I don't have complete confidence in HRW. This could be more propaganda. If true, it's disappointing that Russia has come down to our level.

Justin Raimondo over at antiwar.com, yesterday called HRW out for shamefully downplaying atrocities committed by the Georgian military. He writes:

The blatant media bias displayed by the "mainstream" news organizations is more than matched by the shameful cover-up of Georgian atrocities by the mainline "human rights" organizations, first and foremost Human Rights Watch. In the most brazen display of willful ignorance since Walter Duranty overlooked the Soviet gulags, HRW spokeswoman Anna Neistat told the Guardian that Ossetian claims of Georgian atrocities were "suspicious":

"The figure of 2,000 people killed is very doubtful. Our findings so far do not in any way confirm the Russian statistics. On the contrary, they suggest the numbers are exaggerated."

Neistat avers that no more than 44 were killed and around 200 were wounded in the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali. Perhaps she should talk to International Red Cross spokeswoman Anna Nelson, who reports area hospitals "overflowing" with the dead and the wounded.

.........Seems to me that HRW has been co-opted.

Cluster bombs should be banned by treaty. When is the US going to get onboard?

Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said today that it has obtained evidence proving that the weapons, which were banned by more than 100 countries in May, (BUT NOT THE USA RUSSIA OR GEORGIA) have killed at least 11 people so far during the conflict in the Caucasus. ( AND SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND IN IRAQ AND AFGANISTAN)

Didn't Israel use cluster bombs on Lebanese civilians during its most recent assault on that nation? Does anyone know where those statistics are located?

I'll check at HRW and report back.

This is from Human Rights News in February of this year:

"Israel fired huge numbers of cluster bombs into Lebanon, leaving bomblets that have killed and maimed almost 200 people since the war ended," said Steve Goose, director of the Arms division at Human Rights Watch. "Only a global treaty that bans cluster munitions will prevent such tragedies in the future."

At a five-day conference which starts in Wellington, New Zealand on February 18, 2008 more than 100 countries will discuss the text of a treaty to ban the production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. Israel's cluster attacks on Lebanon in 2006 played a major role in sparking the treaty process that began in Oslo last year and is scheduled to finish later in 2008.

I believe Congress has already rejected the terms of this new treaty. That would be the DEMOCRATIC-led Congress.

The above is not quite current. Feinstein, Leahy, et al are planning to get a Senate floor vote in December to give to "President Obama" after Jan. 20, '09. Perhaps pie-in-the-sky but it's a start. Obama has indicated support while McCain and Clinton have not.

This is a recent post from the US Coalition to Ban Landmines:

Senators, Congressman Call on U.S. to Sign Cluster Bomb Ban Treaty

A few days after most of the world's nations agreed to stop producing and using cluster munitions, Senators Dianne Feinstein (CA) and Patrick Leahy (VT), and Representative James P. McGovern (MA) introduced a joint resolution calling on the United States to sign on to the Convention on Cluster Munitions when it becomes open for signature in December 2008.

The treaty also requires signatories to destroy their cluster munitions stockpiles within eight years. The United States refused to sign on to the agreement.

"The United States should not sit on the sidelines," Senator Feinstein said. "The United States should join the 111 other countries that have endorsed this effort, and we should take a leadership role in bringing other nations on board. Doing so is consistent with our values and our national security interests.

Senator Leahy said, "One of the many lessons of wars today is that so many are fought in the midst of civilian populations. Far more can and should be done to reduce civilian casualties and the anger and resentment they cause toward our own troops. Cluster munitions, like landmines and even poison gas, have some military utility. But weapons that are scattered over a wide area, which often fail to detonate until triggered by unsuspecting civilians, often children, have no place in the 21st Century."

"Cluster munitions kill indiscriminately," Representative McGovern said. "The United States should be leading the way in eliminating these weapons; instead, the Bush Administration is dragging its feet. That is not acceptable. I commend the dozens of nations that have signed the treaty, and look forward to working with my colleagues and the next Administration to add the United States to that list.

The resolution is co-sponsored by Senators Ben Cardin (MD), Bernard Sanders (VT) Russ Feingold (WI.), and Sherrod Brown (OH).

I don't trust HRW either. They were founded as an essentially anti-Soviet group and their coverage of Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon was very biased towards Israel. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Russia was using cluster bombs.

What I find amazing is their policy statement on Iraq:

http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/iraq/hrwpolicy.htm

"Human Rights Watch does not make judgments about the decision whether to go to war - about whether a war complies with international law against aggression. We care deeply about the humanitarian consequences of war, but we avoid judgments on the legality of war itself because they tend to compromise the neutrality needed to monitor most effectively how the war is waged - that is, compliance with international humanitarian law - and because they often require political and security assessments that are beyond our expertise. Whether or not one favors launching a war, whether or not a war is legally justified, we believe that agreement should be possible on the necessity of waging war in a way that minimizes harm to noncombatants, as international humanitarian law requires."

So they will ignore the legality of the war itself to instead focus on the legality of how the war is fought. It's almost like like the way an 18th century war was fought, "alright, you get your volley, now we get ours. No cheating."

Notice how this logic automatically makes it easier to call the weaker opponent a war criminal if their weapons systems are more crude and indiscriminate, or if they adopt guerrilla or terrorist tactics. The stronger power has more leeway for their conduct if they don't have to worry about the legality of their war of aggression.

Yet they also say,

"The sole exception that Human Rights Watch has made to its neutrality on the decision whether to go to war is in the case of humanitarian intervention - the military invasion of a country to protect its people. We have advocated military intervention in limited circumstances when the people of a country are facing genocide or comparable mass slaughter. Horrific as Saddam Hussein's human rights record is, it does not today appear to meet this high threshold - in contrast, for example, with his behavior during the 1988 Anfal genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. "

But surely of invasion of Iraq is a "comparable mass slaughter" to the Anfal campaign? Why isn't HRW advocating military intervention against the US in Iraq? Their selectively use of international law is the main reason I distrust HRW.

bushiswmd,

The interesting thing about HRW and Israel's use of cluster bombs in Lebanon was their bias. When other countries use cluster bombs they accuse them of deliberately trying to kill civilians, but not Israel.

"Jonathan Cook, a British correspondent living permanently in Nazareth, Israel, accuses HRW of distorting its findings to placate the Israel lobby. As an example, he quotes a post-2006 Lebanon War interview between the New York Times and a senior HRW researcher, Peter Bouckaert, over the report "Fatal strikes", in which HRW provides evidence that Israel fired indiscriminately on Lebanese civilians during the fighting. Bouckaert fails to concentrate on HRW's findings of war crimes in Lebanon, digressing: "I mean, it's perfectly clear that Hezbollah is directly targeting civilians, and that their aim is to kill Israeli civilians. We don't accuse the Israeli army of deliberately trying to kill civilians. Our accusation, clearly stated in the report, is that the Israeli army is not taking the necessary precautions to distinguish between civilian and military targets". Cook accuses Bouckaert of claiming to know the intention of the two sides, labeling those of Israel as benign and Hezbollah as malign, in direct opposition to what Cook believes to be the evidence that he then quotes. HRW responded that it had been attacked from both sides, following which Cook accused it of still denying Lebanon the right to defend itself."

There sure have been a lot of tales in our Israeli controlled media that smell like Daddy Bush's 'incubator' fabrications.

Iraq, in the days when Saddam Hussien was a US/CIA puppet imported thousands of cluster bombs, under the watchful eye of Donald Rumsfeld. Iraq then used said weapons against the people of Iran, at the direction of the US, and with the assistance of the CIA.

The US is the single largest maker and stockpiler of cluster munitions,and makes a wide variety of models for deployment via missile, artillery, and aircraft.

Most of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand are still littered with hundreds of thousands of cluster bomb sub-munitions that were dropped illegally on those countries during the Viet Nam war, all while Henry Kissenger was Secretary of State. As far as I remember the US never formally declared war on Laos, Cambodia or Thailand.

And let us not forget the cluster bomb munitions that wre dropped on Afghanistan, DELIBERATELY painted the same color yellow that air-dropped US 'humanitarian aid' packages were. Guess how many innocents died or were maimed in Afghanistan when they thought they were going to get something to eat...

Russia has used cluster munitions enthusiastically during it's Chechen conflict, usually on civilian areas.

And Israel does not produce it's own cluster bombs. They are given to them almost free of charge by ...the Good Old USofA.

So I would have to say that any country that used or uses cluster bombs is in violation of the Geneva Conventions and are using Weapons of Mass Destruction.

To hear that Russia is using them is no more news than hearing that the US is water-boarding more people who were randomly snatched off the street in Baghdad.

The first Marine to die in Lebanon in 1982 was a man named Reagan who stepped on a cluster bomb (CBU) at BIA. I was there. The CBU came from an Israeli 155mm howitzer round. After what Israel did to Lebanon in 2006, including the indescriminate use of cluster bombs, it is strange to read comments about Russia's use of cluster bombs.

Rupert's Newspeak

"MOSCOW, August 15 (Itar-Tass) – Moscow believes that Fox Television demonstrated an utterly impudent behavior during an interview with victims of Georgia's punitive operation in the unrecognized republic of South Ossetia, Alexei Gromov, a deputy chief of the Kremlin administration staff told Itar-Tass.

During a live talk show Friday, the anchorman interviewed a 12-year-old American girl who had turned up in South Ossetia during the conflict and her aunt.

In an apparent expectation of the girl's frankness about the horrible experience she had lived through in South Ossetia, he asked his guests to speak about the events they had seen right on the spot.

The girl and her aunt repeated several times that is was horrible in South Ossetia, indeed, because Georgia dropped bombs there.

They also said they were convinced that all the blame for the conflict should go to Georgia and they expressed many thanks to Russian peacekeepers in the zone of conflict.

Right after these words, the anchorman cut off the interview and switched to ad spots.

The Americans who had stayed in South Ossetia right from the outbreak of the conflict were thus denied an opportunity to say anything more.

"This kind of conduct is a manifestation of utter impudence," Gromov said."

Russia does NOT use cluster bombs. This is a propaganda story, just as the entire Georgian story is. Georgia has committed War CRIMES! Just like the U.S. taught it to do. C,mon people. Stop being Sheeple! Basically, Russia just fought a war with the U.S. and We got our asses kicked because we deserved it. Innocent people, like in all wars are the ones to take the brunt of the suffering. The U.S., is without a doubt, the greatest threat to World peace since Nazi Germany.

Isn't Human Rights Watch funded by George Soros? Anti-Soviet financier who made a lot of money in the commodity market and backs Obama?

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/HRW.html

Georgia surely had Russian cluster bombs from before the 'Rose' revolution. They have a factory that makes RU-25 bombers.
How may cluster bombs has Bush and Olmert sent them?
HRW might be right about finding clusterbombs but who fired them is the question. What invading army wants to step on those things? Perhaps a retreating army might want to leave a surprise...

According to the sales brochures and profits of major military weapons manufacturers it is always the civilians that are the enemy that must be destroyed. They are the most unprotected, with no safety provided by training or by equipment or mobility. If you are buying weapons and want the most kills per buck, then you too will go for civilian killers, the greatest profit making invention and policy used and approved by all major governments from the twentieth century. Kill civilians for years after the war. Irradiate and poison their germ plasm. Blow up their children. Explosively mine their agricultural fields. All out war is a conflict effort to remove part of human kind you do not like permanently from the gene pool. Let your surge and escalation leave indelible marks on your target victims nation. Evict your choice of weakest link from their only home in the Universe of all time and space. May their kind be blighted and you can take their share of the future for yourselves.

LIES is all we get these days out of israel and america.
Lets see Poland will get the shit kicked out of it next for warming up to america.
I can't wait till some asshole country attacks IRAN and as Russia has said several times don't do it or else. Better have a few gallons of gas put away for that one. Time to buy that small motorcycle I was looking at, gets 70 mpg.

So the policy by practice of any modern military is to cripple the opposing society, be it the taliban, muslim shite or sunni, lebanese civilians, vietnamese peasants by industrial scale bombing, long lived mines , poisons , radioactive isotopes, chemicals , defoliants. Since all infrastructure and population supports an armed capability in some way, all civilians are the main target. Since such harsh treatment may bring about inter-generational revenge conflict in the future, the policy is to prevent the birth , recovery and growth of future generations. The policy of all major governments and military manufacturers today is genocide.

Only Israelis (Jews) and possibly Americans are allowed to use cluster bombs, without criticism, with impunity. etc.etc.

Russians = evil doers (du jour)
Anyone whom Israel [or America] favours (du jour) = good, pure, innocent, and holy.

Geeze, y'all need to get with the programmink! Ja vol!

your comments are sometimes much more eye-opening than the articles themselves.

I'm very fascinated with Eastern Europe and have been reading a lot of books about Russia. I just finished one about Rasputin.

I did have some doubts about the West's partisanship towards Georgia. I know that Georgia wants to join NATO. I also read a few articles in today's Seattle P-I and I was disappointed at the lack of mention of Georgia's part in the struggle. It's a Cold War scenario again; the U.S. backs their Western ally while Russia backs theirs.

I'm not sure how democratic Russia is right now. I have been watching several videos via the Socialist Bulletin about the left's current struggle there. http://www.socialistproject.ca/inthenews/kagarlitsky.html

That's really interesting about HRW. I did suspect some things. I went to their website for a report once and did notice that they seemed to have a Western bias. I guess I naively dismissed that because it advocates human rights. The article I was actually looking for there was a very detailed report of the current juvenile detention system in Brazil. I can't say I looked at other reports much, but I do wonder about its focus on Brazil and the relationship between that and Lula de Silva, the left-leaning president. I don't think it was really a biased report or anything; I thought it was very good. from your comments I'm sort of guessing that maybe it's not the reports themselves but the countries they choose to report on?

http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2008/08/12/1980/ is another good source on the current Georgian question. it describes Saakashvili's desire to join NATO and impress the West and a different perspective on this issue.

"'Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity should be respected.'Had George Bush said what he said about Georgia from Beijing about Serbia as well, this is how he would have approached the so-called independence of Kosovo. The truth, of course, is far from this. The US was the first country to recognise the new "state" when Kosovo seceded from Serbia last spring. Yet, Bush now has the audacity to talk about the territorial integrity of Georgia. The policies of imperialism will have pride of place in the annals of hypocrisy.

The war over the issue of South Ossetia has three political dimensions. The first is an entirely local question. Certain peoples (in particular the Ossets and the Abhaz) that were part of Georgia under the Soviet Union have, since the dissolution of the latter, declared loud and clear that they do not wish to live under Georgian rule any longer. Georgia, in contrast, wants to keep these peoples forcibly tied to its domination. Thus the rights of these peoples to self-determination are violated by Georgia."

Mikheil Saakashvili:
War Criminal
A politician's hubris causes untold human suffering
by Justin Raimondo
Amid all the geopolitical analyses and ideological posturing on the occasion of the Three-Day War between Russia and Georgia, we are losing sight of the very real human costs of this conflict: thousands of civilians killed and grievously wounded, a city, Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, in ruins, and the hopes and dreams of the inhabitants of this largely overlooked backwater dashed on the rocks of a politician's hubris.

That politician is Mikheil Saakashvili, the all too glib president of Georgia, whose slickness is so apparent that it seems to leave an oily residue on every word he utters. The decidedly apolitical, non-ideological Web site Reliefweb put it this way:

"The place that has suffered most is South Ossetia which is home to both ethnic Ossetians and Georgians, the latter accounting for about a third of the population. The destruction there has been appalling and it looks as though many hundreds of civilians have died, in the first place as a result of the initial Georgian assault of August 7-8. Gosha Tselekhayev, an Ossetian interpreter in Tskhinvali with whom I spoke by telephone on August 10 said, 'I am standing in the city center, but there's no city left.'

"Ossetians fleeing the conflict zone talk of Georgian atrocities and the indiscriminate killing of civilians."

They may be talking of Georgian atrocities, but we in the West have not heard them – nor will we, given the bias of our media, which is in thrall to the Georgia lobby and its U.S. government sponsors. The "mainstream" has already settled on a narrative to explain events in the Caucasus, and nothing short of a South Ossetian holocaust will wake them from their hypnotic state. The Russians, in their view, have got to be the bad guys, i.e., the aggressors. Anything that doesn't fit into that storyline is cut from the script. Yet, as Reliefweb reports:

etc
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13304

Putin has renewed Russia's membership in the war criminal club. Bu$h the inferior and Shotgun Dick are keeping the USA in good standing with Israel as Gold members. Germany has been letting their membership lapse since Platinum member Adolph died.

Membership has it's privileges!

We can't control what Russia does. We can, as a democracy and for whatever Democracy means, control what we do. It is crucial to bring to mind our proclamation that ours is a government of, by, and for the people. It means that we are responsible for what our government does; that terrorist attacks on our civilians are at least theoretically justified; and that sworn government officials who do not act "for the people" betray that which they have given their word and oath they would protect. It means something or it does not.

I think that the way to judge HRW would be to look at their coverage of Israel's
latest invasion of Lebanon. If they are, as they say, interested in the conduct
of the war, then Israel would have to be condemned, as there wasnt much that Lebanon
and Hizbollah could actually do until Israel put troops on the ground.

If it turns out that HRW actually supported Israel, then we can KNOW that they are
no less biased than the corporate media, and their statements should be treated
similar to statements issued from Tel Aviv or from the whitehouse.

In response to Galen, August 15th at 4:24 pm, who cited "hundreds of thousands of cluster bomb sub-munitions that were dropped illegally" on Laos, Cambodia and Thailand – many seem to forget that Vietnam itself remains one of the countries most affected by cluster bombs in the world even today. Since 1975, when the war ended and Vietnam began a long and difficult post-war recovery effort, more than 100,000 Vietnamese citizens, about a third of them children, have been killed or injured by wartime ordnance scattered on the ground or buried just under the surface. Estimates based on available survey data indicate that some 30 to 40 percent of those casualties were caused by cluster munitions. Just recently, on July 10 in Quang Tri Province, near the former DMZ, three boys ages 12, 13 and 14 were killed by cluster munitions while they were tending water buffalo. – CHUCK SEARCY, VVMF / Project RENEW (www.landmines.org.vn)

Several comments on this article do, unfortunately, confirm what I hae thouht for a long time ( well before the Israeli attack on Lebanon). Human Rights Watch is SADLY not nutral in their judgements.

Apparently, Georgia considers cluster bombs fair game. According to stopclustermunitions.org, Georgia currently stockpiles cluster bombs and didn't subscribe to the Wellington Declaration. Maybe this policy is to gain favor with the gatekeepers of NATO membership.

rtdrury August 16th, 2008 9:55 pm

The overwhelmingly vast majority of the url you posted has to do with RUSSIA illegally using cluster bombs in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Georgia.

Russia, and historically the USSR, is a major producer and exporter of cluster munitions. It is thought to have a massive stockpile of cluster munitions containing hundreds of millions of submunitions. Cluster munitions of Russian/Soviet origin are reported to be in the stockpiles of at least 29 other countries. 2

The 2 refers to,
2Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cuba, Egypt, Georgia, Guinea Bissau, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Kuwait, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Ukraine, and Yemen.

YET YOU AMAZINGLY FAIL and FAIL MISERABLY TO REPORT THIS, only to state that Georgia is "reported" to have Russian cluster bombs. No one has reported that Georgia has used cluster bombs BUT more and more and more indisputable evidence is reported that Russia HAS USED CLUSTER BOMBS ON GEORGIAN CIVILIANS and you totally ignore this. You "progressives" actually go out of your way to applaud there use by the Russians.

Your LIES are as bad as dakotadan, he stridently states that "Russia does NOT use cluster bombs", yet your url explicitly states that not only do the Russians MAKE cluster bombs they USE them.

Joseph Goebbels would be proud of you "progressives". Personally as far as I am concerned you all are a bunch of moronic blowhards, a total waste of bandwith, and fascist bigots.

This conflict is being spun like a top. For me the jury is out on whether Russia used cluster bombs. I do know we have them, make them and refuse to sign treaties against them.