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<dd> <br><br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2> Torturing
Children</b> <br>
<dd> By William Rivers Pitt <br>
<dd> t r u t h o u t | Perspective <br><br>
<dd> Tuesday 20 July 2004 <br><br>
<dd> The biggest story of the Iraq war is not about
missing weapons of mass destruction, or about deep-cover CIA officers
getting their covers blown by vengeful White House agents, or even about
896 dead American soldiers. These have been covered to one degree or
another, and then summarily dismissed, by the American mainstream news
media. The biggest story of the Iraq war has not enjoyed any coverage in
America, though it has been exploding across the international news media
for several weeks now. <br><br>
<dd> The biggest story of the Iraq war is about the
torture of Iraqi children. <br><br>
<dd> A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz'
recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the
effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.- controlled
detention centers, including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of
this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different
detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal
in the report. <br><br>
<dd> The report also outlined eyewitness testimony of
the abuse of these children. Staff Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was
stationed at Abu Ghraib, said that interrogating officers had gotten
their hands on a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police only stopped the
interrogation when the girl was half undressed. A separate incident
described a 16 year old being soaked with water, driven through the cold,
smeared with mud, and then presented before his weeping father, who was
also a prisoner. <br><br>
<dd> Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first
broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU
convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American
media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras
rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys
shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at
war." <br><br>
<dd> Hersh described the prison scene as, "a
series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice
president, by this administration anyway," and that there has been,
"a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the
highest command out there, and higher." <br><br>
<dd> Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American
prisons have been public knowledge since the release of the Taguba
Report. Recently, however, some 106 annexes to the report, previously
classified, have also been released. U.S. News and World Report detailed
the sum of what is contained in these annexes in an article titled 'Hell
on Earth.' <br><br>
<dd> In it, U.S. News says, "The abuses took
place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even
more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence
from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards,
unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food,
prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings
from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report,
that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib." According to coalition
intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between
70% to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were arrested
"by mistake." That means they were innocent. <br><br>
<dd> The orders to treat prisoners in this fashion were
not manufactured by the few "bad apples" we have heard about,
but came from up on high. Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski, former commander of
Abu Ghraib and now scapegoat for the abuses, says the truth about where
the orders came from would be revealed in the trials of the accused
soldiers. Memos ordering the abuse of prisoners were signed off on by
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Justice Department and Mr. Bush's senior
legal advisor went out of their way to craft arguments justifying this,
claiming that torture isn't really torture and that the President is
basically above the law. <br><br>
<dd> Mr. Hersh will revisit this issue within the next
several weeks. In the meantime, the American news media has an obligation
to report on this situation. Photographic and videotape evidence of this
torture is currently in the hands of the New Yorker, the Washington Post,
the U.S. Congress and the White House. It must be released. <br><br>
<dd> We invaded a country based upon the false claim
that Iraq was allied with al Qaeda. We invaded a country based on the
false claim that there were weapons of mass destruction which needed to
be destroyed. We promised freedom and democracy, and instead installed a
CIA-trained strongman named Allawi who has all but created a dictatorship
in Iraq, and who has been accused of killing Iraqi prisoners by his own
hand. 896 American soldiers have died so we could do this. <br><br>
<dd> We took thousands of innocent civilians off the
streets in Iraq and threw them into hellhole prisons, where they were
beaten, raped, and killed. This story has faded from public view because
no new pictures of the abuses have come out in the last several weeks.
Those pictures are out there, and they show the rape and torture of
children. The international media is reporting on it. Coalition ally
Norway may be preparing to flee Iraq because of the allegations regarding
these children. <br><br>
<dd> Where is the American news media? Where are the
pictures? Who is responsible for this abomination? Torturing children in
the name of freedom? Is this what we have become? <br><br>
<hr>
<dd> <a href="mailto:william.pitt@truthout.org">William
Rivers Pitt</a> is a New York Times and international bestseller of two
books -
'<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893956385/qid=1055796595/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-8359763-1225605?v=glance&s=books">War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know</a>' and
'<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0745320104/qid=1055796595/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-8359763-1225605?v=glance&s=books">The
Greatest Sedition is Silence</a>.' <br><br>
<br><br>
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