E-mail a friendCarroll Bogert
airdate November 28, 2007
Carroll Bogert is associate director of Human Rights Watch. She previously spent more than a decade in international news reporting, covering a broad array of topics for Newsweek, in China, Southeast Asia and the Soviet Union, where she was Moscow bureau chief. Bogert frequently publishes on op-ed pages, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and The New Republic. Her commentaries have also aired on NPR. A native of Chicago, Bogert holds a B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University.
Carroll Bogert
Tavis: Carroll Bogert is the associate director of Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization drawing attention to human rights issues in more than 70 countries around the globe. Along with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy, Human Rights Watch is in support for a bill that would cut off U.S. funds for the use or sale of deadly cluster munitions. Carroll Bogert, nice to have you on the program.
Carroll Bogert: Thanks for having me.
Tavis: Let me just say up front before we get to the conversation about this, since I mentioned her name now twice, Dianne Feinstein, and maybe you can help me on this, I don't know; this is not your fight. But when you hear Dianne Feinstein, our senator here in California, doing something as courageous as supporting you all on this effort, I'm having trouble trying to juxtapose how she sports a guy like Mukasey for attorney general, who cannot define what it means to torture, and yet on the other hand, she's out courageously on this. How do you have a moral compass that allows you to be missing in action on this fight - no pun intended - but then leading the fight against cluster munitions?
Bogert: I can't explain that either, Tavis, and I can tell you we were very disappointed that Dianne Feinstein did not vote against sending Mukasey's nomination to the Senate floor. I agree with you. I think it's a travesty. I think the attorney general of the United States should be able to stand up and forthrightly say, “Waterboarding is illegal. It's torture, and we aren't going to do it.” And Dianne Feinstein, I wish she had not supported sending that nomination.
Tavis: Maybe if she shows up again - if she shows up again, maybe she'll address the issue. Senator Feinstein, you're welcome here any time, because I don't quite understand that, as many Americans, I suspect, don't either. But we'll talk to her about that maybe at a later time. That's not your fight. Your fight is cluster munitions. She's supporting you on this. For those who don't know what they are, let's talk about what they are first.
Bogert: Cluster munitions are a weapon the United States and other countries have used. They can be dropped from an airplane; they can be launched by artillery. They explode over, in the air, and spread out little bomblets over a huge area like the size of a football field. The problem is they leave a lot of duds in the ground that explode later. They become like little baby land mines -
Tavis: Like land mines, yeah.
Bogert: Exactly. And kids find them later, they pick them up, they blow off their limbs, they kill themselves. It's a terrible remnant of war that stays around in the ground and continues to kill people even after the conflict is over. So we want these weapons to be banned just as an international treaty has banned land mines.
Tavis: It sounds to me, Carroll, like they almost have to be banned because - and you know the research better than I do - how would you go about, in these major fields, clearing up all of the stuff that you dropped anyway? So it's almost as if to solve the problem there's got to be a front end approach as opposed to a back end approach.
Bogert: It's just a weapon that should never be used in populated areas, because then you're not targeting specifically the enemy. You are in a populated area; by definition, you're going to rain this weapon over civilian homes and schools and shopping areas, and you're going to kill civilians who should never be targeted in wartime, and their immunity from attack should always be respected.
Tavis: I don't ask this question out of any naiveté, but why, then, do the weapons exist to begin with, beyond the fact that somebody has the technology to build them? Why do they exist to be used, period?
Bogert: Because they can, I think, make big territories no-go zones. So you can use them against an isolated facility, for example, in the middle of the desert and really just wipe it out and make it an area now that the enemy cannot use ever again because it's just littered with cluster munitions. The problem is that this weapon is prone to misuse, and we've never seen cluster munitions used in a war where they didn't get misused against civilians, ultimately.
Tavis: Who around the world is most abusing the use of these cluster munitions?
Bogert: Well, both the United States and the United Kingdom used them in Iraq, and they used them in populated areas, which is precisely where it's most dangerous. We saw Israel use them extensively in southern Lebanon in the war there in 2006. There are about 75 countries around the world that have them in their stockpiles, in their arsenals, and we want to get this weapon banned before it is really widely used.
With land mines, we had a campaign that got started after already thousands and thousands of people had been maimed and killed. We want to work on cluster munitions and outlaw that weapon before it does as extensive damage as land mines did.
Tavis: But given - maybe I'm naive on this, but given the fact that cluster munitions ultimately cause the same kind of harm and threat and maiming that land mines previously did, why did the military not get that? I'm trying to figure out how these cluster munitions, post land mines and that fight, came in existence anyway.
Bogert: Well, land mines is a fight that we're still fighting with the United States. They have not signed that treaty, and it's an extremely successful treaty. There used to be more than 100 countries that were stockpiling land mines and we're down to 46. The treaty has only been around for about 10 years and it's already done a lot of good.
But the United States is not one of the countries that's a party to that treaty. So when you ask why are we fighting a clusters fight when we already fought the land mines fight, it's the same fight. And the Pentagon appears not to want to have its maneuver restricted in any way by international treaties.
Tavis: I was going to ask that question. How does the U.S. military view this fight and this weapon?
Bogert: Yeah, well, they have not signed on to clusters, they're not one of the more than 80 countries that are part of an international process trying to get a treaty that's going to ban the weapon internationally. Now Dianne Feinstein, who may have done the wrong thing on Judge Mukasey but is doing the right thing on clusters, and she's introduced legislation in the Senate that has 14 co-sponsors.
There's a similar bill in the House, and I hope that that's going to at least restrict U.S. sale and transfer and stockpiling of this weapon.
Tavis: So then what's the likelihood, then, since we're still, to your point, in this land mine fight, never mind all the publicity positive it has received, the U.S. still not a party to that particular treaty, what's the likelihood, then, that Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, or anyone else in the Senate can get this thing passed?
Bogert: Oh, no, we think they can do it. We think they can do it. It'll take a little while, but it needs support from Americans who care about this. People need to call their senators and representatives and say, “Listen, I don't want the United States to be a party to anything that causes such harm to civilians, and I don't want us to be using this weapon.”
And if American citizens speak out and let their representatives know, that makes a difference. Because they don't often hear about these international issues from constituents, and they need to.
Tavis: Let me connect these two, though. I'm glad we started our conversation talking about Feinstein and Mukasey, because if the American people did not raise enough hell to stop him - and I'm not casting aspersion on him, just asking a question - if there wasn't enough hell raised to stop him from being confirmed when he would not define what it means to torture, how do you think then you get traction with the American people on an issue like this?
If they let that pass, if that slid by, how do you focus their attention on this, which again they're not seeing the results of Stateside every day. This is happening in places around the world.
Bogert: Yeah. Well, by getting Tavis Smiley to do a show about it.
Tavis: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Bogert: No, really, by using the media to alert people to what this terrible weapon is doing and how the United States is using it around the world, which besmirches America's name, to use this terrible weapon. It's not something we should be doing. So it's really a question of getting the word out and letting people know how dangerous this weapon is.
Tavis: Finally, in the work that you do, Carroll, on this issue and so many other issues that Human Rights Watch is courageously out front on, what's your sense of how the folk in Washington, who you have to work with and lobby all the time and try to get to understand these issues, what's your sense of how receptive they are, how much they really get it, how much they understand how we are viewed around the world?
And I ask that because there's so many issues we can talk about where we are just on the wrong side of these human rights questions oftentimes, even though we're the beacon of democracy around the world. We're on the wrong side of so many of these conversations and yet I sense that if the people who are in charge in Washington cared about how we're viewed around the world, understood how we're viewed around the world, that something might change. So what's your sense of how they get it or don't get it, as it were, when you come to talk to them about these global issues?
Bogert: Yeah, the more they've traveled, the more they've been around and spoken to people - I could take them to meet Iraqi children who have been maimed by these weapons, or kids in southern Lebanon who - those were American weapons that Israel was lobbing into southern Lebanon - and it's really very moving, I think, when you understand the real human cost of it and you get legislators to slow down and think about the people whose lives are affected who don't have limbs today because of an American cluster munition.
They understand that message. I think they hear that, and it really depends on how much they want to pay obeisance to the Pentagon. And if the Pentagon is against this, are they willing to stand up to the generals and say, “Listen, we're not going to use this weapon anymore.”
Tavis: Her name, Carroll Bogert. The organization, Human Rights Watch. The issue, cluster munitions. Now you are informed. Carroll, nice to have you on the program.
Bogert: Thanks for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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