" Lets face it, you drop thousands of little brightly colored land mines all over a country and you are going to get some little kids to blow off their legs or arms, maybe blind them, and if there isn't help right there they will bleed to death.

Now it is true that America drops thousands of leaflets warning the Afghans to stay away from the unexploded bomblets, but you have to be able to read for that to help and girls were not allowed to go to school and really who knows if the leaflet is written in the language those particular people read.

If you are in the Pentagon though you have to come up with every excuse you can think of because you know that your own troops are going to come across exploded children from time to time and you have to tell those young people in the army that it "isn't your fault," but the Talibans'.

But just like every war fought those same troops will have the vision of those little bodies in their heads till the day they die and as the years go by they will know that it was the United States that came up with this terrorist weapon that kills so indiscriminately.

I do understand from a military point of view, cluster bombs are a great weapon that kills lots of people, but they are not a new weapon. We have used these same weapons for years and for years we have been killing innocent little kids with them. Today, in other countries we had wars in, little children are still getting killed or maimed by our "little Bomblets."

No, we do not go back and pick up all of the live bombs that for some reason didn't go off. That would cost way too much money and it is very dangerous too, we can let the little kids do that for us.