From CNN.
I find this disturbing as hell, especially the part about:
Hey kids, let’s play a game with your Uncle Sammy…which yellow container is food and which is a deadly cluster bomb?
Just in case you need to know the difference:
Wait…which one had the deadly high explosives? Dang, I always get this confused…hmm, let’s make a rhyme!
round and yellow and your a dead fellow!
yellow and square, there’s food in there!
Why are you suprised? People with college educations can’t figure out what the hell a red light is for at an intersection. Why would people in another country with less education be able to tell the difference from a MASSIVE box crammed full of little yellow packets with every concievable word/picture for food writen on them.
Screw this whole war on terrorism thing, we need a war on stupidity!!!
If you still don’t know how the turn on your computer, burn in hell.
“The U.S. has said it will not drop food parcels and cluster bombs in the same areas.”
ABSOULTLY UNWINABLE!
i have a real nice list of first-day air-strike targets, however…
One point please -
It would seem clear to me that the cluster bombs were designed by some one other than the person who designed the food packets. I’d venture a guess that as a generalized rule 'o thumb, we’re not often in the habit of dropping humanitarian aid in the same local as bombs, both being kinda, ya know, opposite in intentions.
It’s an appauling situation, but I doubt that anyone directly set about designing one to intentionally be confused with the other. If you have evidence that it was intentional, I’d take a look at it.
I’d hope that they do something to the food packets to make them more easily distinguishable (assuming it’d be easier to do that than to disassemble and reassemble the bombs).
wring,
If I had (or even tried to look for) evidence this might be somewhere else besides the pit. This just struck me as a grevious error, indeed!
The cluster bombs are cylindrical and have drouges on them.
The food is much larger, square, and has pictures of people eating on it.
Other than color, can anyone find a similarity?
I thought not.
The cluster bombs are painted yellow so that de-mining teams can easily find and remove them. The packets are colored yellow so that refugees can find them. That is all.
Tranquilis,
I suppose a 3,4 or 5 year old would know that and never, ever pick up the wrong package, huh?
Maybe you would like to go over there to see for yourself how they do? I’d say the odds or 50/50, at least (even though it HAS been proven that babies are stupid).
obidiah I don’t think there’s any question that some can be horrifyingly mistaken about these packages.
Concept tho’ is that except for the color and the fact they’ve been dropped from the sky by planes, there is no other similarity.
They’re both dropped from the sky since that’s the only way we have to get either there (Fed Ex doesn’t go there), The fact they’re both yellow has led to this unhappy circumstance, but there’s nothing to lead me to believe that it’s anything other than a horrible coincidence (ie ‘we gotta make these easy to spot - “I know let’s make 'em bright yellow” happening in both cases, independently of each other). The same plane isnt’ dropping both ya know.
I agree that it’s awful that little kids may mistake one for the other. which is why I hope they make the food packets a different color (and please note this, 'cause it’s the important piece) now that they know there’s an issue
I repeat again for you. I don’t think there’s ever been a similar situation in the past where we’ve dropped both humanitarian aid and bombs on the same piece of real estate at the same time. So I see no reason to suspect that anyone could have/should have realized when designing the damn things that they’d look like the other thing. Kind like if you’d have packaged communion wafers and condoms in the same kind of container. Who’d think that there’d be liklihood of the two being remotely used in the same place/time 
Not only is there confusion over the yellow food/bomb packets, but also in my post as well! I did not mean to imply that this was purposeful…just that it is a horrible error and ironic as hell. When you see statements like “The U.S. has said it will not drop food parcels and cluster bombs in the same areas.” Does it NOT strike you as vaugely ironic? I mean, c’mon.
they had the same damned problems in Yugoslavia as well with landmines , children used to think they were toys
and used to throw them around or drop rocks on them ,
and hell if writing and pictures are on the food packets and they find a can shaped object that has no writing on it , they might turn it over to see if there is any writing on it too and boom too late , shit maybe the US should sign up for the Humane war treaty and ban landmines (landmines as in unexploded cluster bomb submunition cannisters that lay around to prevent the area being reused or destroyed vehicles being salvaged)
You know, Afganistan has been at war for something like 22 years. It is the most heavily land-mined real estate in the world.
Give these people SOME credit - “uneducated” does not equal “stupid”. In fact, I would guess that the average Afghani is smarter about survival than most other folks because the stupid don’t last long under the conditions they’ve been enduring.
Afghanis know about land mines, bombs, bullets, and various things that go “boom”. I’m sure that when the first food aid packages fell there were a number of folks around the field they landed in going “…hmmm… let’s see, I’ll throw a rock and see if there’s hidden landmines out there… no… OK, Abdul, it’s your turn to go poke that with a stick and see if it explodes… yeah, use the really looooong stick… good, yellow square things don’t explode… hey! Look! a picture of someone eating! You think it’s food? Mohammed, it’s your turn to be taste tester. Here, have some. If you’re still around in the morning we’ll all have breakfast…”
Now, when some more yellow things drop out of the sky, but of a different shape, imagine the above sceanario but with Abdul triggering a KA-BOOM! with his stick. Hopefully he will survive, but even if he doesn’t his companions will make note that while the square yellow things are food, the round yellow things are Bad Things™ and steer clear of them.
Will there be unfortunate accidents? Of course there will, this IS a war we’re talking about. But not as many as the doomsayers predict. As I said, the stupid (and incautious) have largely suffered a Darwinian fate in Afghanistan.
Broomstick,
Soooo…it is your opinion that is perfectly acceptable for innocent children to die because we are at war?
How enlightened.
So perhaps we should just off 5,500 of these sand-niggers and call it a day.
This can’t be alright with you?
There’s a variety of cluster bombs in use, and the submunitions IMHO look very much like unexploded ordnance and very little like food packets.
Take a look at http://www.coxwebs.com/bone/weapons.htm - I believe the yellow can described might be a submunition from a CBU-87 - to the right, about halfway down. Honestly, does this look like a food package ?
Unexploded ordnance of all kinds still is a huge problem, because all of it looks “interesting” to small children (and, sometimes, adult souvenir hunters).
It’s just that there’s no way one can design any munition with 100% reliability - some will be duds - and some of the duds will be picked up with tragic results. Which all goes to show that war sucks.
There will be non-combattant casualties. These happen in war.
Some will be from unexploded ordnance, no matter what colour said ordnance has. And it can’t be helped, once there’s war. It just can’t. Whether we “accept it” or are “allright with it” or not, it will happen. War sucks.
This is what we call a strawman. A classical, if offensive, example. Please show us where, exactly, that Broomstick said it was “perfectly acceptable for innocent children to die”. Thanks.
Spiny, thank you for that visual cite. That, of course, looks absolutely nothing like a packet of any kind, much less a food packet.
Spiny,
I see your point, but does a five or six year old kid know the difference between a yellow canister and a yellow bag?
In any case, in my opinion it is NEVER alright or acceptable under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES for children to die. Can you (you in the broad sense, not directed towards Spiny B) hear yourselves? After a huge loss in New York and Washington where children died what have we learned? It is OK to kill others. It is OK to kill innocent people for our cause. That treads dangerously close to terrorism.
It literally sickens me to hear this sort of bullshit. My best friend’s 8 year old daughter was in that building. She does not cry out for retribution, only at the loss of HER child. Please consider her the next time you feel that “There will be non-combattant casualties. These happen in war”
Sorry to pick on you, Spiny. This wasn’t directed at you…I’m just very sad and very frustrated.
Dear Demise,
This seems to indicate that Broomstick is of the opinion that, balancing the knowledge of innocent children dying against the necessity of war, it is acceptable that “unfortunate accidents” will occur. I simply used the words “perfectly acceptable” in place of “Of course there will [be accidents]” and “innocent children” in place of “unfortunate accidents”.
I was wondering, also, Demise, how many children have you seen up close and personal, that have stepped on a land mine or messed with some unexploded bouncing bettys? I had the bad fortune of being in that situation while defending our country in another middle eastern war run by another President Bush. The children, women and men who die in a war are certianly NOT made of straw.
No, but your argument was…
Understanding that children are going to be hurt, even killed, does not mean that anyone wants them to be…it certainly doesn’t mean that anyone wants to kill “5,500 sand niggers and call it a day”…
*Originally posted by obidiah *
It’s even worse than that. Children will pick up anything that looks out of the ordinary, no matter what colour. As long as we agree that noone intended to lure children into picking up the ordnance. (Which, by the way, would have been a huge war crime.)
Then you need to think out an alternative to war. One that works. I’ll applaud when you pick up your Nobel.
Nefarious comparison: Children die in traffic every day. We know that our convenient transportation comes at the cost of X childrens lives per year. This isn’t alright, this isn’t OK, but it happens anyway.
Noone said it was “OK”. But war always, always involves killing non-combattants. It just can’t be helped. And it’s not OK, it’s a failure every time it happens. But we can’t design weapons with 100% accuracy and reliability. You can argue that we shouldn’t go to war, then, but this time, it would appear that the war was brought to us.
Noone wants to kill children as retribution. No proper human being wants to kill children at all. The bombs aren’t aimed at children. Ordnance is designed to explode, not to fail. There has been rumblings about a high percentage of duds in submunitions, and that is an issue that needs to be looked into. But there’s no intent to kill children on our side. Why would we do that ? That doesn’t further our cause at all.
I don’t feel that, I know that. It’s not a matter of being callous or of approving, it’s a matter of knowing war for what it is.
No prob. These are scary times, and we need to keep an eye on what’s being done in our name. Even if our intentions are noble, our methods must be able to stand up to scrutiny as well.