Here is part of Peace Activist, Polly Mann's letter to MN's CEO of Alliant Tech
***The report about the unexploded bomblets was written by George T. Cody, PhD, Executive Director of the American Task Force for Lebanon, who quotes the UN, saying “the cluster bomb contamination in Lebanon is the worst ever seen, worse than the contamination in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The reason for this is the sheer volume of bombs dropped on a ‘postage stamp’ size country like Lebanon.”
The UN estimates a 30% to 40% actual failure rate for cluster bomblets in Lebanon, leaving them to kill and maim innocent Lebanese, many of them children. As of November 2006, 78,738 unexploded bomblets have been cleared—about 8% of the total. It will take 50 teams of 10-15 persons per team working 20 hours a week almost a year to clear the fields. In the meantime the economy of Lebanon, 70% of which is based on agriculture, will be brought to a halt. And there are problems about running out of money provided by pledges of many industrialized countries.
You know, good people, you could stop all this. I know it wouldn’t be easy and I don’t even know just how you’d go about doing it. The easiest way out would be to sell all your shares of stock. That would certainly relieve your conscience but that wouldn’t change the big picture. Bomblets would still go rolling off the assembly line. No, no, no. Of course, they can’t roll.
You could try to disband the company. But how? You would simply be replaced on the board. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to make some bad financial decisions and hope the company would go bankrupt. That might also be illegal. And somebody’s sure to mention the orphans and widows who depend on their stock holdings. It’s a toss-up isn’t it? Because on the other hand, you’ve got the many, many orphans and widows being created by your bomblets themselves.
You need to hear about them. There’s information in an article written by Frida Berrigan that appeared in In These Times last December. Frida says that 98% of the people killed or injured by cluster bombs are civilians. Like, for example, 11-year old Lebanese, Ramy Shibleh, who was gathering pinecones with his brother. The small cart which they were using hit something solid and Ramy tied to toss the rock-like object out of the way. But it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head, killing him instantly.
Of course, it isn’t only in Lebanon. Your product has been distributed all over the world. In Afghanistan, Nazeer Ahmad, de-miner for the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation says, “We completely forgot about the Russian bombs and mines when we saw American cluster bombs. They are horrible things. Nobody knows how to detect them and nobody knows how to destroy them. In Herat when Americans dropped cluster bombs, there were little bomblets that were yellow color. Children thought they might be food. Thirty have been killed and 25 wounded by cluster bombs.”
Farnaz Fassihi reported for the Newhouse News Service in late December that “at the Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital in Kabul, all the beds in the children’s ward are occupied by youngsters injured by cluster bomblets.”
Without knowing, of course, I suspect that some of you have young children and probably more have young grandchildren, and you care about those children. I suspect you’re also good neighbors to those around you, responsible, and sympathetic to those in need. You simply haven’t made the connection between your children and these children damaged and killed by your product. Ultimately you have the power to do something about this. To begin with you might check the website of the Cluster Munition Coalition.
http://www.alliantaction.org/scoop/s1go/2007/090007wamm/0907polly.html 
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