CHILDREN TORTURED and Detained by US reported

JUST IN 3 hours ago at time of posting this: Torturing children...Democracy's Failure
here

Also see War Crimes Against Children at thepeoplesvoice dot org

And various other reports are coming in recently - among these the following:

CHILDEN to whom we as Americans are ESPECIALLY responsible:

HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten add these to many others reported detained at Bagram, Guantanamo and various secret sites around the world. Be sure to see the recent report listed at end of this post.

Below find various excerpts of reports concerning children detained and often flown via US or connected "Ghost Planes" from one site to another. Some of the children as young as 8 or 10 or not much older. Many - many have been and still are considered juveniles. They've been tortured in secret for months if not years.

MAJOR GENERAL ANTHONY TAGUBA notes:
[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"...

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER wrote:
'...the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse."' In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old."

REPORTER SEYMOUR HERSH (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported:
800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.

In Abu Ghraib (Seymour Hersh)wrote"
"The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking...They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

REPUBLICAN SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM said:
"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

History is just beginning to sort out - A compilation in November 2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:

IRAQI LAWYER Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview:
"There are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."

FORMER PRISONER THAAR SALMAN DAWOD -in a witness statement said:
"[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."

IRAQI TV REPORTER, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days said he saw:
"...hundreds" of children there. He said that he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily. He also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.

GERMAN TV reporter, Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted US ARMY SGT. Samuel Provance that:
interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.


JONATHAN STEELE wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad's prisons...Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.

RAAD JAMAL, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army's Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.

IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners' Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.

One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."

What hope of redemption can there be for a nation which faces its past. One that does not can only become more monstrous.

When historians search through the materials relating to Guantánamo for a handful of cases that give a good sense of what was done there in the nation’s name, they’d be well advised to pause over the file of Mohammed Jawad. SEE HARPERS DOT ORG ARCHIVE here From the "No Comment" Blog at Harpers.org