By Norman Solomon / FAIR.org
For the New York Times news department, cluster munitions fall into two categories—clearly wrong or complexly controversial—depending on who uses them.
There was no ambiguity when Russia apparently started using cluster weapons during the invasion of Ukraine. Five days after the invasion began, the Times (3/1/22) front-paged a story that described them in the second paragraph as “internationally banned” and went on to report: "Neither Russia nor Ukraine is a member of the treaty that bans cluster munitions, which can be a variety of weapons—rockets, bombs, missiles and artillery projectiles—that disperse lethal bomblets in midair over a wide area, hitting military targets and civilians alike."
Given that the Times is a US-based outlet, the long article unduly detoured around some basic facts—notably, that the United States is also not “a member of the treaty that bans cluster munitions.” And the 1,570-word piece failed to mention anything about the US military’s firing of cluster munitions during its own invasions and other military interventions, including Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Congressional Research Service has noted that “US and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003.”
When the Times (3/5/22) followed up a few days later with a piece headlined “NATO Accuses Russia of Using Cluster Bombs in Ukraine,” the ostensible paper of record still did not mention Washington’s refusal to sign the treaty banning cluster munitions. As for US use of those weapons, the piece buried a single sentence with a deficient summary at the end of the 24-paragraph article, telling readers: "NATO forces used cluster bombs during the Kosovo war in 1999, and the United States dropped more than 1,000 cluster bombs in Afghanistan from October 2001 to March 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch report."
The Pentagon’s massive use of cluster munitions during the invasion of Iraq went unmentioned. So did a Tomahawk missile attack with a cluster bomb, launched from a US Navy warship, that killed 14 women and 21 children in Yemen a week before Christmas in 2009.