http://www.thismodernworld.com/
July 08, 2004
German TV news report (and take a deep breath, folks): Children at Abu Ghraib
(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)
Three days ago, a German TV newsmagazine called Report Mainz broadcast an eight-minute segment reporting that the International Red Cross found at least 107 children in coaliton-administered detention centers in Iraq.
The report also quotes from a yet-unpublished June 2004 UNICEF report, which (as near as I can tell through my crappy German) confirms that children were routinely arrested and “interned” in a camp in Um-Qasr. UNICEF seems particularly vexed with the “internment” status, since that means indefinite detention.
Another storm seems about to begin. Possibly a large one.
Even if you have no German at all, hit the link and watch the video. (Click where it says “Beitrag ansehen” and you’ll get a RealVideo stream. I’d include a direct link but the server seems to require you to link from the page.) There’s some footage of the internment camps here that you’re not likely to see on American TV. The link also includes a complete transcript, in German.
In addition to the Red Cross and UNICEF concerns, Report Mainz broadcast an original interview with U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance, who was stationed for six months at Abu Ghraib and later quite famously blew the whistle about abuses there and the subsequent cover-up. In this interview, Provance confirms the presence of teenagers in Abu Ghraib, describing the torture-by-cold-and-exposure of a teenage boy in order to get his father to talk.
The General Secretary of Amnesty International in Germany, Barbara Lochbihler, is finally shown demanding a full accounting from the U.S. government, describing the information as “scandalous.”
A few caveats: I haven’t found where Provance mentioned young people at Abu Ghraib until now, and another witness in the report describes “hundreds” of pre-pubescents at Abu Ghraib, which tingles my smell detector. Then again, I wouldn’t have believed in Stack-The-Iraqis at first, either.
There’s also the point that a 15-year-old can damn sure fire a gun. But even so, since 70-90 percent of those at Abu Ghraib were innocent, if at least 107 kids were locked up, the best-case scenario is still that the U.S. has interned a boatload of innocent Iraqi kids. That’s still bad.
The worst-case, meanwhile, if the German TV report is even close… is a lot worse.
Meanwhile, there’s not a damn thing – I mean, not a single word I can find – about this yet in the U.S. media, but it’s starting to pick up speed on the rest of our tiny planet, so far showing up in Der Spiegel (roughly Germany’s equivalent to Time), an Australian ABC Radio report, and TV2 and NRK television in Norway, where the story might even lead to a change in Norway’s participation in the U.S.-led coalition.
If you’re an American news reporter led here by a reader, but you need a hook that doesn’t place the incendiary charges in the lead (for whatever reason), OK, here’s your story on a platter: Bush may even lose another ally over this. Hit the Norwegian links, and you’ll find that the local Amnesty International has stated that “Norway can not continue its military collaboration with the US in light of the alleged torture of children.” Norway actually listens to its activists; you’ll find that the Prime Minister’s office says it plans to address the situation with the U.S. “in a very severe and direct way.”
If this ain’t news, I don’t know what the hell is.
I’ve Google-rigged an English version of the Der Spiegel article. This is a good place to get the gist of what the world is starting to read, even through the machine translation, which parses the headline as “US Soldiers Are To Have Abused Arrested Children.”
This is gonna travel pretty fast. Let me look again… yup. New headlines have appeared just since I started writing this.
In Pakistan right this minute, they’re reading “Over 100 Children Abused in Custody in Iraq”.
Factual conflation aside – that’s not what the original report stated – it hurts like hell that it’s no longer a perceptual leap to assume the worst. When I think of the outpouring of love for America post-9/11… it’s just stunning how far we have fallen. This is really what the world sees now.
Still, we need to know. My thanks to reader Thomas for the tip that started me on this.
If you’d like to know more than a guy with bad German, worse Norwegian, and a laptop can find out in an hour, give the major newspapers and cable networks an email or a holler. I understand they have actual reporters and stuff.