The Indiscriminate Rain of Cluster Bombs

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The United States sent cluster munitions to Ukraine, bombs banned by 123 countries due to how they kill and maim indiscriminately over a wide area and for years after a conflict. This week on Intercepted, Marc Garlasco — the military adviser at PAX, a Dutch nongovernmental organization where he works to protect civilians in armed conflict, joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain to discuss how cluster munitions kill civilians during war and long after, and why their use — even by the United States — should be considered a war crime.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Jeremy Scayhill.
0:37.0	And I'm Mataza Hussein.
0:39.0	Well, Maz, there's a lot of talk right now in the United States and around the world about the escalating war in Ukraine.
0:46.0	There's a pretty dramatic situation that's been unfolding in Crimea and in the waters surrounding Crimea.
0:52.0	And a lot of questions about where all of this is headed.
0:56.0	In the US media, for the first time in a long, long time, there was discussion of munitions called cluster bombs.
1:03.0	And the reason that this was being talked about is because the Biden administration very publicly acknowledged that it was going to be giving.
1:12.0	And in fact, has started to give Ukraine a fresh batch of cluster bombs.
1:17.0	And these are really, really devastating indiscriminate weapons.
1:21.0	They're essentially flying landmines that are dropped down over large areas.
1:27.0	And they scatter into tiny bomblets.
1:30.0	And as a young reporter, Maz, in 1999, I was in what was then called Yugoslavia.
1:38.0	But at the time, it was just Serbia and Montenegro.
1:41.0	But I was in Serbia when the United States was leading a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia.
1:48.0	This was what was referred to at the time as the Kosovo War.
1:52.0	And the NATO bombing wasn't just happening in Kosovo, which at the time was a southern province of Serbia,
1:59.0	but was happening throughout Serbia and parts of Montenegro.
2:03.0	And in May of 1999, I believe it was May 7, 1999, NATO warplanes conducted an attack on the southern Serbian city of Niche.
2:14.0	And the alleged target of the attack was supposedly the airport in Niche.
2:19.0	But they dropped cluster bombs that then ended up hitting basically in the center of the city.
2:26.0	And the bombs scattered and just blasted everywhere.
	...

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