[Marxism] Children as unlamented victims of Bush’s war crimes

[Nasir Khan]

Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

By Michael Haas | Information Clearing House, May 2, 2009

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of
the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the
“war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over
torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners
in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted
are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive
illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support.
The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of
children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights
under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet
both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very
existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world,
however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was
the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well
documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when
the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby
murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children
were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing
in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004,
during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including
peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed
live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

Full article: http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com/2009/05/children-as-unlamented-victims-of-bushs.html