03/28/09 – Lora Lumpe – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Laura Lumpy.
She is the author of Running Guns and the Arms Trade Revealed, a former consultant for Amnesty International and is now with the Friends Committee on National Legislation, where she is the legislative representative from the U.S. campaign to ban landmines.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing great, thanks.
That's good.
All right.
And now, so, there's two major, I guess, separate sort of issues revolving around the subject of cluster bombs.
There's international treaty to ban them, but then there's also a law that's just been passed as part of the budget that virtually bans the export of cluster bombs.
So, I guess, let's talk about that first.
What's going on there?
Sure.
Maybe, if you don't mind, I'll just start by saying, you know, the goal of the U.S. campaign to ban landmines and cluster bombs is to get the U.S. to sign the global treaty.
So, we see the legislative stuff as part of the strategy for getting the administration to sign the treaty and step up to the place where its closest allies are 100 countries.
Nearly 100 countries have signed that treaty already.
So, if you can get the American government to basically abide by the treaty anyway, just by federal laws that you get passed, then signing the treaty is no problem.
The piece of cake.
That's right.
So, as part of our strategy, then, to help show the Obama administration that this is safe, indeed imperative that they sign on to the treaty, first, we worked to restrict exports.
What your listeners need to know is the U.S. military has an arsenal of about 1 billion, with a B, of these tiny cluster submunitions.
That's not the big bomb that opens up, but it's the small bombs that a cluster bomb spits out.
And many of those fail to explode on impact with the ground as they're intended, which you might think is a good thing, except that they're still lethal, and they're waiting for some subsequent farmer or child or just, you know, any old person to come along, pick it up, jiggle it, and that could be the final little movement that the thing needed to be triggered.
So we have two challenges.
One is to make sure the U.S. doesn't export that very large arsenal of cluster submunitions, and the second is to make sure the U.S. doesn't use that very large stockpile of cluster submunitions.
So in this big budget bill that was just signed into law in mid-March, embedded in that telephone-thick size bill was one little provision that said that the U.S. could no longer export cluster submunitions if they had a dud rate of more than 1%, that is to say if more than 1% of the cluster, the small bombs within the big bomb, fail to explode on impact.
So that's good news.
That's 99.99999% of the U.S. arsenal of these weapons.
There's only one type of cluster munition that would not be banned for export, which we can talk more about if you like.
Well, yeah, let's focus right on that.
You're saying that this law that says that any cluster munitions that have a dud rate of greater than 1% can no longer be sold to any other country.
Sold or given, that's right, exported, period.
And yet there's a new kind that fits within and actually has a high enough ratio of successful detonation that they can still be exported?
Yeah.
You know, the treaty that was negotiated last year also has, in effect, exempted some weapons.
And here's what that treaty did.
It said that if a weapon has a whole set of characteristics that would not result in it posing an unreasonably high or even a high risk of harm to civilians, then the treaty basically undefined that as a cluster munition.
So it said if a weapon has a very small number of submunitions, the system that the U.S. has used most commonly, something called the multiple launch rocket system with a fragmentation warhead.
It spits out one push of a button, sends out 12 rockets from the multiple launch rocket launcher.
Each of those 12 rockets have 600-plus of these little submunitions that are about the size of a D-cell battery with a ribbon loop on the end.
So one push of a button sends out about 7,000 of these small bomblets.
Of those, about 10 percent, and that's a conservative estimate, will fail to explode on impact.
So what you're going to have is some 600, 700 of these little battery-sized objects with a ribbon loop on the end, very curious-looking object, very interesting to a kid.
You'd want to pick it up and fling it around on your fingertip, and that's exactly the arming mechanism for these things.
So that's the typical.
That's what we really, really, really must make sure the U.S. doesn't use and doesn't export, and that's the bulk of our arsenal.
And that's what our government used in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and also I remember the New York Times headline, emergency export of cluster munitions to Israel in the middle of their war against Lebanon in 2006.
You know, that's what actually got me into this particular work.
Really?
That New York Times story?
Yeah, that particular New York Times story.
Emergency export.
If your readers are not familiar with it, it sounded very much like in the middle of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in south Lebanon, it sounded very much like the U.S. was going to make a, quote-unquote, emergency resupply shipment of cluster munitions.
In the last 72 hours of that war, Israel rained down some 4 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon.
An estimated 800,000 to a million remained on the ground and hanging in trees, et cetera, after the war ended.
So now about 300 people have been killed or wounded since the war's end, including about 50 deminers.
These weapons are incredibly touchy and lethal.
They're the most feared and hated kind of unexploded ordnance that deminers deal with.
Well, there's an article in the Daily Star today about a 10-year-old kid that lost a leg and a hand.
It's really an amazing story.
I guess Americans don't usually get a chance to hear things like this, but according to the translation in the Daily Star anyway, the kid said, Yeah, so I was out taking advantage of the springtime, playing in the field, and there were these pretty yellow flowers everywhere, and then the next thing I knew I felt my body being ripped apart, he said, a 10-year-old kid.
Yeah.
You know what?
We led a speaker's tour through the Midwest in October.
One of the speakers was a now 17-year-old young man from Afghanistan who lost both his legs to a U.S. cluster submunition in late 2001, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and he had the one sentence that summed it all up.
If you had these in your country, you would ban them in an instant.
So fortunately for us, we're ignorant of these weapons.
We're ignorant of the lasting threat of having, in effect, landmines gathered willy-nilly around our homes, our gardens, our schools, our playgrounds, etc., and just think about what that would mean to you and your family, your quality of life, your peace of mind.
It would all be a thing of the past.
So of course, if we had these in our country, as Suraj said, we would ban them like that.
Well, so this is a really significant step then, the Congress and the President.
What's left for them to implement for them to basically be going by the treaty, even though having not signed it and ratified it?
Right.
Youth.
So the budget bill included a provision that restricted exports, but so far the Pentagon still insists that they must maintain the right to use these weapons.
They say that they provide significant force multiplier and protections to U.S. troops.
I was at the treaty signing in Oslo in December, and there were 18 survivors of clustered munitions at the treaty signing, and 16 of those 18 were affected by U.S. clustered munitions.
We've been the biggest user of these weapons in the world, in the history of the world.
And so we need to make sure that the U.S. never again uses these weapons.
So that's the second part.
And to deal with that, we have a piece of legislation that Senator Feinstein, Senator Leahy, and nine other Senate colleagues introduced in mid-February of this year called the Cluster Munition Civilian Protection Act of 2009, and that bill would prohibit use of these weapons along the same criteria that were just legislated around prohibitions on exports.
So if they're not safe for our allies to use, they're not safe for our troops to use either.
Well, and that's the thing today, right?
Today's the National Call-in Day in support of that?
Yeah, we have a National Call-in Day we've organized called Give Cluster Bombs the Boot, the National Call-in Day to the Senate, and we've got information up on the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Bombs webpage, which is www.uscbl.org.
And you'll find it if you just type in Google Cluster Bombs the Boot, you'll come up with lots of different organizations who've picked this up and are running with it.
And the Call-in Day we're focusing on today because we're trying to generate a lot of calls on one day, but our call-in number will be open for the whole week.
So I encourage any of your listeners to get online, see which states in particular, which senators we're focusing on because many states, both senators have already signed on.
For instance, all of the left coast, Oregon, Washington, California, all taken care of, Vermont and Maine, all the senators already on board.
For every other state, either we need both or we need one of the senators.
So I really encourage your listeners to check out the Quick Talking Points.
It'll take five minutes at most to call your two senators.
We've got a handy-dandy little script there that you can use, and it'll really help a lot.
We're trying to run up co-sponsorship on this bill.
We've already got 24 co-sponsors, so nearly a quarter of the Senate.
We're working to get 30 co-sponsors within the next month, and we think that'll really show President Obama that this is not only a safe issue for him to take on, but an imperative issue for him to take on.
And for those who are listening to this on MP3 later, again, it doesn't matter if it's on Monday, Tuesday, or Friday, or next week, if you can just call your senators and let them know that, well, this is the kind of thing that would help convince you to support them the next time they're trying to get reelected.
Right.
Or it would be the kind of thing that would lead you to oppose them the next time they're trying to get reelected if they don't sign on.
I think it's safe to say, like the old cliche, you can't make them see the light, but you can make them feel the heat.
That's right.
Well, yes, any time they can call, write, raise it with their senator.
And there's a companion bill in the House, too, but we're focused on the Senate because when the President signs this treaty, he'll have to send it to the Senate for advice and consent.
So we're really working on the Senate now, both as kind of a push-me and a pull-you.
We're using them to show Obama that it's safe and desirable for him to sign the treaty, and then once he signs it, we will have to continue working on the Senate for ratification.
I'm not a military strategist, but it seems to me like these things are basically useless.
I mean, it seems like you would drop cluster bombs on the British Army all lined up in the field or something like that.
But otherwise, they're not anti-tank weapons or anything, right?
They're only good for killing people with, but where do you ever have a lot of soldiers all grouped together in one place?
They were actually developed as anti-tank weapons, which is part of what makes them extremely feared and deadly to civilians and to deminers.
So the charge, the blast in these is a much more potent blast than in interpersonal landmines.
The idea there really was to simply maim a person, a soldier, thereby slowing up the opposing army.
These weapons were largely, the cluster munitions were invented to take on tank or armor formations on an open plain, as you said.
So it's a higher charge blast, but as you asked, I mean, you said soldiers are not lining up neatly.
Well, tanks are a thing of pretty much the past, and as you know, warfare increasingly is fought in and on the margins of cities.
And so if you use these weapons, you are really seeding terror in a city or in a populated area.
Well, that's a really important point, how much more deadly these things are lying around than landmines, which are already an absolute nightmare in many places in the world.
Absolutely.
Now, as far as their use in Afghanistan and Iraq, are they still littering the ground undetonated like they are in Lebanon?
Yeah, they're still littering the ground.
They have not been used since 2003.
So the U.S. used them in the invasion stage of the Iraq war, and that's the last time they used them.
And part of the reason that they're not still using them gets back to the question you just asked, which is how can these things actually be useful?
Not only do they threaten the local civilian population that U.S. forces or any military forces are trying to win over as part of a counterinsurgency operation, but they also directly threaten your own troops.
One of our most effective spokespeople for the U.S. campaign to ban landmines and cluster bombs, sadly, is a woman named Lynn Braddock from Portland, Oregon, whose son Travis was a Marine killed in 2003, July 2003, by one of our own cluster submunitions while clearing a farmer's field of these weapons after the U.S. Army had laid them down.
And the U.S. was clearing them at that point because U.S. troops were moving through those areas, and U.S. troops also obviously come in contact with these weapons and are, at a minimum, slowed down and, in the worst case, killed by the weapons as well.
So they really are a very, very questionable military utility ever, but certainly today.
These were Cold War-era weapons that were built for a kind of warfare that doesn't exist, industrialized, mechanized warfare on an open plain.
These were never intended to be used in a populated area.
And our closest military allies, all of our closest and biggest NATO partners, Britain, France, Canada, Germany, and Australia and New Zealand, have all signed a treaty, pledging that they can carry out their defensive missions in the future without the use of a weapon that terrorizes the public.
Well, it's nice to know that our government is still on the same moral plane as Russia and China when it comes to everything.
Yeah, we're working on it.
One thing that I read in Freda Berrigan's article about this on Antiwar.com, I guess late last week, was that 350 people per year are still killed in Laos by these bombs left over from the Richard Nixon era.
Yeah, isn't that amazing?
And most people here are completely ignorant that the U.S. ever bombed Laos in the first place.
That's right.
Forty years later, weapons dropped on that country are still killing and maiming, as you said, several hundred people a year.
That's an outrage.
So that New York Times article is what brought me into the work.
And focusing on the situation in Laos, I mean, that just cemented the deal for me.
This is such an outrage that our thoughtless, you know, that we could leave behind such a deadly legacy.
So we're working to make sure the U.S. signs this treaty, as well as the landmines treaty, that we ratify them.
And then we're working to ensure that the U.S. government continues to provide money to clear up, especially, you know, those places where we are directly responsible for the deadly legacy of war that still continues to kill and maim people.
So we're working to make sure that demining funds are continued at a high level until the job is done.
All right, everybody, that's Laura Lumpy from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
And tell us all the contact info for people who want to get involved in contacting their congressman about this.
You bet.
We've got all this week, we've got a toll-free number, 1-800-590-6313.
That's 1-800-590-6313.
And you call that number and it will redirect you to the Senate switchboard, which is open 24 hours a day.
So even if it's after hours, call, leave a message, ask for your senator's office, leave a message telling them that you want them to co-sponsor S-416.
S-416, the Clustered Munitions Civilian Protection Act.
And to get talking points on this, you can go to uscbl.org.
That's www.uscampaigntobanlandmines.uscbl.org.
And also, you can find links from the Friends Committee on National Legislation, fcnl.org.
That's right.
That's where I am based and we coordinate the U.S. campaign.
So fcnl.org also.
Thank you.
Okay, great.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
Cheers.