Suffer the little children...(revisited)

The General is certain that the Sunday Herald reporter who wrote the following must have confused life under Saddam with life under the benevolent rule of Our Leader. Surely, we don't hold children in our Iraqi prisons, and most assuredly, if child prisoners were being raped, the Anointed One would move heaven and earth to punish the rapists without regard to political consequences. We have only to look at how He has pursued those who outed Valerie Plame to see His commitment to doing the right thing.

From the article:

It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets," he said in a statement given to investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. "Then, when I heard the screaming I climbed the door -- and I saw [the soldier's name is deleted] who was wearing a military uniform." Hilas, who was himself threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Graib, then describes in horrific detail how the soldier raped "the little kid."

In another witness statement, passed to the Sunday Herald, former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod said: "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a US soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young."

It's not certain exactly how many children are being held by coalition forces in Iraq, but a Sunday Herald investigation suggests there are up to 107. Their names are not known, nor is where they are being kept, how long they will be held or what has happened to them during their detention.

Proof of the widespread arrest and detention of children in Iraq by US and UK forces is contained in an internal Unicef report written in June. The report has --? surprisingly -- not been made public.

[...]

"I saw a camp for children there," he said. "Boys, under the age of puberty. There were certainly hundreds of children in this camp." Al-Baz said he heard a 12-year-old girl crying. Her brother was also held in the jail. One night guards came into her cell. "She was beaten," said al-Baz. "I heard her call out, 'They have undressed me. They have poured water over me.'"

He says he heard her cries and whimpering daily -- this, in turn, caused other prisoners to cry as they listened to her. Al-Baz also told of an ill 15-year-old boy who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed. Guards then brought in the child’s father with a hood over his head. The boy collapsed again.

[...]

High-placed officials in the Pentagon and Centcom told the Sunday Herald that children as young as 14 were being held by US forces. "We do have juveniles detained," a source said. "They have been detained as they are deemed to be a threat or because they have acted against the coalition or Iraqis."

Officially, the Pentagon says it is holding "around 60 juvenile detainees primarily aged 16 and 17", although when it was pointed out that the Red Cross estimate is substantially higher, a source admitted "numbers may have gone up, we might have detained more kids".

[..]

The Norwegian government, which is part of the "coalition of the willing", has already said it will tell the US that the alleged torture of children is intolerable. Odd Jostein Sæter, parliamentary secretary at the Norwegian prime minister's office, said: "Such assaults are unacceptable. It is against international laws and it is also unacceptable from a moral point of view. This is why we react strongly -- We are addressing this in a very severe and direct way and present concrete demands. This is damaging the struggle for democracy and human rights in Iraq."