Fwd: truthout - William Rivers Pitt - Torturing Children

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> Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:19:30 -0700

> truethout - William Rivers Pitt - Torturing

Children

>

>

> <http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/072004A.shtml>

> Torturing Children

> By William Rivers Pitt

> t r u t h o u t

>

> 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.'

> --

> " There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms

> or mass graves

> in Iraq "

> --George Bush, May 1st, 2003

>

Said during " Mission Accomplished " speech on USS

> Lincoln