NYT: Arrested Development (War: Children tortured in US prisons)

[Whoa_Nelly]

Arrested Development

By ARLIE HOCHSCHILD
Published: June 29, 2005
Berkeley, Calif.

LAST month John Miller, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said that half the victims of human trafficking may be children under 18. Children are "at the center" of the problem of trafficking, which, Mr. Miller noted, is one of the great human rights issues of the 21st century. Yes, children should be at the heart of our concern for human rights. But that concern should start with the children detained in American prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay.

Under international law, the line between childhood and maturity is 18. In communications with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon has lowered the cutoff to 16. For this reason among others, we don't know exactly how many Iraqi children are in American custody. But before the transfer of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Iraqi interim government a year ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107 detainees under 18 during visits to six prisons controlled by coalition troops. Some detainees were as young as 8.

Since that time, Human Rights Watch reports that the number has risen. The figures from Afghanistan are still more alarming: the journalist Seymour Hersh wrote last month in the British newspaper The Guardian that a memo addressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after the 2001 invasion reported "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody."

<snip>
A Pentagon investigation last year by Maj. Gen. George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled military guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to " 'go nuts on the kids,' barking and scaring them." The children were screaming and the smaller one tried to hide behind the larger, the report said, as a soldier allowed the dog to get within about one foot of them. A girl named Juda Hafez Ahmad told Amnesty International that when she was held in Abu Ghraib she "saw one of the guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg."

more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/opinion/29hochschild.html?ex=1120795200&en=14d3b5d69fad92d8&ei=5070&emc=eta1

[indepat]

1. Sadly it seems millions will support every action of their government if

politics of those who control the levers of power are right.

[pocket]

2. for every child we know about

there are probably a thousand children brutalized by *'s thugs over there.