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A U.S. Gulag For Children. Our state of enlightenment regarding human rights is on a par with Somalia's, the only U.N. member state — other than the United States of America — that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Instead of taking the moral lead on the worldwide scourge of child soldiers, the United States has opened new ramifications of its horror, acknowledging recently that it is holding a number of adolescents incommunicado at its infamous Camp X-ray. “Their release is contingent on the determination that they are not a threat to the nation and have no further intelligence value,” Lt. Col. Barry Johnson told London's The Guardian. The one-dimensional and ultimately futile nature of our war on terror is no more starkly symbolized. This is how powerful we are. Fortress America, with its $380 billion defense budget, high-tech weapons systems and expendable billions to invade Third World countries, is acting like a fairy-tale elephant in regard to adolescent “enemy combatants” rounded up in Afghanistan. Eek, terrorists! I confess to being something less than shocked — something less than surprised, even — when I heard that, among the 660 or so non-prisoners of war we are detaining at Guantanamo Bay in legal limbo and possibly inhumane conditions, in defiance of the Geneva Convention and to the outrage of human rights activists everywhere, are at least three boys 13 to 15 years old. At what point does our fear of the rest of the world let up? When do we show a larger understanding of it than “us vs. them”? American yahooism didn't begin with the Bush administration, but this cynical and power-savvy crowd has made it the centerpiece of its foreign policy, up to and including the establishment of a kiddy room in its nascent gulag (where there have been at least 24 suicide attempts thus far). Challenged by the international press and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, U.S. military spokesman Johnson explained that the boys “are in a secure environment free from the influences of older detainees. “They are,” he said, “receiving specialist mental health care, in recognition of the difficult circumstances that child combatants go through, and some basic education in terms of reading and writing.” Well, great, but Camp X-ray isn't junior high school. The children are also indefinitely sequestered from the rest of the world and have no access to legal representation or, for that matter, their parents (if it turns out they have any). They get video games, if they're good, but they'll be shot if they try to escape. We're questioning them, not educating them, and we'll keep them until we're done. Our state of enlightenment regarding human rights is on a par with Somalia's, the only U.N. member state — other than the United States of America — that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. How much enlightenment does it take to understand that child soldiers are the exploited victims of armed ideologues and not, to any rational soul, “the enemy”? There are an estimated 300,000 of them worldwide drugged killers, sex slaves, landmine fodder — forced to take up arms for one cynical cause or another. The convention, which declares that every child deserves to grow up in “an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,” is the world's minimum decency standard for the treatment of children, and we've fallen below it. We've chosen to mine these wretched adolescent combatants for military intelligence rather than rescue them. Robert Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services. © The Day Publishing Co.
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