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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/7/17

The president's strange way of showing his 'love': Trump Dumps DACA as Well as Child-Maiming Cluster Weapons

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Dave Lindorff
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By Dave Lindorff

Original image by Nathanial Thompson (@untilwegetthis)
Original image by Nathanial Thompson (@untilwegetthis)
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Original drawing by Nathaniel Thompson for ThisCantBeHappening.net (@untilwegetthis)

When Donald Trump says he "loves children" as he did in trying to make the case that his termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was not a case of child abuse, it's important to remember that Trump has also amped up US support for Saudi Arabia's brutal war on Yemen, and has specifically continued to supply the Saudi air force with US-made cluster bombs, the primary victims of which are children.

Here is what President and Commander in Chief Trump really thinks of kids.

Buried US cluster bomblet, looking like a half-buried golf ball

A UN Convention on Cluster Munitions that prohibits the "use, transfer and stockpiling" of cluster bombs and shells was adopted in Dublin, Ireland in 2008, went into force on August 1, 2010 after being signed by 30 nations, and today has 116n countries that have ratified it. Among the holdouts are the US, Russia, China, India, Israel, Pakistan and Brazil -- all countries that both produce and stockpile such weapons.

In the US, the last company manufacturing these horrific Weapons of Child Destruction Textron, Inc., announced last September that it would no longer make them, most likely because of massive global and domestic objections to their use. Last year too, the Obama administration, which had been supplying these weapons to Saudi Arabia for it's war on Yemen (and which had been using them in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably Syria, too), cancelled shipments to Saudi Arabia, allegedly because of concerns that the Saudi's were indescrimiately boming hospitals and other civilian targets with them.

A report by the Intercept in December says that the US continues to supply cluster weapons to its client state Saudi Arabia, and to allow it to use the stockpile of these bombs that were already shipped there from Pentagon stockpiles.

childen

Clearly if this president "loved" childen, he would order an immediate halt to their use by US client states and by US forces. According to research by the group Cluster Munitions Monitor, 97 percent of the victims of cluster munitions are civilians -- the majority of them children. And the "gift" of cluster murder is one that keeps on giving long after wars in which the weapons are used have ended. Ask the long-suffering people of Laos, where the US dropped colossal numbers of them on peasant fields to disrupt support for the Pathet Lao, and where farmers and young children still inadvertently trigger them when working or playing in the fields.

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Dave Lindorff, winner of a 2019 "Izzy" Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper (more...)
 

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