Victims of bush’s “War on Terror”: Children

(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

On January 12th 2009 President bush gave his final Press Conference to the Nation.

In it he made a number of statements that have been analyzed by many, my take on his answers and spin was his showing how little a man, who is in total denial and lacking any compassion or moral feelings, of how big a failure as a person, and especially as the President, he has been!

In one of his answers he said this:

“The most urgent threat that he’ll have to deal with and other presidents after him will have to deal with is an attack on our homeland,” Bush said. “You know, I wish I could report that’s not the case, but there’s still an enemy out there that would like to inflict damage on America.”

And for once I agree with this incompetent,immoral, unrepentant little man?, he’s created tens of thousands, that didn’t exist before, who now wish this Country and It’s Citizens Harm, “Mission Accomplished”, for the coming decades!!

We can all see, daily, those who are retaliating for the policies he set forth, in Iraq and Afghanistan, from the death and destruction that is ongoing, with our soldiers still dying and being maimed as well as the innocent citizens of both countries, the word is “Blowback”! These policies have also brought about a rise of Criminal Terrorism, around the World, over these last 7 years.

What does the future hold and for how long?

I’ve done a few posts, this is but one, about that probable future and the possibility of reaching into the coming generations, how many, who knows right now. But it only takes a few who carry the hatreds that they have grown up with to create destructive blowback, and that builds towards more of the same.

Michael Haas has a recent write on just this probable future, more geared in the present of who should be brought to accountability, but there are certainly more who actually created the failed policies we’ve been party to. The name of Michael article is: Children As Unlamented Victims of Bush’s ‘War On Terror’.

He starts it out with:

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture.

Some will try and argue that certain forms of torture really aren’t, or that it’s needed to get information, it isn’t for it only gives weak or false information, yet we as a Nation have not only participated but helped write the laws on torture and ratified these laws making them our own. The link only gives one of the World Wide conventions held for the purpose of writing these laws that aim to end the use of inhumane treatment of torture, and more, that doesn’t return what is sought, reliable intelligence. We were also the major contributor to the Geneva Conventions and major condemner of countries who don’t follow what was done in Geneva. We are now publicly one of the participants, we can condemn no more.

We’ve all watched, most in total disbelief and rage, what has happened under this president and his administrations policies along with his political parties affiliation rubber stamping their wants, and we’ve done virtually nothing but allow it to continue.

Haas goes further into what most haven’t paid attention to:

The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In 2008, the Bush administration reported to the UN-assisted Committee on the Rights of the Child that the United States from 2002 had detained 2,400 children in Iraq and 100 in Afghanistan, though another source claims that the figure for Afghanistan is at least 800 boys, aged 10 to 15, from whom as many as 64 were sent to Guantánamo, of which there were 21 as of May 2008. That month, the Committee upbraided the United States for charging minors with war crimes instead of treating underage persons as victims of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two children, aged 7 and 9, were separately detained to intimidate him to confess.

Think about the above, as parents what would You do if your country was and is being destroyed and the children of were being treated as enemies or used for other purposes and excused as being in War! But there’s more:

While detained, several children have been brutalized and tortured. At Abu Ghraib, American guards videotaped Iraqi male prisoners raping young boys but took  no action to stop the offenses. Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib  Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down Abu Ghraib with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards  stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

Those that want to denie, for argumentative our some twisted form of political ideology, what torture or inhumane treatment of others actually is or isn’t, look at your’s or other little kids, young teens, and ask if you would want them treated like animals, and if so to what purpose!

Michael Haas has a book out George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes I haven’t read as yet, as I just ordered it, but it will be read and added to the others and all that is now being written and discussed as to what this Nation must do, not only for our own survival of what we are, but the World view of us as a Leader of Nations and an Example to Emulate and Strive towards.

We must find the ways to bring Accountability for the Crimes against our Laws as well as the Laws we’ve helped form towards World stability and make our Constitution strong again, or we will collapse as a society and be scorned by the World!

And we must find a way, amongst All People, to stem the possibility of many of the children of today, growing up under occupation, death and destruction, don’t become even more violent and destructive towards others than that we’ve already created through our failed policies of the past and the near past!

Guantanamo “Abandoned Our Values and Defiled Our Constitution!”

The video is a combination of three BBC News reports on Guantanamo from Dec. ’08 to Jan ’09, it’s about 141/2 minutes long, the links to each individual video at their site found below.

Guantanamo ‘a stain on US military’ Dec 3rd ’08

Guantanamo closure plan ordered Dec 19th ’08

Former guard on Guantanamo ‘torture’ Jan 9th ’09

The Special Prosecutor Petition