A Gradual Shift Comes Clearer As Hillary Clinton Gains More Sanders' Supporters

[Divernan]

41. Nor do brown children maimed by HRC's pro-clusterbomb vote!

While a senator, she voted against the US joining the international consortium of countries banning the use of cluster bombs. Then she doubled down on that vote while she was secretary of state, even after having visited an artificial limb center in Laos and being schooled with in-her-face evidence of the maiming, mutilation and murder of innocent civilians by cluster bombs, long after formal, US funded hostilities have ended.Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was confronted by a dramatic legacy of U.S. warmaking during her recent visit to Laos.

There, she ignored the ongoing manufacture and sale of cluster bombs by her buddies in the MIC, and dismissed the continuing cluster bomb maiming, mutiliation and murder of civilians as simply remnants of the Vietnam War.

“At an artificial-limb center, Mrs. Clinton met a nineteen-year-old who lost his forearms and eyesight when a bomb, dropped by the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War and unexploded for decades, finally blew up three years ago,” the New York Times reported.

“The young man, Phongsavath Sonilya, gesticulated with his arm stumps as he explained to Mrs. Clinton that more than three decades after the end of the war, not enough had been done to stop the use of cluster bombs and to support those who may be injured in the future by bombs still lying unexploded in the countryside,” the New York Times reports. “The United States has not signed the Convention on Cluster Bombs."

More than 100 countries have signed the treaty, and more than fifty have ratified it, but the United States stubbornly refuses to join in. The U.S. stance betrays a callousness toward the people whose lives are so severely affected by cluster bombs.

“Farmers tilling their land are often maimed or killed when striking ‘bombies’ that settle below ground,” Tom Fawthrop writes for Foreign Policy in Focus. “Children are frequent victims because they are attracted to the bombies' bright colors and odd shapes.”

Clinton called the artificial limb center she visited “a painful reminder of the Vietnam War era” and added that “the international community will join us in our efforts to bring this legacy of the Vietnam War to a safe end,” as a prelude to announcing a tepid increase in the appallingly modest U.S. handout ($5 million in 2010) to clean up its mess.

- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/clinton_should_have_u_s_sign_cluster_bomb_treaty.html#sthash.aQ8xFFR7.dpuf