Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
George Bush and the Children of the ‘War on Terror
For His Treatment of Children in the ‘War on Terror,’ Bush Is a War Criminal
by Dave Lindorff Surely nothing that President Bush has done in his two wretched terms of office — not the invasion and destruction of Iraq, not the overturning of the five-centuries-old tradition of habeas corpus, not his authorization and encouragement of torture, not his campaign of domestic spying — nothing, can compare in its ugliness as his approval, as commander in chief, of the imprisoning of over 2500 children.
Omar Khadr, languishing yet in Guantanamo Bay after being taken prisoner in Afghanistan at 15
According to the US government’s own figures, that is how many kids 17 years and younger have been held since 2001 as “enemy combatants” — often for over a year, and sometimes for over five years.
At least eight of those children, some reportedly as young as 10,
were held at Guantanamo. They even had a special camp for them there:
Camp Iguana. One of those kids committed suicide at the age of 21,
after spending five years in confinement at Guantanamo. (Ironically and
tragically, that particular victim of the president’s criminal policy,
had been determined by the Pentagon to have been innocent only two
weeks before he took his own life, but nobody bothered to tell him he
was slated for release and a return home to Afghanistan.)
I say
Bush’s behavior is criminal because since 1949, under the Geneva
Conventions signed and adopted by the US, and incorporated into US law
under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, children under the age of 15
are classed as “protected persons,” and even if captured while fighting
against US forces are to be considered victims, not POWs. In 2002, the
Bush administration signed an updated version of that treaty, raising
the “protected person” age to all those “under 18.”
Treaties
don’t mean much to this president, to the vice president, or to the
rest of the administration, but they should mean something to the rest
of us.
But capturing and imprisoning children isn’t even the
worst of this president’s war crimes when it comes to the abuse of the
young. Under Bush’s leadership as commander in chief, the US military
in Iraq and Afghanistan has been considering any male child in Iraq of
age 14 or older to be a potential combatant. They have been treated
accordingly — shot by US troops, imprisoned as “enemy combatants,” and
subjected to torture.
In the 2004 assault by US Marines on the
city of Fallujah, things were even worse. Dexter Filkins, a reporter
for the New York Times, reported that before that invasion, some 20,000
Marines encircled the doomed city, which the White House had decided to
level because it harbored a bunch of insurgents and had angered the
American public by capturing, killing and mutilating the bodies of four
mercenaries working for US forces. The residents of the
300,000-population city were warned of the coming all-out attack. Women
and children and old people were allowed to flee the city and pass
through the cordon of troops. But Filkins reported that males
determined to be “of combat age,” which in this case was established as
12 and up, were barred from leaving, and sent back into the city to
await their fate.
Young boys were ripped from their screaming mothers
and sent trudging back to the city to face death.
In the ensuing
slaughter, as the US dumped bombs, napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel
fragmentation weapons and an unimaginable quantity of machine gun and
small arms fire on the city, it is clear that many of those young boys
died.
This was a triple war crime. First of all, it was a case
of collective punishment — a practice popular with the Nazis in World
War II, and barred by the Geneva Conventions. The international laws of
war also guarantees the right of surrender, so those men and boys who
tried to leave, even if suspected of being enemy fighters, should have
been allowed to surrender and be held as captives until their loyalties
could be established. The boys, meanwhile, were “protected persons” who
were by law to be treated as victims of war, and protected from harm.
Instead they were treated as the enemy, to be destroyed.
For these crimes, the president should today be impeached by the Congress and then tried as a war criminal.
After
watching this Congress cower from its responsibility to defend the
Constitution, I have little hope of that happening. But I do harbor the
hope that once Bush has left office, some prosecutor in another country
— perhaps Spain, or Canada or Germany — will use the doctrine of
universal jurisdiction to indict him for war crimes, and, should he
leave the country for some lucrative speaking engagement, arrest him,
the way former dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested by a Spanish
prosecutor on a visit to the UK.
For his abuse, imprisonment and killing of children, this president should stand trial for war crimes.
Dave
Lindorff’s most recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Writings 
Surely nothing that President Bush has done in his two wretched terms of office — not the invasion and destruction of Iraq, not the overturning of the five-centuries-old tradition of habeas corpus, not his authorization and encouragement of torture, not his campaign of domestic spying — nothing, can compare in its ugliness as his approval, as commander in chief, of the imprisoning of over 2500 children.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Why, though, am I seeing an advertisement for John McCain on this very page? I am shocked and disturbed...