George Carlin - The Boston Globe - The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror TV - Rory Stewart TV - John Pilger TV - Rae McGrath - Noam Chomsky - Kofi Annan - Simon O’Dwyer-Russell - Rosie Boycott - Storyville: Hurt Locker Hero TV - Rob Bell TV - Ancient Impossible TV - Blown Away 1994 -
The major sports have grown kind of boring and predictable, and the public has become jaded. So I’m suggesting a few changes that would add excitement to the games and increase their entertainment value. Baseball has one major problem: not enough serious injuries … Fans are crying out for someone to really be hurt badly, so, to raise the injury level, what I would do is place thirty to forty land-mines in the outfield … Like most good ideas it’s uncomplicated: if the pitcher hits the batter with the ball the batter is out. That’s it. A simple idea. But it could make quite a difference. And maybe if the ball hits the batter in the head it could be a double play … George Carlin, More Napalm & Silly Putty
There was an empty chair at the Geneva meeting this past week on implementation of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. The 138 signers of the Treaty were reviewing progress made in removing mines, treating victims, and destroying stockpiles ...
The empty chair was a symbolic invitation to governments that have not yet signed the treaty. Among these are Iraq, North Korea, Libya, China, and Russia. Sad to say, that empty chair in Geneva also beckons the United States.
The refusal of America to sign the Mine Ban Treaty represents a particularly embarrassing contradiction, since President Clinton, during a 1994 speech to the UN General Assembly, became the first leader of a major power to demand elimination of all antipersonnel land-mines. In 1996, Clinton pledged in public that the United States would spearhead an international campaign to rid the world of antipersonnel land-mines. The Boston Globe 2000
Another tragedy for Afghanistan. The country has been littered with some ten million land-mines over the last two decades of conflict. Every single day between ten and twenty people lose their limbs or their lives, mostly children and peasants. The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror, 2005
The Russians began to call this conflict a War of Mines ... They felt they were fighting an army of ghosts. Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart II, BBC 2012
This is Cambodia where up to 500 amputations are performed every month, the result of land mines. John Pilger, Flying the Flag (Arming the World), ITV 1994
Throughout the world there are more than a hundred million of them waiting to explode, and yet the British Government has planned a military strategy of scattering mines from the air. This is often known as MINX or Mines into the Next Century. ibid.
It’s called Area Denial. The humanitarian effect that that has is when the war is finished, those areas remain uninhabitable, but of course returning refugees, farmers, people like that, they have no choice – they have to go there. The official United Nations figures are that two thousand people are maimed and killed every month. Rae McGrath, UK Mines Advisory Group
There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the US simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land-mines. Noam Chomsky
Land-mines are among the most barbaric weapons of war, because they continue to kill and maim innocent people long after the war itself has ended. Also, fear of them keeps people off the land, and thus prevents them from growing food. Kofi Annan
It began around 1985 with at first one training team going out from the SAS Regiment in Hereford to the Thai-Cambodian border to begin what became a series of training courses, seminars ... for the Khmer Rouge ... The British are still involved in supplying those sort of the mines, yes. Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, diplomatic correspondent Sunday Telegraph
When the Tories implied that she was too thick to understand the complexities of the land mines issue, we said, What complexity? ... She was right, and the law was changed. Rosie Boycott, Great Britons: Diana, BBC 2002
45 km from Mosul, Iraq: ‘It’s an electronic trigger. If you step on it, the mine explodes right away. 5 kg is enough to set it off.’ Storyville: Hurt Locker Hero, Colonel Fakhir, BBC 2018
‘Major Fakhir is walking towards death.’ ibid. radio message
‘I wanted to get back at the Americans for killing my brother. ibid. captured bomber
‘They planned this to kill him. Bastards!’ ibid. bloke on radio
‘Fakhir and his two assistants, Masoud and Lokman, were killed.’ ibid. brother
The deadly power of these new magnetic mines posed a massive threat to the Royal Navy. Rob Bell, Great British Ships: HMS Belfast: WW2’s Great Survivor, Channel 5 2018
How did the Chinese manage to build a devastating repeating weapon? … What secrets lie behind the ancient world’s high-tech body armour? … What simple invention was behind the world’s most ruthless weapon – land mines? Ancient Impossible: Warrior Tech s1e7
Land mines: this sucker here is particularly nasty: it’s called a Bouncing Betty. Blown Away 1994 starring Jeff Bridges & Tommy Lee Jones & Suzy Amis & Lloyd Bridges & Forest Whitaker & John Finn & Stephi Lineburg & Caitlin Clarke, director Stephen Hopkins hero’s lecture