British Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens: The Axis of Child Abusers

[Clara T]

British Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens

The Axis of Child Abusers

By LILA RAJIVA

British Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens A video shown on BBC TV on February 11, 2006 shows British soldiers savagely beating and kicking unarmed Iraqi teenagers in an army compound. Officials at the Ministry of Defense are said to have investigated and established beyond doubt the authenticity of the video.

Shot secretly “for fun” as a home movie from a rooftop in Basra in southern Iraq by a corporal and shown to friends at a home base in Europe, it was given to the News of the World later by an anonymous whistle blower. The footage shows soldiers pulling four Iraqi boys in their early teens into their army base after a riot and beating them with batons, then punching and kicking them repeatedly on the body and head and between the legs. Within the space of one minute, some 42 blows are rained on the four teens whom the whistle blower said “were just kids” who did not even have on shoes.

One soldier can also be seen kicking a dead Iraqi in the face. The unidentified cameraman can be heard laughing and urging his colleagues on with vulgarities. This, mind you, is kinder gentler Britain, whose exemplary interaction with the locals at Basra was held up as a model for American forces. The new video shows this up for the nonsense it is; the Brits on tape are every bit as gung--ho and turned--on torturers of detainees as the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were.

And underage detainees at that. Nothing new there either, of course. Despite all the breast--beating, the fact remains that the two worst crimes coming out of the prison scandal (assuming one can make a hierarchy of these things) -- the abuse of children and the complicity of medical personnel -- have yet to be given anything like serious examination by the fourth estate here. So now Britain too is a paid--up member of the Axis of Child Abusers.

http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva02132006.html

[wakeme2008]

1. Video

here http://www.break.com/index/britishiraq12.html