277 Million Boston Bombings
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/277_million_boston_bombings_20130423/
277 Million Boston Bombings
Posted on Apr 23, 2013
By Robert Scheer
The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim is the way The New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror. But are we as a society prepared to be judged by that standard?
The presidents deployment of drones that all too often treat innocent civilians as collateral damage comes quickly to mind. It should also be pointed out that the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and, as our killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese demonstrated, those weapons are inherently, by the presidents definition, weapons of terror. But it is Americas role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our countrys refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the worlds nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.
To this day, antipersonnel weaponsthe technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Bostonmaim and kill farmers and their children in the Southeast Asian killing fields left over from our countrys past experiment in genocide.
An experiment that as a sideshow to our obsession with replacing French colonialism in Vietnam involved dropping 277 million cluster bomblets on Laos between 1964 and 1973.
The whole point of a cluster weapon is to target an area the size of several football fields with the same bits of maiming steel that did so much damage in Boston.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been active in attempting to clear land of remaining bomblets, estimates 10,000 Lao civilian casualties to date from such weapons. As many as twenty-seven million unexploded bomblets remain in the country, according to the committee.
unhappycamper comment: For more cluster bomb pics, google images: cluster bombing