GERMAN TV: U.S. ABUSED CHILDREN IN IRAQI PRISIONS

[Hoping4Change]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 "Global Network" aired: "The Fall --Iraq" filed by Thomas Reutter

Excerpts (English translation for Traprock Peace Center by Richard Gawthrop.)

Sometimes during roundups the soldiers also arrest children. What happens to the children? About that the military gives no information. We investigate, as it happens, through informants.

One of them, who is knowledgeable about these things, is Sergeant Samuel Provance from U.S. Army Intelligence. For half a year he was stationed in the notorious Abu Ghraib torture-prison. Today, five months later, we meet with Sergeant Provance in Heidelberg. His superiors have strictly forbidden him from reporting to journalists about what he experienced in Abu Ghraib.

Yet Provance wants to talk about it nonetheless. Pangs of conscience plague him. He tells us about one 16-year-old, whom he himself had to lead away.

Provance: "He was full of fear, very alone. He had the thinnest little arms that I have ever seen. His whole body shook. His wrists were so thin that we could not put handcuffs on him. As soon as I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry for him. The interrogation specialists doused him with water and put him in a truck. Then they drove with him throughout the night, and at that time it was very, very cold. Then they smeared him with mud and showed him to his likewise imprisoned father. With him they had tried out other interrogation methods. But they had not succeeded in making him talk. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father had seen his son in that condition, it broke his heart. He wept and promised to tell them what they wanted to know."

The son however remained in custody, and the 16-year-old was put in with the adults.

Provance reported also about a special department, expressly for children. A secret children's wing in the horror prison of Abu Ghraib.

One person, who has seen the children's wing with his own eyes, is the journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz. Our correspondent met him some week ago in Baghdad. The Iraqi TV reporter related how he himself was arrested arbitrarily by the Americans while shooting film and spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib.

Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz;: "There I saw a camp for children. Young, under the age of puberty. In this camp were certainly hundreds of children. Some of them have been released, others are definitely still in there." >From his solitary cell in the adults' wing, Suhaib heard a perhaps 12-year-old girl weeping. Later he learned that her brother was on the third floor of the prison. One or two times, says Suhaib, he saw her himself. In the night, according to Suhaib, they were with her in her cell. The girl shreeked out to the other prisoners and called out to her brother.

"She was beaten. I heard her call: 'They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." Daily, says Suhaib, one heard her crying and wimpering. Many of the prisoners wept when they heard her.

snip

"The classification of these children as "internees" is alarming, since it contains them for an indefinite time in prison, without contact with their families or expectation of legal proceedings or trial." Over this up to now unpublished report UNICEF does not yet want to say anything. Their own workers in Iraq should not be put in danger.

http://www.traprockpeace.org/iraqi_child_prisoners.htm

German news video
http://www.swr.de/report/archiv/sendungen/040705/02/04070502.ram

[mike_c]

1. pigs....

Pig bastards abusing chidren and other civilians IN OUR NAMES!

[OneBlueSky]

this whole mal-administration should be tried as war criminals . . .

the list of charges would be as long as your arm . . .

[stellanoir]

2. our tax payer's dollars at work for us. . .?

We should all scream loud and hard about this and wonder why the stories of sodomy of juveniles has been all over the European press for weeks, and that Repub Lindsay Graham reported it on MTP months ago, our press has been strangely silent. Scream loud and hard for these kids. Their suffering has been unimaginably horrific.

[Hoping4Change]

3. As you point out the story hasn't been put on the backburner in

Europe. With this sort of publicity and continued silence from the Pentagon about child prisoners which country would want to contribute troops to work with the U.S.?

[arcane1]

4. ah, ok. But when insurgents attack us, it's because they "hate freedom"

:grr:


I'm going to go throw up, and then crawl into a fetal position, I can't take this bullshit anymore

[izzie]

5. Someone is teaching these people that Iraq people are less then human.

Some thing has got to be done. This is something I do not want to go on in my name.

[Hoping4Change]

6. i wonder if there should be an International Day of Solidarity

Against the Abuse in Iraq? A massive demostration would at least make the Muslim world aware that millions of people in the West are incensed by these actions. My worry as many have already pointed out that this is playing into AQ's hand.

[hansolsen]

7. U.S. Sunday broadcast TV had better cover this, and do it now.

Tim Russert, Bob Sheiffer, George Stephanopolous, Wolf Blitzer, and the rest had better find a place to ask the Spokescritters the Bush administration sends out to make the rounds this week, if there are any children being held as detainees, and what has happened to them.

If not, it is prima facia evidence that the corporate controlled media is no longer a "free press".

So say I.

[Vitruvius]

8. I hope to live to see the day the Bu$h thugs are turned over to the Iraqis

for trial.