When the parents of one of these children sees Al Qaeda or any other fringe group fighting the US in  Iraq, and are asked for their support in the fight against an invading and occupying army from a country they did not and could not attack, what do you think their response is? How many more "terrorists' are the American people going to let this administration create?

Cluster Bombs: War Crimes of the Bush Administration

All over Iraq, unexploded cluster bombs, originally dropped by U.S. troops in populated areas, are still killing and maiming civilians, farm animals, wildlife-any living thing that touches them by accident.

Under Article 85 of the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to launch "an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population in the knowledge that such an attack will cause an excessive loss of life or injury to civilians." Under the Hague Conventions, Article 22 and 23, "The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited," and "It is especially forbidden to kill treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army."

A cluster bomb is a 14-foot weapon that weighs about 1,000 pounds. When it explodes it sprays hundreds of smaller bomblets over an area the size of two or three football fields. The bomblets are bright yellow and look like beer cans. And because they look like playthings, thousands of children have been killed by dormant bomblets in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. Each bomblet sprays flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter inch of steel.

The failure rate, the unexploded rate, is very high, often around 15 to 20 percent. When bomblets fail to detonate on the first round, they become land mines that explode on simple touch at any time.

But you know, there are thousands of kids who will never have breakfast, thanks to the insane madmen who create and use things like cluster bombs.

In short, an aircraft bomb left over from the Second World War exploded today during construction work along the A3 autobahn in the vicinity of Aschaffenburg, about 25 miles southeast of Frankfurt am Main. At least one person was reported killed.  Apparently, the bomb had been disturbed during the work.  The entire autobahn in that area (one of the busier stretches in the country) is closed in both directions.

One still hears on their radio reports (usually in the form of a traffic advisory) about street closures and area evacuations so duds can cleared be a couple, three or four times a year.

Sixty-plus years after the fact, these things are still lurking, live and waiting.  It's bad enough these (relatively few) bombs are out there.  It's whole orders of magnitude worse, when governments deliberately drop large numbers of weapons with fuzes which don't work.  Either these cluster bombs are being used as area denial weapons - to keep out putative terrists who happen to farm Lebanese hillsides - or the governments have been taken for a ride by their contractors.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Israeli army used phosphorous artillery shells against Hezbollah guerrilla targets during their war in Lebanon this summer, an Israeli Cabinet minister said, confirming Lebanese allegations for the first time.

Until now, Israel had said it only used the weapons -- which cause severe chemical burns -- to mark targets or territory, according to Israeli media reports. The Geneva Conventions ban using white phosphorous against civilians or civilian areas and Israel said the weapons were used solely against military targets.

Cabinet Minister Yaakov Edri said Sunday that Israel used the weapons before an Aug. 14 cease-fire went into effect, ending its 34-day war against Hezbollah. Edri's spokeswoman Orly Yehezkel said he was speaking on behalf of Defense Minister Amir Peretz.

"The Israeli army holds phosphorous munitions in different forms," Edri said. "The Israeli army made use of phosphorous shells during the war against Hezbollah in attacks against military targets in open ground." ...

The United States acknowledged last year that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah in November 2004, but said it had never been used against civilian targets. ...

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has been criticized for failing to distinguish between Israeli civilian and military targets. Human Rights Watch also said the militant group fired cluster bombs into civilian areas of northern Israel during the fighting.

Chaos after Explosion on the A3 near Aschaffenburg

The scene brought to mind something from 1945:  a crater, eight meters wide and 2.5 meters deep left by the explosion of a dud bomb from the Second World War that tore asunder the asphalt surface of the A3 autobahn this morning at 10:53.  The bomb's explosion tore apart a construction worker with his milling machine.  The 46 year old was dead at the scene;  colleagues and people passing in vehicles suffered severe shock.  The cleanup is underway.

Police report that the accident occurred during milling operations for the expansion to six lanes of the heavily traveled Autobahn between Wuerzburg and Frankfurt in the vicinity of Aschaffenburg.  The 25 ton specialized milling machine, used to mix dry cement underground*, was thrown into the air and totally destroyed by the explosion.  Colleagues of the deceased construction worker, who were held back [by police] approximately 400 meters from the scene, heard a dull thudding boom, before feeling a strong shockwave.

Some of the debris flew hundreds of meters away and damaged cars passing by the scene.  Four construction workers and one auto-driver suffered severe shock.  The total blockage of the Autobahn lasted about five hours, and the backed up traffic diverted into the surrounding local streets and Aschaffenburg and created a chaotic traffic situation.  About 3 pm, the traffic headed in the direction of Frankfurt was stopped for approximately 20 kilometers.

Bomb damage 61 years after the end of the war.

It was unclear and undetermined whether the dud was an aircraft bomb or a(n artillery) shell*. Specialists are proceeding on the thought it was a 500 pound bomb from the Second World War:  the "Damm" neighborhood in Aschaffenburg was bombed by the Allies through 1945 because uniforms were manufactured there*.

It is unclear whether the bomb was previously buried in concrete by an oversight during the decades-ago construction of the most important east-west Autobahn.  "Our ongoing investigation must show whether this is so" said a spokesman for the Landes-Kriminalamt* expert team, which arrived at the scene by helicopter this afternoon.

Background:  Deadly instrumentalities left behind

In Bavaria, since the end of the Second World War the most old aircraft bombs have been found and uncovered during construction work.  In July the Bavarian Interior Ministry reported (made known) that in the last year over twenty tons of WWII munitions were dug up and destroyed.  Among those were 33 high-explosive and fragmentation bombs.  The last fatal accident in the Free State took place in May 1999, during the construction of the Legoland Amusement park in Guenzburg.  In that incident a tank shell which had already been excavated exploded and killed a 54 year old demolitions "meister".

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Later reports from Bavarian Radio indicate the bomb was buried no more than one foot below the surface and that authorities are fairly certain it was a 500 pound aircraft bomb.

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•  The methodology which appears to be in use in this construction project is something Americans call soil-cement.  In this, raw cement powder is milled into the in situ subsoil, and water is then added and milled in, too.  This is then shaped and compacted in place to form a very solid, stable base for highways, parking lots and the like.  This method is common in Germany for building autobahns, is a lot more economical and much faster than pouring reinforced cement, and eliminates a lot of earthmoving effort, too.  It can only be used in soils suitable for the purpose, which are present in that area.  The specialized milling machine is best compared to a gigantic, tractor-mounted version of a garden roto-tiller, albeit with a hood over the rotating blades (to keep rocks and dirt from flying around).  The blades can reach only to one foot below the surface;  the depth is limited to that because of the limitations of compaction equipment.  

* Given the size of the hole, my money's on a 500-pound aircraft bomb
** My look at google maps also indicates there is a sizeable rail yard within a mile of the scene, also a WWII target.  Speaking politely "the stuffing was bombed out of it" definitely applied to Aschaffenburg.
** Roughly, the State Police.

Commentary - for whatever reason, a dud from more than sixty years ago killed a man who was nowhere near being born when the plane which dropped it took off.  Shoot, the plane was probably long scrapped before he was born.  Maybe the ground crew messed up fuzing the bomb, maybe the manufacturer did a bad job making the fuze, maybe it just hit at an odd angle, maybe everything worked and the thing just didn't go off.  Could be any number of "reasons", but the end result is the same - some guy ended his life in a flash, not knowing what hit him.  And, still, the beat of dropping from planes explosives with dubious fuzes goes on, and people not born yet will someday be killed by the actions of those following politicians' orders today.

Last month, Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Dianne Feinstein of California submitted an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill designed to prevent cluster-bomb use in or near populated areas. It failed.

Senators Leahy and Feinstein should reintroduce their amendment next year. Ideally, this bill would include a ban on the use of all cluster bombs that have high failure rates - which leads to the danger zones of unexploded bomblets - and a ban on the stockpiling or transfer of these submunitions. It deserves the support of every senator.

As with the movement that led to the 1999 global treaty banning land mines, there is mounting international pressure to stop the use of cluster munitions altogether. Belgium has already banned them, Norway has imposed a moratorium, and other countries back a convention to prevent their use. The Review Conference examining the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting next month in Geneva is a key opportunity to build momentum for the international ban.

The stakes for civilians in Lebanon are high. They will suffer the effects of these weapons for years to come. But if action is taken now, the impact could be reduced. That's why Israel must share the coordinates of the areas it cluster-bombed with the UN Mine Action Coordination Center. The center also needs greater funding to clear the land of this contamination.

The human cost of using cluster bombs in this summer's conflict should provide enough impetus to abolish these indiscriminate killers once and for all.

* Curt Goering is the senior deputy executive director for policy and programs at Amnesty International USA.