It seems the United States government is holding and questioning children under the age of sixteen at Guantanamo Bay. This really surprised me.
I don’t understand the refusal of giving out the number of children being held or the justification for doing so.
Am I alone in being angered by this. Holding over 600 adults in a military camp without charges or trial is bad enough, but an unknown amount of children?! Not only are they being held, but they are being interrogated also. I wonder what this means exactly? Are they being used as leverage against the detained adults? This is completely unacceptable by any stretch of the imagination to my way of thinking.
They were shooting at American soldiers. They were captured. Once they got to Cuba, it was discovered that a few of these captured enemy combatants happened to be under 16. So what is the U.S. supposed to do with them? Ship them back to Kabul? They’re children, you can’t just dump them in Kabul. Adopt them out? Put them in foster homes in Miami?
Send them back to Kabul with a U.S. military escort, charged with finding their families and repatriating them one by one? They were enemy combatants. A bullet from one of their guns could just as easily have killed somebody as a bullet from one of the adult’s guns. How is that going to look? “Well, they tried to kill us, but we forgive them, because they’re only children…”
Ok, why can’t we get info on the ages of the youngest being detained? Is that another National Security secret? If it were our kids being detained in facilities with adults I believe folks would be screaming from the rooftops. If two sixteen year old kids are being detained after firing on our troops, that’s a different story. I just want to know conclusively that we don’t have some ten year old and younger kids down there.
Well, yeah. We’re the ones that took them out of there in the first place. If anyone is responsible for their continued well-being now, its us. Reuniting these kids with their parents seems like a logical step. They tried to kill us because we were fighting a war against them. That is what people in the other army do in war. It is not illegal and it is not unexpected. And unless we’re going to charge them with something (and try them) I don’t see why we need to be holding them.
what, and that makes it better? They’ve no legal status, noi access to lawyers, they’re being held seperate from the adults.
“US officials have confirmed that their military is holding an undisclosed number of children as “enemy combatants” at its base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The teenagers, who are all 16 or under, are being held separate to around 660 adults who were captured during the US/British war against Afghanistan. Officials refused to say how many children were being held, but said they were “very few”. All of them were captured after January 1st this year. The United States has transported suspected al-Qa’ida and Taliban fighters to Guantanamo Bay to avoid giving them rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. They have been classed as “enemy combatants”, a term which has no basis in international law, and are being held without charge or without access to lawyers. Human Rights Watch has expressed grave concerns about the inmates, several of whom have attempted suicide”
As I mistakenly opened another thread about this very topic sezyou, I can assure you that I find it as outrageous as you do.
Duck Duck Goose and MLS, your concern warms my heart. I frankly don’t give a flying f_uck how it looks to return these children to their homes, nor how much it might cost to send someone with them to find their homes. We need not “drop them off in Kabul”. I assume that these children are not mute and can explain to anyone who speaks their language exactly where they live. It would take all of one day.
Honestly, I’ve had enough of this enemy combatant crap. I see two situations. Either they were directly involved in planning or running the operation that resulted in September 11th, or they were not. If they were, then try them in a friggin court of law, and I will agree to the most datardly and horrific punishments we can devise and I will be cheering on the sidelines. If they are not,and we have no evidence that would stand up in a court of law about other activities they are involved in directly against the US on US soil, then get them the hell back to Kabul. If they were part of the Taliban, then they were fighting an invading army on behalf of the closest thing to a government they had, and as such are friggin POWs. If they are Al Queda, then they can be credibly accused of criminal acts and should be charged and tried. If they are children, then they should be tried just as any child would be tried for criminal acts in this country. If they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, then get them friggin home, with a nice suitcase full of money and our deepest apologies.
I know that the current administration is dismissive of any international laws regarding these people, but does anyone know if there are any laws regarding juvenile POWs just in case this administration decides to abide by that inconvenient little thing called international law.
What does 9/11 have to do with this? My understanding was that they were the people who shot at American or allied troops during the war in Afghanistan.
Are these truly “children” or are they perhaps 14 year olds with guns, whose balls dropped a long time ago, who fired on americans.
Don’t play the child card unless you can demonstrate ther are innocent children there, and not maurading fourteen year-olds.
“Officials determined the detainees were younger than 16 during medical and other screening after their arrival, Johnson said.”
It doesn’t take a medical screening to identify a child. It might to identify a 14 yo vs a 16 yo. Come back when you have proof of children (real children, not parsing an 18 yo vs a 15 yo) being brutalized by the USA.
Were these prisoners at Guantanamo apprehended in Afghanistan or in the US itself? Does anyone know? I thought when I first read the article that they were apprehended in the US because I can’t imagine why the US would bother to ship prisoners all the way to Cuba rather than just put them in a camp in Afghanistan.
What “enemy combatants” means exactly is important here. If it means someone suspected of planning terrorism, then we have entered very dangerous territory. VERY dangerous. There has been little to separate the behavior of the current US administration from that of Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany; and the absence of camps detaining prisoners who have been arbitrarily detained by authorities was a very significant separation.
Does anyone have any more info on where these 660 prisoners came from or what they are alleged to have done?
The secrecy surrounding the detainment is the most troubling aspect to me. If there are a couple of fifteen year olds then make an official statement. I may not like it, but it won’t be bothering me as much as refusing to discuss it.
Perhaps it is just me, but most times when information is not given candidly I have a gut instinct something is trying to be hidden.
Well, we don’t KNOW how old they are, that’s one of the problems -at least according to a LA Times writer, printed in the SF Chronicle today. They are running special tests, and even these might not be conclusive. (It is hard to tell the exact age of a teenaged “boy”, especially if they might have been raised on an poor diet)
If they were in the Afgan army- well, then they are POW’s- but from what I can gather, they were part of the foreign “volunteers” who were fighting with the Taliban, and not in uniform. Thus, their status is unclear, along with most of the other “detainees”.
However, if they were old enough to tote a AK47 in battle and shoot it- then they aren’t CHILDREN anymore.
If someone will come out and officially announce the approximate ages of these kids and that they were toting and shooting AK47s it would go a long way towards relieving my concerns.
Why is it in a war scenario, kids who allegedly used guns are given the status of adult killer, but if a kid here in the US uses a gun, he is still given the benefit of youthful indiscretion, and still treated with a different set of rules than an adult?
What does 9/11 have to do with this? My understanding was that they were the people who shot at American or allied troops during the war in Afghanistan.