Breaking
News
Congress Permanently Bans Cluster Bomb Exports
March 11, 2009
 President Obama will sign a law today that will
make permanent a ban on nearly all cluster bomb exports from the
United States. Congress included the export ban in an omnibus budget
bill that passed the Senate last night. This provision will move
the U.S. one step closer to the position of the nearly 100 nations--including
our closest NATO allies--that signed a treaty banning cluster munitions
in December.
The legislation states that cluster munitions can only be exported if they leave
behind less than one percent of their submunitions as duds, and if the receiving
country agrees that cluster munitions "will not be used where civilians
are known to be present." Only a very tiny fraction of the cluster munitions
in the U.S. arsenal meet the one percent standard. This export ban was first
enacted in a similar budget bill in December 2007, but that law mandated it for
only one year. The law was then extended for six months in the fall of
2008. Yesterday’s omnibus bill, H.R. 1105, extends the ban indefinitely.
U.S.-exported cluster bombs were most recently used by Israel in Southern Lebanon,
where dud rates were reportedly as high as 40 percent; hundreds of civilians
and deminers have been killed or maimed since the fighting ended in 2006.
Now
Congress needs to take the next step and
ban U.S. use of these deadly weapons. Nearly one in four senators have already
cosponsored the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act (S. 416), introduced
one month ago, which would stop the military from using virtually all of the
cluster bombs in its vast arsenal by applying this same one percent standard
to U.S. use. Do your senators support this bill? If not, urge them
to co-sponsor today. If
it's unacceptable to export high dud-rate cluster bombs, then it's unacceptable
to use them. Growing Senate support for S. 416 will show President Obama
that the U.S. public stands with the rest of the world in supporting a ban on
cluster bombs.
As 17 year old Soraj Ghulam Habib from Herat, Afghanistan, who lost both legs
to a U.S. cluster submunition in 2001 observes, "You'd ban them for sure,
if you had them here." Click
here to
see what a cluster bomb would do to your neighborhood.
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