Textron

Cluster Bombs

Textron produces the CBU-105 Sensor Fused Weapon, an air-to-surface cluster bomb. (Cluster bombs are designed to explode above the ground, releasing thousands of bomblets that are supposed to detonate on impact. These modern cluster bombs are devastating weapons.) Textron's CBU-105 cluster bombs have been used by the US Army during the current war in Iraq. They were primarily designed as an anti-armor/anti-tank weapon. (To learn more about how they work, watch this YouTube demo video.)

According to disarmament groups working to ban cluster bombs, combat results show between 10 percent and 40 percent fail to go off and lie primed in the target area to kill and injure civilians.

"Cluster munitions are the most dangerous weapons out there today, now [that] we have the land mine crisis under control," says Steve Goose, director of the weapons division of New York-based Human Rights Watch. "Getting a grip on this weapon is the most important thing we can do to protect civilians ... during and after combat."

40 percent of the victims of cluster bombs are children, according to Hilde Johnson, deputy director of UNICEF.

At the end of an international conference on cluster bombs held in New Zealand in February, 2008, eighty-two nations endorsed a strongly worded draft treaty on cluster munitions

Bell Helicopters skirted U.N. embargo to sell to Serbia

According to U.N. investigators, on June 5, 1998, Serbia paid $154,785 to Bell Helicopter Textron for spare parts for the maintenance of Bell helicopters. At the time, Serbia was under a U.N. arms embargo—in February, more than a year before NATO bombing began, it had commenced attacks against Kosovo—but it was in dire need of helicopters and other war supplies.

It got what it needed: Bell Helicopter parts and millions of dollars worth of other materials—through a network of shell companies and secret bank accounts that spread out from the offshore financial center of Cyprus through Greece and some 50 other countries, including the United States.

Helicopters are civilian and military dual-use equipment, allowing manufacturers as well as governments to skirt embargo rules. Any helicopter can carry secret police and troops, and civilian choppers can easily be retrofitted for military use. That seems to be what Serbia did. Radomir Markovic, head of the Serbian state security branch—the secret police—told Hague Tribunal interrogators that “We needed to secure foreign currency reserves to provide … guns for [security branch] helicopters.” He added, “I know that the equipment needed by the service arrived.”

“Dealing with Dictators: Bell Helicopters skirted U.N. embargo to sell to Serbia,” by Lucy Komisar, In These Times, Sept 13, 2002. “Serbia’s Deadly Choppers - U.S. Firm Sold Parts to Milosevic,” By Lucy Komisar, Pacific News Service, Aug 16, 2002.