The "great care" taken by Washington to reduce civilian casualties included the dropping of brightly-coloured, shiny cluster bombs into civilian areas for children to mistake as sweets, only for the explosive fragments to blow up, blowing away their faces, their hands, their legs, their eyes or even their lives. UNICEF estimates that at least 1.000 children - one thousand children - were mutilated for life in this way.
I really don't know what to believe anymore.
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posted
I don't think it's true, Synesthesia, but mainly because it's in Pravda.
P.S. I don't know if it is more depressing that they would say this about us because they are afraid they won't get back the money Saddam Hussein owed them.
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See, I was reading the left and saw a couple of articles that left me confused on their allegiance. One spoke of Americans killing 320 "thugs", the other spoke of Fallujah, "10 wankers erased".
Though I now have to wonder about the story my husband tells about Israelis dropping exploding pencils into Egyptian schoolyards is true.
P.S. Reminds me of that castration mine whose existence I could never prove.
posted
You don't seriously believe that, do you, Synesthesia? I mean, there are links to news articles about Russian time machines and Jesus Christ being born in Russia. The writing style is hate-filled, inflammatory rhetoric that makes no attempt to sound impartial. You'd get better news from tabloids.
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quote:The "great care" taken by Washington to reduce civilian casualties included the dropping of brightly-coloured, shiny cluster bombs into civilian areas for children to mistake as sweets, only for the explosive fragments to blow up
Perhaps our intention was not to have children mistake the bomblets as sweets, but if they were painted, let's say, bright orange (one possible color used by the military to mark ordinance)...that would fit the PRAVDA description pretty closely, wouldn't it?
It's always good to read newspapers from overseas, or listen to other country's radio and television broadcasts. Our news is definitely filtered. So is "theirs," but differently. Obviously, it is foolish to believe everything you read or see or hear, but "the truth is out there." You just have to get it from a dozen different sources (where have we all heard this reference from before!?!).
“I went with my cousins to see the place where NATO bombed. As we walked I saw something yellow – someone told us it was a cluster bomb. One of us took it and put it into a well. Nothing happened. Later I went back to the bomb and put it in this position [vertical]. We began talking about taking the bomb to play with and then I just put it somewhere and it exploded. The boy near me died and I was thrown a metre in the air. The boy who died was 14 – he had his head cut off. I was near him and another boy tried to help me….”
An interview with a 13-year-old boy in Pristina Hospital who had recently undergone a double leg amputation, 26 August 1999. From Rae McGrath, “Cluster Bombs”, Landmine Action, 2000.
So, not from the recent invasion/military action, but it does help illustrate the "Candy Coloured Bomblet" issue.
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I couldn't find "castration bomb" or "castration mine in Snopes. Therefore, it has to be true. But the ones I was thinking of were used by the Germans in WWII. And the pencil bombs would have been before 1976.
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During the Afghan, um, is war the right word? Anyway, when the USA was bombing Afghanistan we were dropping HDRs, Humanitarian Daily Rations, which were bright yellow squares, and someone realized that we were also dropping cluster bombs. Not all of the bomblets in a cluster bomb explode on impact, and they are also bright yellow, but can-shaped. The color of the HDRs was changed to a pale orange. I'm sure that's the basis of truth this story came from. They didn't look at all like candy, but we were telling the population that we were dropping food and it was bright yellow.
Most of the stories have aged off the web, but here's one that was originally on Reuters:
It isn't even the "original" newspaper Pravda, which doesn't seem to have an on-line version.
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