The Times article by Rick Gladstone appeared on the tails of the annual report from advocacy group Cluster Munition Coalition, which found that cluster bombs have been used in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and Sudan this year.
Gladstone wrote that while the United States has not ratified the treaty, it has abided by its provisions. That’s a flat out lie, according to Greenwald, who provided a detailed and specific account of their use.
“As Americans, we should feel proud that our government, though refusing to sign the cluster ban treaty, has nonetheless ‘abided by its provisions’,” Greenwald wrote for the Intercept. “If not for the fact that this claim is totally false. The US has long been and remains one of the world’s most aggressive suppliers of cluster munitions, and has used those banned weapons itself in devastating ways.”
Greenwald went on to detail the December 2009 attack (just weeks after President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, he notes,) where the US commander-in-chief ordered a strike on al-Majala in southern Yemen which killed 35 women and children. The munitions in the attack included cluster bombs which exploded and scattered 166 “bomblets.”
He went on to detail that, five years later, as Yemen is under attack once again by the deadly cluster bombs dropped by Saudi-Arabian led forces, the bombs that have killed and wounded dozens of civilians have all been made in the United States.
“The US military [is] selling $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, despite the near-universal revulsion at such weapons,” an August 2013 Foreign Policy article quoted a Defense Department press release as stating.
“Last year, the US Air Force reportedly spent billions of dollars to purchase a batch of 4,600 cluster bombs from Textron, a New England-based arms manufacturer that also supplies munitions to Turkey, Oman and the United Arab Emirates,” the Daily Beast reported in 2011.
The first article of the Convention on Cluster Munitions explicitly states: “Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: (a) Use cluster munitions; (b) Develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, cluster munitions; (c) Assist, encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention.”
Greenwald concluded his must-read report by deeming the New York Times article “nationalistic propaganda.”
“For the NYT to tell its readers that the US — one of the leading cluster bomb states on the planet — is actually one of the countries that ‘have not yet joined the treaty but have abided by its provisions’ is nationalistic propaganda of the most extreme kind,” Greenwald wrote.
