Officials from UNAMI, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iran, said that children awaiting trial at severely overcrowded Tobchi prison, Baghdad, said they had been tortured and sexually abused while in custody in adult facilities prior to their transfer to Tobchi, and showed the marks to prove it. And at Karkh juvenile prison, children showed skin sores from lying on soggy mattresses in temperatures that average 112 during the day.
Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in “Our Endangered Values”(Simon & Schuster) that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons “107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old.” And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.
President Carter wrote that 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 an effort to conceal conditions in its Iraqi compounds, the U.S. has closed them to human rights monitors such as AI, HRW, and the International Federation of Human Rights, says Ciara Gilmartin, the Security Council Program Coordinator at Global Policy Forum(GPF), a New York-based organization that seeks to strengthen international law.
GPF called for opening the Iraqi detention facilities “to national and international observers” and for establishing clear accountability for U.S. officers and contractors in charge of the prisons. “The whole abusive system must be thoroughly overhauled or closed down,” Gilmartin said.
“U.S. military and civilian leaders are not the only ones complicit in the abuse and lack of due process of Iraqi detainees. All who stay silent in the face of the Iraq gulag allow it to continue.”
In 2005, the AP reported from Geneva that UNICEF was “profoundly disturbed” by reports of abuse of children in Iraq prisons. “Any mistreatment, sexual abuse, exploitation or torture of children in detention is a violation of international law,” UNICEF spokesman Damien Peronnaz said.
According to a report by Felicity Arbuthnot published last June 9th in Global Research, the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomarswarmy, said children are not allowed any outside lawyers and may be held hostage to force an adult family male to give himself up. HRW said that as of February of this year the length of detention for children was more than 130 days and “some children have been detained for more than a year without charge or trial, in violation of the Coalition Provisional Authority memorandum on criminal procedures.
Not surprisingly, “One of the biggest complaints (by Iraqis) is that the vast majority of (U.S.) detainees have not been charged with any crime,” David Enders writes in the October 27 issue of The Nation.
Although President Bush says he reads the Bible, the words about children Matthew ascribes to Jesus may not have sunk in and so are worthy of repeating: “Who so shall offend one of these little ones…it were better that a millstone was hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” #
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant and reporter that can be reached at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com Ross compiled this article from news sources he believes to be reliable and is particularly indebted to the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Herald.)
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