Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Suffering Little Children

From today's New York Times op-ed page:

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Maj. General [George] Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old detainee in the prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. "He told me he was almost 12," General Karpinski recalled, and that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother."
...
... coalition intelligence officers told the Red Cross that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees in Iraq are eventually found innocent and released. Many innocent children are swept up with their parents in chaotic nighttime dragnets based on tips from unreliable informants. "We know of children under 15," Clarisa Bencomo of Human Rights Watch told me, " held for over a year at Guantánamo Bay, whom the government later said were not security risks."

Say, where can I get me one of those nifty "Proud To Be An American" bumper stickers?