Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

[kpete]

CURRENT WAR CRIMES DEVELOPMENTS

Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In 2008, the Bush administration reported to the UN-assisted Committee on the Rights of the Child that the United States from 2002 had detained 2,400 children in Iraq and 100 in Afghanistan, though another source claims that the figure for Afghanistan is at least 800 boys, aged 10 to 15, from whom as many as 64 were sent to Guantánamo, of which there were 21 as of May 2008. That month, the Committee upbraided the United States for charging minors with war crimes instead of treating underage persons as victims of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two children, aged 7 and 9, were separately detained to intimidate him to confess.

much more at:
http://www.uswarcrimes.com/?p=1538

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[gratuitous]

2. And who will be responsible?

Obviously not the civilian commander-in-chief. Not the brass. Not the underlings following illegal orders. No, it will be us, the American people who pay for these crimes. The civilian commanders will retire to a life of luxury. The brass will be pensioned off, to enjoy their golden years "consulting" for arms dealers and "serving" on the boards of major corporations. Some of underlings will go quietly (and not so quietly) mad, and perhaps take a few folks with them. But the real penalties will be inflicted on us, the taxpayers who financed these atrocities.

Unless we do something about it.

[juno jones]

3. K&R! n/t

[G_j]

4. kick