December 18, 2005

​​​​Today, I started reading former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Our Endangered Values". In it, he revealed something that is absolutely horrifying--the US is holding children as young as 8 years of age who have been captured in Afghanistan and Iraq in prison camps--namely, the one in Guantanamo, Cuba. Worse yet, Donald Rumsfeld knew about it. Read a short excerpt below:

After visiting six of the twenty-five or so U.S. prisons, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107 detainess under eighteen, some as young as eight years old. The Journalist Seymour Hersh reported in May 2005 that Defense Secretaary Donald Rumsfeld had recieve a report that there were "800-900 Pakistani boys age 13-15 in custody." The International Red Cross, Amnesty International, and thePentagon have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children ( emphasis mine), confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse. In addition to personal testimony from children about physical and mental mistreatment, a report from Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, described a visit to an eleven year old detainee in the cell block that housed high risk prisoners. The general recalled that the child was weeping, and "he told me he was almost twelve," and that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother." Children like this eleven year old have been denied the right to see their parents, a lawyer, or anyone else, and were not told why they were detained. A Pentagon spokesman told Mr. Hersh that "age is not a determining factor in detention."

This is an absolute outrage. How could any normal, sane person ever, ever in their lives even think about torturing a child? That our own military could engage in such acts of evil, sadistic brutality--AGAINST CHILDREN--is almost too horrible to even think about.

Every single sick SOB who had a part in this needs to be sent to prison for the rest of their lives, including Rumsfeld.

Reports like this help to illustrate why torture is wrong--the kind of people who will actually do it are the lowest, sickest breed of human beings--the kind who have no moral qualms about inflicting abuse on anyone--regardless of age, or any other factor.

UPDATE TO THIS POST:

Here is an excerpt from this article published at the Scottish newspaper Sunday Herald:

It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets," he said in a statement given to investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. "Then, when I heard the screaming I climbed the door … and I saw [the soldier’s name is deleted] who was wearing a military uniform." Hilas, who was himself threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Graib, then describes in horrific detail how the soldier raped "the little kid".

In another witness statement, passed to the Sunday Herald, former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod said: "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a US soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young."

Read another account at Truthout.org