Torturing Children
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 20 July 2004
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.
The biggest story of the Iraq war is
about the torture of Iraqi children.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
William
Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of
two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
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