The Biden administration is drawing outrage after announcing it will send cluster bombs to Ukraine as part of a new weapons package. When deployed, cluster munitions spread smaller “bomblets” across a wide area and regularly kill civilians, either on initial impact or from unexploded segments that go off later. Their use has been banned by 123 countries that signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the United States, Russia and Ukraine are not signatories to the treaty. This comes as a new Human Rights Watch report documents how Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munitions, including by Ukrainian forces. We speak to Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, who calls the Biden administration’s decision “appalling,” and to writer and activist Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, who says the U.S.’s military hypocrisy demonstrates a “willingness to sacrifice human beings and human rights on behalf of [its] strategic interests.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.