The Children Prisoners of the United States

Crouching, hands tied behind his back, eyes covered with a black blindfold. He is a prisoner in Iraq, where abuses and tortures committed against the detainees in U.S. jails or by Iraqi guards have received worldwide reprobation. But the violation of human rights is even greater in this case that the photograph shows: it’s about children and teens.

It’s paradoxical, but the investigators of the transgression are North American soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Craig J. Simper, a Judge Advocate General Corps officer from the 419th Fighter Wing in his base in the state of Utah, investigated allegations of torture in a juvenile prison of Baghdad and found clear evidence that Sunni children have been killed by their Shiite captors.

The Salt Lake Tribune published the statements of the official: “The explanation was that these people were trying to escape, but our investigation concluded that they were scheduled to be freed.”

However, another source of that task force spoke of “unsubstantiated allegations” regarding the executions and that “no records were found or documented evidence of the incident.”

With or without evidence, after the barbarity of Abu Ghraib, nothing can surprise us of the description that Simper made of the Tobchi juvenile detention center, where supposedly vocational training was offered to the imprisoned children: “a prison in the worst sense… it was worse than the prisons for adults” … “We found a lot of evidence of torture, of physical and sexual abuse, and deplorable conditions.”… “The rats were the size of Chihuahua dogs and there were 50 children caged in the same cell.” Among them were children as young as 6 years old.

Little 6 year-old kids! The criminal and illegal war, initiated by George W. Bush in the shadow of lies, had also in these cases their “collateral damages,” with the amputation of innocence, and now they want to become judges who have learned of their skills.

This is no different from what their own American soldiers have done since January 2002 in the concentration camp that they installed in the Naval Base of Guantanamo, the Cuban territory illegally occupied for more than a century.

Take the news of this Tuesday, from the AP, dated in Canada: the lawyers of the Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, locked in that “black hole” since almost the first moments of opening that prison of horror, have spread a video–the first known of its kind: 7 hours in duration, it contains the interrogations that he completed during four days as an agent of the Intelligence Service of Security of Canada, in order to know the facts that motivated his capture in Afghanistan.

“The video,” says AP, “allows a glimpse of the effects of long interrogations and the prolonged captivity of a Guantanamo prisoner who was captured when he was 15 years old.”

Yes, Omar Khadr was a teenager, a minor according to the term used by the United States, when he was detained and converted, by the grace and determination of Mr. W. Bush, into an “enemy combatant”, a sort of limbo-hell category for denying detainees at the Criminal Base and in other secret prisons of the CIA and the Pentagon, the smallest glimmer of justice and fair treatment.

Recently, very recently, it became known that the young man was accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier during a battle in Afghanistan in 2002.

One could wonder, what is the crime of Omar Khadr? Perhaps, and despite his young age, facing troops that invaded his country—and still occupy it? Isn’t that a right that could be assumed, if that were the case, the children of whatever country of the world, including the United States, if their territory was assaulted by a foreign army or a coalition of forces with the self-awarded right to spread “democracy and liberty”?

The children of Tobchi, the teen of Afghanistan, a multiplication of infamy of an administration that equally violates the Geneva Convention with respect to the prisoners of war, as it does the International Convention of Children and Adolescents. One has to wonder – some day will there be another Nuremberg trial that judges these criminals of war properly?