>
> Just when you think the Bush clique has reached
> rock bottom, you
> discover that they are sinking to ever-lower depths
> of moral depravity.
> Here's what these self-appointed guardians of our
> moral values are
> doing to child prisoners as young as 8 who fall into
> their clutches in
> Iraq and Afghanistan. This goes a long way to
> explain why the US is one
> of only two nations which has refused to ratify the
> Convention on the
> Rights of the Child (as well as other humanitarian
> conventions adopted
> by the civilized world).
>
> * * * * * * * * * *
> June 29, 2005
> Arrested Development By ARLIE HOCHSCHILD
> 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."
>
> Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu
> Ghraib and Bagram
> Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment
> as adults. The
> International Red Cross, Amnesty International and
> the Pentagon itself
> have gathered substantial testimony of torture of
> children, bolstered
> by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or
> participated in the abuse.
>
> According to Amnesty International, 13-year-old
> Mohammed Ismail Agha
> was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2002 and
> detained without charge or
> trial for over a year, first at Bagram and then at
> Guantánamo Bay. He
> was held in solitary confinement and subjected to
> sleep deprivation.
> "Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick
> at my door and yell
> at me to wake up," he told an Amnesty researcher.
> "They made me stand
> partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours."
>
> A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was 15 in 2002 when he was
> captured in
> Afghanistan and interned at Guantánamo. For 2½
> years, he was allowed no
> contact with a lawyer or with his family.
> Seventeen-year-old Akhtar
> Mohammed told Amnesty that he was kept in solitary
> confinement in a
> shipping container for eight days in Afghanistan in
> January 2002.
>
> 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."
>
> Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of
> Abu Ghraib, told
> Maj. General Fay about visiting a weeping
> 11-year-old detainee in the
> prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed
> prisoners designated high
> risk. "He told me he was almost 12," General
> Karpinski recalled, and
> that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he
> please call his
> mother."
>
> Children like this 11 year old held at Abu Ghraib
> have been denied the
> right to see their parents, a lawyer, or anyone
> else. They were not
> told why they were detained, let alone for how long.
> A Pentagon
> spokesman told Mr. Hersh that juveniles received
> some special care, but
> added, "Age is not a determining factor in
> detention." The United
> States has found, the spokesman said, that "age does
> not necessarily
> diminish threat potential."
>
> It's true that some of these children may have
> picked up a stone or a
> gun. But coalition intelligence officers told the
> Red Cross that 70
> percent to 90 percent of detainees in Iraq are
> eventually found
> innocent and released. Many innocent children are
> swept up with their
> parents in chaotic nighttime dragnets based on tips
> from unreliable
> informants. "We know of children under 15," Clarisa
> Bencomo of Human
> Rights Watch told me, " held for over a year at
> Guantánamo Bay, whom
> the government later said were not security risks."
> Even if a child is
> found guilty, he or she should be treated humanely,
> rather than
> tortured or "rendered," as the C.I.A. puts it, to
> third parties that
> torture.
>
> AMBASSADOR MILLER is right. Children matter. To
> really place them "at
> the center" of our human rights concerns, the United
> States should
> hasten to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the
> Child, from which
> only we and Somalia abstain. And if the Pentagon
> must detain children,
> it should do so in separate facilities, with access
> to family, and
> under humane conditions that include the offer of
> rehabilitation and
> education.
>
> Finally, the Pentagon should open all prisons to
> human rights
> inspectors. By taking these steps, the United States
> could begin to
> reverse some of the terrible harm that continues to
> be done to children
> in our name.
>
> Arlie Hochschild is a professor of sociology at
> the University of
> California, Berkeley, and the co-editor of "Global
> Woman: Nannies,
> Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy."
>
>
>
>
> * Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
>
>
>
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>
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