US authorities' treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Private Bradley Manning was "cruel and degrading," the UN special rapporteur on torture Juan Ernesto Mendez said Monday.

"I believe Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico," he told AFP, referring to the US military prison near Washington.

Mendez said that "fortunately" the alleged mistreatment ended when Manning was transferred from Quantico to another prison in Kansas.

"But the explanation I was given for those eight months was not convincing for me," he said, speaking on the sidelines of a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva.

Jailed for more than a year and a half before his arraignment last month, Manning, 24, has complained of being placed in solitary confinement, of bullying by guards, and of being subjected to an ultra restrictive regime in Quantico.

He has been charged with 22 counts in connection with turning over a massive cache of classified US documents to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks in one of the biggest intelligence breaches in US history, including "aiding the enemy."

At his arraignment hearing at the Fort Meade army base on February 24, when he declined to enter a plea, Manning's civilian lawyer, David Coombs, said his client had been in confinement for 635 days.

Manning faces court martial later this year, accused of passing hundreds of thousands of military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks between November 2009 and May 2010, when he served as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

The military documents shed light on civilian deaths, while the diplomatic cables sparked a firestorm by disclosing the private remarks of heads of state and candid observations by senior US officials.

The US government slammed the disclosure of the documents by WikiLeaks, saying it threatened national security and the lives of foreigners working with the military and US embassies.

WikiLeaks supporters view the site as a whistleblower that exposed US wrongdoing and see Manning as a political prisoner.

Army investigators told a hearing in December that contact information for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, military reports, cables and other classified material had been found on computers and storage devices used by Manning.

Manning's lawyers have portrayed him as suffering from "gender identity disorder," saying he had created an online female alter ego called "Breanna Manning."

The Bradley Manning Support Network said last month that Manning had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic parliament.

Assange has meanwhile been in Britain fighting extradition to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault accusations.

He has denied the allegations, saying they are politically motivated.

UN Official Slams WikiLeaks Suspect Manning's Treatment

It's most instructive to read carefully the Stratfor emails WikiLeaks released recently.

Their language and tone are alarming: both brutal and ruthless, in my view they reflect all that is wrong with a world now programmed to a rampant neo-liberal economic model that is underpinned by Machiavelli's philosophy of power.

In an era where governments and private enterprise have merged - or, more accurately, governments have become the proxy force for big business – it is not surprising to discover that the prose of the "father of modern politics" is everywhere in the business section. Books explicitly adopting his philosophy line the shelves: Throwing the Elephant/What Would Machiavelli Do?; The New Machiavelli: The Art of Politics in Business; Management and Machiavelli: A Prescription for Success in Your Business; What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness; The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women; Machiavelli for the 21st Century: "The Next Decade" Review. Only last year Forbes ran a piece '5 Machiavellian Business Lessons From Billionaire Aliko Dangote'.

So Machiavelli's philosophy is now found in the boardroom as well as on the battlefield and in government.

Machiavelli (who himself was tortured, by the way) suggests that whoever becomes the ruler of a free city and does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed by it. He urges the would-be prince to:

Secure himself against enemies, to gain friends, to conquer by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the people, followed and reverenced by the soldiers, to destroy those who can and may injure him, introduce innovations into old customs, to be severe and kind, magnanimous and liberal, suppress old militia, create a new one, maintain the friendship of kings and princes in such a way that they are glad to benefit him and fear to injure him, such a one can find no better example than the actions of this man.

In the modern private sector that means "judge us by what we achieve rather than how we achieve it". The focus is on the outcome rather than the form. So when you receive those healthy dividend cheques you should overlook the use of child slave labour, the degradation of environments, the fracturing of societies and the extinction of species. You do note reports like Citigroup's 'The Plutonomy Symposium - Rising Tides Lifting Yachts', highlighting that the most potent and short-term threat to plutocracy - the elite have moved on from democracy - would be societies demanding a more 'equitable' share of wealth, but don't feel unduly concerned because the authorities quickly put down organised protests like Occupy Wall Street that threaten the status quo. You're not concerned about plans by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies to exploit Iraq's oil reserves the year before the country was invaded on a fabrication, or that according to Stratfor emails energy interests smoked out supporters for the Libyan 'campaign'.

I once would have questioned the notion of the IMF and World Bank being tools of a neoliberal onslaught, but if it is true that you must destroy something before you control it, it doesn't get more Machiavellian than Greece. Stratfor's email notes:

Greece's privatization efforts have become central for the new approximately 65 billion to 70 billion euro ($94 billion to $101 billion) bailout package being finalized by eurozone member states and expected to be approved by the June 20 eurozone finance ministers' meeting. As the chief condition of the new bailout plan, Greece's eurozone partners are demanding that Athens speed up its sale of publicly held assets and shift the responsibility of privatization from the government to an independent agency that would, sources tell STRATFOR, have considerable input from foreign governments. In other words, Greece needs to sell about 50 billion euros worth of public assets by 2015 and on terms that satisfy Germany and other eurozone countries, regardless of the preferences of the Greek state that owns the assets or the Greek public that depends on them for employment.

 Greece stands conquered by fraud. No arms necessary. Given the role of Goldman Sachs and other financial behemoths in ramping up Greek debt to unsustainable proportions, should we call this "another Wall Street production"? Isn't it a repeat of the Asian crisis: money comes flooding in, debt levels rise, credit suddenly dries up and money flows out, the economy collapses, the "rescuers" come in and "restructure" and the carcass is sold off to "investors" at bargain basement prices.

What is interesting about Machiavelli is that he warned that the powerful can never insure against a hostile populace on account of their number; that the powerful need not be concerned about conspiracies when the people are well disposed, but when they are hostile and hold the powerful in hatred, then they must fear everything and everybody; and that the populace merely want to avoid oppression.

That's why it's so interesting that Stratfor emails reveal the US Department of Homeland Security concerns about the potential risks of the Occupy Wall Street movement to critical infrastructure, "critical infrastructure" being the assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, public health or safety, or any combination thereof. They don't mention that the private sector owns or controls 85-90 per cent of the United States' recognised national assets. So who are the princes? And to what lengths would they and their governmental minions go to protect their empire?

When being interviewed about Stratfor's emails about Bhopal Andy Bichlbaum, a member of The Yes Men, made this astute observation:

...what Stratfor seems to be really a bit obsessed with is whether we or other organizations are going to draw this into a bigger critique of corporate power... they seem to be really concerned that we, Amnesty, Greenpeace, etc., would be broadening this into a systematic critique and attacking the basis of corporate power. And it's interesting that that's what they were concerned with, rather than anything to do with the exact bottom line of Dow itself. And that might be a clue that they were really concerned about systemic critique and, you know, making statements that could affect policy. Maybe that's also why they've been so afraid of Occupy Wall Street....

Equally telling is Stratfor's 'Client Project-must read' 2008 email about threats facing chemical companies and their products, like nationalisation of oil, increased regulation or even talk of regulation.

What it all comes down to is that the greatest threat to monopolies, oligopolies, plutocracies and to neoliberal capitalism itself is reform.

Machiavelli knew that 'the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.'

Enter WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, a person and an organisation capable of achieving reform because of the information they publish. Or Anonymous, a network of computer hackers that neutralises Machiavelli's essential requirement for 'the powerful to disguise their character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler, by hacking thoughts and strategies off a computer system and putting them out for publication'. Organisations and people like these are the harbingers of reform because they expose the truth: they expose for all to see the blatant mendacity, insatiable greed and calculated inhumanity of the economic elite and their political stooges.

What would Machiavelli do to destroy reformers and preserve the (old order) empire? Be ready to break both morals and religious principles when needed? Issue economic sanctions and red Interpol notices? Be prepared to waterboard, incarcerate, isolate or assassinate the enemy? The answer is an unreserved "Yes". Any measures necessary to drive the wolves out. As Henry Kissinger said:

There are some situations in which the more the survival is threatened the narrower the margin of choice becomes unless you can say you would rather have your society destroyed than to pursue the marginal means.

The problem for the plutocrats is that horse has bolted. Even if they silence reformers like Assange - and it's all stops out to do that - the people of many countries around the world are already hostile and feel oppressed. Attempts to censor the internet and crack down on social media will only intensify those feelings. Over the last 30 years people have watched what Machiavelli described as cruelties ill committed (ie increasing rather than diminishing with time): the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. The plutocrats are well aware of that: America's National Defence Authorisation Act is a clue that the powerful have become afraid of their own shadow.

As Arundhati Roy suggests in her 2012 Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Trust Lecture 'Capitalism - A Ghost Story', capitalism is going through a crisis. The international financial meltdown is closing in and huge corporations are sitting on large cash reserves that they don't know where to invest, which she describes as a structural crack in capitalism. More terrifying than anything is having money that they can't make grow. Roy's lecture demonstrates the catastrophic results of Machiavelli's Prince operating in the neo-liberal economic model.

In the aftermath of International Women's Day 2012 celebrations I urge all women to watch Arundhati Roy's lecture and to read 'The Prince'. Women aspiring to sit at the boardroom table shouldn't imitate the alpha males operating in their Machiavellian corporate world but need to be forewarned and forearmed to be able to change it. May you all give life and legs to corporate and social responsibility and may we all support the reformers.

WikiLeaks & Other Reformers: Has Machiavelli Met His Match?

Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics of the U.S. face divestment from major UK banks, for manufacturing cluster bombs. The Guardian newspaper has exclusively reported that Aviva, the UK’s largest insurance company; Scottish Widows (part of the Lloyds Banking Group) and the Co-op Bank will sell shares in these companies, following a similar move by the Royal Bank of Scotland last year after 10,000 people signed protest letters in a campaign led by Amnesty International.

Cluster bombs are made of dozens of “bomblets” that are delivered in a single larger weapon that scatters them on impact. The wide dispersal of these small bombs makes them hard to trace. Many linger for years – long after conflict has ended - before exploding when civilians dig or pick up unusual pieces of metal. For example, 200 civilians were killed in Lebanon after the conclusion of the August 2006 invasion by Lebanon. The Cluster Munition Coalition – an activist collaborative – estimates that a third of the casualties are children.

A treaty to ban the production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions was signed by 94 countries in Oslo in December 2008. The Convention on Cluster Munitions became international law on 1 August 2010, after 30 countries ratified it in February 2010. (A similar treaty banning land mines was signed in Ottowa in 2007).

The UK has signed and enforced the treaty and has even expelled companies promoting such munitions from trade fairs in the country. However, a number of other countries - Brazil, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. for example – all of which manufacture such weapons, have refused to sign the treaty.

The UK banks are using a list compiled by Ethix, a Swedish ethical investment consultancy, of the major manufacturers of cluster bombs. This includes Alliant Techsystems (US), Aryt Industries (Israel), Doosan Corporation (South Korea), GenCorp (US), General Dynamics Corporation (US), Hanwha Corporation (South Korea), L-3 Communications Corporation (US), Lockheed Martin Corporation (US), Poongsan Corporation (South Korea), Poongsan Holdings Corporation (South Korea), Singapore Technologies Engineering (Singapore) and Textron (US).

"The Aviva board has now determined that this exclusion should also be applied to Aviva policyholder funds. We are currently working to implement this decision and will provide an update when this is complete," a spokesperson told the Guardian. Aviva held $65 million worth of bonds in Lockheed Martin and $67 million in Textron in 2010.

"We are now well advanced in a process of identifying and divesting from overseas companies where there is strong evidence of involvement in activities prohibited by the convention,” a spokesperson for the Scottish Widows Investment Partnership told the newspaper.

"All of our active portfolios are no longer invested in such holdings and no further investments in such companies have or will be made through these funds," a spokesman from Co-op Asset Management told the Guardian. "By the end of this month we will also have divested all of our passive, tracker funds, which are non-retail funds owned by the Co-operative's life fund, from these companies."

Barclays and HSBC are the two other major UK banks that have yet to announce a policy on cluster bomb manufacturers.

Despite the official commitment to ban cluster bombs, the UK has been reported to be working behind the scenes with the US to “permit the use of cluster bombs as long as they were manufactured after 1980 and had a failure rate of less than one per cent” according to a report in the Independent newspaper last November.  The attempt failed.

Lockheed, General Dynamics Face UK Bank Boycott Over Cluster Bombs

France and Germany were prepared in spring 2005 to negotiate on an Iranian proposal to convert all of its enriched uranium to fuel rods, making it impossible to use it for nuclear weapons, but Britain vetoed the deal at the insistence of the United States, according to a new account by a former top Iranian nuclear negotiator.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who had led Iran's nuclear negotiating team in 2004 and 2005, makes it clear that the reason that offer was rejected was that the George W. Bush administration refused to countenance any Iranian enrichment capability, regardless of the circumtances.

Mousavian reveals previously unknown details about that pivotal episode in the diplomacy surrounding the Iran nuclear issue in memoirs published Tuesday.

Mousavian, now a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, had been a top political aide to former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and head of the foreign relations committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council during his political-diplomatic career in Iran.

Mousavian had been entrusted with Iran's most sensitive diplomatic missions, including negotiations on a strategic understanding with Saudi crown prince Abdullah in the early 1990s and with U.S. officials on Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda in 2001 and 2002, his memoirs reveal. But he was arrested by the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration on charges of "espionage" in April 2007.

The British and U.S. refusal to pursue the Iranian offer, which might have headed off the political diplomatic crisis over the Iranian nuclear programme since then, is confirmed by a former British diplomat who participated in the talks and former European ambassadors to Iran.

Mousavian writes that one of the European negotiators told him that "they were ready to compromise but that the United States was the obstacle."

The episode occurred a few months after an agreement between Iran and the British, French and German governments on Nov. 15, 2004 on terms for negotiations on "long-term arrangements", during which Iran agreed to maintain a voluntary suspension of enrichment and other nuclear activities.

The agreement to be negotiated was to "provide objective guarantees that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes" as well as "firm guarantees on nuclear, technological and economic cooperation and firm commitments on security issues".

But the EU objective in the talks was to demand a complete end to all Iranian enrichment. At the Mar. 23, 2005 meeting in Paris, the EU called for an indefinite suspension of enrichment by Iran, meaning suspension beyond the negotiations themselves.

At the same meeting, Iranian negotiators submitted a proposal that included a "policy declaration to convert all enriched uranium to fuel rods" and "committed to getting the Additional Protocol", which would allow the IAEA to make snap inspections on undeclared facilities, ratified by its parliament.

Conversion of low enriched uranium (LEU) to fuel rods only usable for power plants could have provided a guarantee against using the enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Iran did not have the capability to fabricate fuel rods, so the implication was that the LEU would have to be shipped to another country for conversion or would have to be done under international auspices within Iran.

Once the fuel rods were fabricated, it would be practically impossible for Iran to reconvert them for military purposes.

Peter Jenkins, then the British permanent representative to the IAEA and a member of the British delegation to the Paris meeting with Iran, recalled in an interview with IPS, "All of us were impressed by the proposal."

The European delegations asked for a break to discuss it among themselves, Jenkins recalled, but soon decided to tell Iran they would "need more time to consider further".

But the Europeans did not seek to explore the Iranian offer further.

Mousavian reveals that Iran learned a few weeks after that meeting that the Europeans had no intention of negotiating any agreement that would allow Iran to have any enrichment programme. On Apr. 12, 2005, Mousavian recounts, the French ambassador to Iran, Francois Nicoullaud, told him it was impossible for the Europeans to negotiate on the Iranian proposal.

"For the U.S. the enrichment in Iran is a red line which the EU cannot cross," Mousavian quotes Nicoullaud as saying.

In June 2009, Nicoullaud signed a statement with five other former European ambassadors to Iran recalling that in 2005 "Iran was ready to discuss a ceiling limit for the number of its centrifuges and to maintain its rate of enrichment far below the high levels necessary for weapons," but that "the Europeans and the Americans wanted to compel Iran to forsake its enrichment program entirely."

Jenkins recalled that he was aware that no proposal, no matter how forthcoming on assurances against diversion of LEU to a nuclear weapon, would be acceptable to the British government if it involved a resumption of enrichment.

"I knew in my heart of hearts that this was a waste of time - that it would not fly," he recalled.

"The British objective was to eliminate entirely Iran's enrichment capability," Jenkins said. "I remember we couldn't even allow Iran to have 20 centrifuges for R&D (research and development) purposes, because we ourselves had mastered the technology with even fewer than that."

The Iranians had made clear to the European three that they could not agree to any loss of their right to enrich, according to Jenkins, but the Europeans hoped that it was merely an opening negotiating position.

"I don't think we realised fully in March 2005 that Iran was not prepared to give up enrichment as the price of a settlement," Jenkins recalled. "We believed that if we could come up with sufficient Incentives and scare Iran with the threat of referral to the (United Nations) Security Council, they would give in."

After reading Mousavian's minutes of the meeting with Nicoullaud, the Supreme Leader instructed his nuclear policy coordinator, Hassan Rowhani, to restart the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. Iran had included the conversion facility in its suspension of enrichment activities only with great reluctance under the pressure of the European negotiators.

Meanwhile, Mousavian made the rounds to try to persuade the Europeans to accept an Iranian offer to ensure that it would not divert uranium to nuclear weapons. He recalls offering his German counterpart Michael Schaefer in Berlin yet another proposal that had not yet been cleared by Iranian leaders.

Under the Mousavian proposal, Iran would have resumed uranium conversion at the Isfahan plant but would have exported its product to "an agreed-upon country" in exchange for yellowcake, the form uranium takes prior to enrichment.

At a later stage of the proposal, Iran would have begun enrichment at Natanz with some 3,000 centrifuges, but again would have exported all the enriched uranium to "an agreed-upon country".

While those extraordinary arrangements were being carried out, Mousavian proposed, negotiations on a "final compromise" on "objective guarantees of non-diversion" and EU "firm guarantees" on comprehensive relations with Iran would continue for a maximum of one year, and that Iran would adopt a timetable for enrichment agreed upon with the EU "based on Iran's fuel requirements".

Schafer encouraged Mousavian to pursue the proposal with the French and British, and French political director Stanislas Lefabvre Laboulaye told him it would depend on the British response.

But Mousavian writes that British director general for political affairs John Sawers told him that the Bush administration "would never tolerate the operation of even one centrifuge in Iran".

After his round of meetings with the Europeans, Mousavian was informed by Rowhani that the package he had proposed had been accepted by the Iranian leadership, based on a minimum of 3,000 centrifuges and a one-year limit on the negotiations. But a third condition was that the Europeans had to agree on the plan before the June Iranian presidential election.

The third condition suggests that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not want either of the two presidential candidates, Hashemi Rafsanjani or Mahmound Ahmadinejad, to get credit for the agreement with the Europeans.

The conversion of the bulk of Iranian low enriched uranium (LEU) to fuel rods after being exported to France or Russia was the basis for the Barack Obama administration's diplomatic proposal to Iran in October 2009.

The Ahmadinejad government negotiated with the U.S. and European diplomats on the proposal, but in the end Iran was not willing to part with as much as 80 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium without getting any change in U.S. policy in return.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

US Rejected 2005 Iranian Offer Ensuring No Nuclear Weapons

The federal government has made the same few statements for almost two years in responding to criticism of its Cluster Munitions Prohibition Bill. Some of its claims are misleading statements of opinion presented as facts, while one oft-repeated line has been shown by the US embassy cables released by Wikileaks to be false.

The Bill was introduced into parliament in late 2010 to enable Australia to ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the most significant international disarmament treaty negotiated since the landmine ban treaty in 1997. Both treaties are important because they were negotiated outside the United Nations yet have been effective in stigmatising the use of these inhumane weapons, which cause long-lasting unacceptable harm to civilian populations. (Read more about cluster bombs and why they have been banned.)

There are two serious problems with the draft legislation. It's supposedly giving effect to a Convention which seeks to eradicate cluster bombs, yet it allows Australian troops to actively assist countries that haven't signed up to the Convention (in practice, the USA) with the use of cluster bombs. It also has explicit wording enabling the USA to stockpile its cluster bombs on Australian soil and to transit them through our ports and airspace.

The Bill passed the lower house with little scrutiny and entered the Senate in November 2010. Due to the Bill's inconsistencies with recommendations made by the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, it was referred to the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade committee for review. The committee called for submissions, conducted a public hearing, and produced a report which noted many suggestions for improvement made by civil society but nevertheless recommended the Bill be passed without amendment. One committee member, WA Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, tabled a dissenting report.

The Bill is scheduled for debate in the Senate this week. If passed, it will become law.

Line 1: "This legislation faithfully implements the Convention on Cluster Munitions."

Three ministers and their departments have been involved with this legislation: Attorney-General, Defence, and Foreign Affairs, and they have trotted out this line repeatedly. It is an opinion with which many respected organisations and individual experts disagree.

International Committee of the Red Cross: "…section 72.41 of the Australian Bill raises substantial concerns… which would contravene the Convention and undermine its goals..." AND "allowing the foreign stockpiling of cluster munitions on Australian soil… would undermine the objectives of the Convention…"

Australian Red Cross: "The Bill …would permit the use of cluster munitions in a manner that weakens the aims and objectives of the Convention…" AND "[s72.41] could in fact allow the intentional violation of the Convention" AND "[s72.42] allows acts generally prohibited in the Convention to occur on the territory of a State party."

Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School IHRC: "the Bill creates a defense for many acts during such operations that on their face violate the convention" AND "Section 72.42(1)… should be removed because it runs counter to Articles 1 and 9 of the convention."

Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser, former Prime Minister: "the government has drafted legislation scattered with alarming loopholes that, to my mind, directly undermine the spirit and intention of the convention."

General Peter Gration, former Chief of the Defence Force: "the wording used in our legislation goes well beyond [that required for interoperability with US] and in fact doesn't follow a couple of the key things that the convention is about…"

Paul Barratt, former Secretary of Defence Department: "Legislation in these terms is clearly at odds with a convention whose central purpose is to prevent the use of cluster munitions…".

Forty-seven eminent Australians with relevant expertise have also disagreed with the government.

Line 2: "States party to the Convention may continue military cooperation and engagement with countries that are not party to the Convention. The ability to maintain interoperability is central to the maintenance of Australia's national security."

The Convention (in article 21) protects the troops of countries like Australia from being prosecuted should they inadvertently become involved in cluster bomb use while on joint operations with countries that have not signed up to the Convention. However, it goes against the entire purpose of the Convention to argue, as the government does, that article 21 means Australian forces can knowingly help the US plan cluster bomb attacks and assist in the use of the very weapons we have supposedly committed ourselves to banning.

Raising "national security" in this context is disingenuous. It would be awful if Australian national security did depend on us assisting in the use of cluster bombs and permitting them to be stockpiled on our soil but, as the above experts have made clear, this is not the case.

As Frank Brennan highlights, New Zealand has done a better job with its legislation, which allows participation in joint military operations without undermining the Convention's absolute prohibition on assistance with the use of cluster bombs.

Line 3: "Australia has been a strong advocate of an international ban on cluster munitions. Australia was an active player in the negotiations and one of the first countries to sign the Convention."

Australia was not an early supporter of a ban on cluster munitions and at a UN conference in November 2006 it didn't vote in favour of a proposal for an instrument "that addresses the humanitarian concerns posed by cluster munitions." The nations that did support this proposal later met outside the UN, hosted by Norway, to discuss what eventually became the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Australia did not attend the initial meeting of this group.

Nor did Australia act nobly once it did get involved. Lyn Allison, former leader of the Australian Democrats, and instigator of a previous Bill attempting to achieve an Australian ban on cluster munitions, said in the Canberra Times on 27 May 2008, "It would almost be better if we weren't involved at all. Our input has been shameful, placing military concerns ahead of humanitarian needs. Instead of listening to the legitimate pleas of medical and de-mining groups, the Government has kowtowed to army honchos."

The US embassy cables released by Wikileaks amply illustrate that Australia did become "an active player in the negotiations," but not in the way the government implies. Australia worked to water down key aspects of the treaty as part of a "like-minded" group aligned with the USA (which has stated it sees cluster munitions as a legitimate weapon and has no intention of signing the Convention). Shamefully, Australia lobbied Asian nations, including Vietnam, affected by cluster bombs, to push for the weaker wording and labelled countries and NGOs arguing for a total ban as "hardline." The Age reported that Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams, who led the campaign to ban landmines, accused Australia of being part of a "bad guys' cabal."

Australia, creditably, worked to ensure provisions on victim assistance and land clearance were included in the treaty. Although, given the line Australia pushed to enable it to operate jointly with the US even as the US was using cluster bombs, future victims might have been better served had the Australian delegation spent more time pushing for wording that ensured cluster bombs wouldn't be dropped in the first place.

To clarify the treaty signing spin: Australia was one of ninety-four nations that signed the Convention the day it opened for signature.

Line 4: "The Australian Government will not approve the stockpiling of cluster munitions in Australia by foreign governments."

After sustained criticism on the hosting of foreign stockpiles, the Defence Minister announced last November that the government will issue a policy statement at the time of Australia's ratification of the Convention stating that the government will not approve the stockpiling of cluster munitions in Australia. This is better than not having such a statement. However, the government has not amended the section of the legislation which explicitly permits countries not party to the Convention to stockpile cluster bombs here. Section 72.42 says:

"Section 72.38 [lists the criminal offences under the Bill] does not apply to the stockpiling, retention or transfer of a cluster munition that is done by a member of the armed forces of a foreign country that is not a party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions…"

Thus the government has created a confusing situation where it says it won't approve foreign stockpiles yet has drafted legislation which plainly allows such stockpiling to occur. In an interview with ABC Radio last November, Stephen Smith refused to explain the contradiction created by his statement, relying on above 'line 1' to deflect the question.

Given the serious flaws in this legislation, and the government's earlier actions behind the scenes to weaken the global ban on these weapons, it's hard to fathom how the government reconciles its actions with its claims that Australia is a "strong supporter of" and "committed to" the Convention. Yet no doubt we'll hear these exact same lines used yet again when the Senate debate starts.

Decoding Government-Speak On The Cluster Bomb Bill

US President Joe Biden has greenlighted the supply of cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of the Pentagon’s 42nd arms package for Kiev’s forces. The White House said that Biden made the decision despite the risk of harm to civilians. 

The president approved the transfer based on “unanimous” advice from his national security team, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday.

US officials “recognize that cluster munitions create a risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance. This is why we deferred the decision for as long as we could,” Sullivan said, before arguing that the supply of cluster bombs is not “that much of an addition of civilian harm,” as Russia has allegedly used them in Ukraine already.

Cluster munitions are banned in more than 120 countries because when they detonate, they release many small ‘bomblets’ over a wide area, with these unexploded elements posing severe risks to civilians for years after fighting ends. 

The US, Ukraine, and Russia are not parties to the ban. The US, however, has prohibited exports of the armaments with a ‘dud’ rate of more than 1%, but this restriction can be lifted by presidential waiver. 

The cluster bombs sent to Ukraine will have a failure rate of up to 2.35%, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Colin Kahl told reporters on Friday. Kahl claimed that Ukraine would not use these munitions in “civilian-populated urban areas,” despite Kiev’s track record of using Western-supplied weapons systems against civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk.

Kahl explained that the cluster munitions in question will be dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM), which can be fired from Ukraine’s NATO-supplied 155mm artillery systems. Asked whether the US decided to send DPICM shells due to a shortage of conventional 155mm rounds, Kahl seemingly confirmed the shortfall, explaining that the cluster shells would serve as a “bridge” until NATO members could ramp up production of conventional shells.

Kahl refused to say how many DPICM rounds would be sent to Ukraine, but said that there are “hundreds of thousands” of such shells in US stockpiles, which could potentially be doled out to Kiev over multiple military aid packages.

https://www.rt.com/russia/579358-us-ukraine-cluster-munition/

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QUESTION: HAVE CLUSTER-BOMBS HELPED THE USA WIN WARS? ANSWER: NO....

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wcPix8-0TA

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