Pentagon plans to make food packets different color than bombs

By MATT KELLEY
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon plans to change the color of the humanitarian food packets being dropped over Afghanistan to contrast with unexploded bombs, a top military officer said Thursday.

Some humanitarian aid groups have complained that the bright yellow food packets are the same color as unexploded cluster bombs. Children could "mistake the colorful yellow bomblets released by cluster bombs for either air-dropped food packets – which are also yellow – or for toys," Andrew Wilder of the group Save the Children told a House panel Thursday.

The United States has dropped leaflets written in local languages explaining the difference between the food packets and the bombs, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers. The packets' color also will be changed, said Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I think it's going to be blue," Myers said at a Pentagon news conference. "That, obviously, will take some time. We're trying to figure out how long (it will take) to change that color over because there are many in the pipeline."

Myers said the United States has dropped more than a million food packets to hungry Afghans since the Oct. 7 start of the bombing campaign.

Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the food drops were in areas where there was no bombing, so there should not be a problem with people mistaking one for the other.

Myers and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also defended the use of cluster bombs, which human rights groups have criticized as too indiscriminate.

"They're being used on front-line al-Qaida and Taliban troops to try to kill them, is why we're using them, to be perfectly blunt," Rumsfeld said.

AP-WS-11-01-01 1806EST