A 13-year-old soldier with the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 2004. Nations conscripting children are subject to sanctions.
Obama administration refuses to protect child soldiers they have captured and allows for their use by nations allied to US. Meanwhile the Obama administration in defiance of international law defends its own policy of incarceration, abuse and torture of child soldiers.
...The phenomenon of child soldiers, like genocide, slavery and torture, seems like one of those crimes that no nation could legitimately defend. Yet the Obama administration just decided to leave countless kids stranded on some of the world’s bloodiest battlegrounds.
The administration stunned human rights groups last month by sidestepping a commitment to help countries curb the military exploitation of children. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reported that President Obama issued a presidential memorandum granting waivers from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to four countries: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Yemen...
...Strategically granting certain countries a pass on child rights reflects Washington’s warped attitude toward the global human rights regime. The U.S. has failed to ratify, or simply ignored, numerous human rights protocols, and (its)our ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child has languished. Human Rights Watch points out, “Only the United States and Somalia, which has no functioning national government, have failed to ratify the treaty.”
from : White House Says Child Soldiers Are Ok, if They Fight Terrorists by Michelle Chen, raceWire.org Nov. 15, 2010
UN calls on the us government take action in regards to torture
The United Nations has called on the United States to conduct a full investigation into torture under the administration of former US President George W. Bush. PressTv
The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Ernesto Mendez, urged Washington ...to prosecute offenders as well as senior officials who ordered the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
"The United States has a duty to investigate every act of torture. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much in the way of accountability," Mendez told Reuters.
The Argentinean diplomat also said he plans to visit Iraq to investigate what he called a "very widespread practice of torture" of detainees by US-led forces, following the 2003 occupation of the war-torn country.
Obama and American Public indifference or even Hostility to International Law and to United Nations and to human rights organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross , Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, World Vision etc. is just a matter of continuing the policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. As with Bush and Cheney Obama also puts National Security and American Exceptionalism before legal or ethical considerations. By doing so Obama is contributing to International erosion of respect for the USA and helping Terrorists organizations recruitment.
Those who make up the elite in America claim they are not bound by international law or by common decency or compassion or fairness or a basic sense of justice. Their security and their survival must be protected by whatever means necessary . This elite in America along with the current administration reaffirm that it is their right to ignore international law or international condemnation of no real importance. They therefore conclude that in their struggle for survival and maintaining the continuity of their control over government that the use of torture renditions assassinations massacres destroying nations if they so desire is their right according to divine empowerment or the result of Natural law and Manifest Destiny.
-Big Surprise??? not so much given the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of successive American administrations which insists that America is outside the jurisdiction of international law and is therefore a law unto itself.
There's No Democratic Culture in America -- We Live in an Era of Imposed Amnesia :Getting to the bottom of the electoral sweep that just put the most egregious Republican Party candidates back in power. By Henry A. Giroux at turthout.org via Alternet.org November 16, 2010
We live in an age in which punitive justice and a theater of cruelty have become the defining elements of a mainstream cultural apparatus that trades in historical and social amnesia.
How else to explain the electoral sweep that just put the most egregious Republican Party candidates back in power?
These are the people who gave us Katrina, made torture a state policy, promoted racial McCarthyism, celebrated immigrant bashing, pushed the country into two disastrous wars, built more prisons than schools, bankrupted the public treasury, celebrated ignorance over scientific evidence ("half of new Congressmen do not believe in global warming" )(1) and promoted the merging of corporate and political power. For the public to forget so quickly the legacy of the injustices, widespread corruption and moral abyss created by this group (along with a select number of conservative democrats) points to serious issues with the pedagogical conditions and cultural apparatuses that made the return of the living dead possible. The moral, political and memory void that enabled this vengeful and punishing historical moment reached its shameful apogee by allowing the pathetic George W. Bush to reappear with a 44 percent popularity rating and a book tour touting his memoirs - the ultimate purpose of which is to erase any vestige of historical consciousness and make truth yet another casualty of the social amnesia that has come to characterize the American century.
Renditions Torture
UN urges full US torture investigation :The United Nations has called on the United States to conduct a full investigation into torture under the administration of former US President George W. Bush. PressTv
The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Ernesto Mendez, urged Washington ...to prosecute offenders as well as senior officials who ordered the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
"The United States has a duty to investigate every act of torture. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much in the way of accountability," Mendez told Reuters.
The Argentinean diplomat also said he plans to visit Iraq to investigate what he called a "very widespread practice of torture" of detainees by US-led forces, following the 2003 occupation of the war-torn country.
The new UN expert who, himself, is a victim of prison torture during Argentina's dictatorship in the 1970s, also plans to visit Guantanamo prison.
Mendez says he wants to conduct his own probe there on condition that US officials allow him to interview prisoners still being held at Guantanamo by the Obama administration.
He also condemned Bush's comments in his recently published memoir, "Decision Points."
In his book, Bush confirms that he personally approved a request by CIA agents to use waterboarding and other forms of torture in the interrogation of so-called "terror suspects." He claims that his decision helped save lives.
Bush's autobiography, which has been much publicized in the mainstream media, is considered as an attempt to politically resurrect the ex-president's badly-tainted reputation during his tenure.
...Among his crimes are unleashing two wars on Afghanistan and Iraq following the September, 11, 2001 event. The ongoing conflicts have killed over a million Afghan and Iraqi civilians and left nearly 6,000 US soldiers dead.
The unpopular former US leader is also blamed for the torture of hundreds of Iraqis, Afghans and other Muslims in US detention facilities such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram in Afghanistan and Guantanamo in Cuba.
Last week, Amnesty International, stated that the United States must prosecute Bush for torture after a criminal probe into his admissions.
Interrogation Nation The baby steps that have taken the United States from decrying torture to celebrating it. By Dahlia Lithwick ,Nov. 10, 2010
In an America in which the former president can boast on television that he approved the water-boarding of U.S. prisoners, it can hardly be a shock that following a lengthy investigation, no criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.* We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man.
President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would "turn the page" on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration's war on terror. What he didn't seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There's no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it's feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it's not illegal after all.
In his new memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush boasts that he not only granted his permission to water-board detainees but did so cowboy-fashion—with the words "Damn right." This admission has elicited barely a ripple of self-doubt among an American public that reconciled itself long ago to the twin propositions that torture can sometimes be legal and that every terror suspect is always a ticking time bomb...
British papers may claim that there will be legal repercussions following Bush's admissions, but the truth is that the Bush spin on the old Nixonian formulation for presidential conduct—it's legal if my lawyer tells me it's legal—has become the law of the land. Indeed, it's exactly the formulation used by Jose Rodriguez, the man who ordered CIA officials to destroy videotapes showing prisoners being abused: His lawyers said he could. As Nan Aron explains, the "my lawyer ate it" defense has been deemed illegal since Nuremburg. Now it's a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that water-boarding is illegal torture. So what? That's just their opinion. President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. It has taken this issue from a legal question to a matter of personal taste. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer. This is precisely the kind of sliding-scale ethical guesswork the rule of law should preclude.
Those of us who have been hollering about America's descent into torture for the past nine years didn't do so because we like terrorists or secretly hope for more terror attacks. We did it because if a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right. Or, as President Bush now puts it, damn right. It spawns a legal regime that cannot be contained in time or in place; a regime that requires that torture testimony be used at trials and that terror policies be withheld from public scrutiny. It demands the shielding of torture photos and the exoneration of those who destroyed torture tapes just a day after the statute of limitations had run out. Indeed, as Andrew Cohen notes, when the men ordering the destruction of those tapes are celebrated as "heroes," who's to say otherwise? Check, please.
... Yet having denied any kind of reckoning for every actor up and down the chain of command, we are now farther along the road toward normalizing and accepting torture than we were back in November 2005, when President Bush could announce unequivocally (if falsely) that "The United States of America does not torture. And that's important for people around the world to understand." If people around the world didn't understand what we were doing then, they surely do now. And if Americans didn't accept what we were doing then, evidently they do now. Doing nothing about torture is, at this point, pretty much the same as voting for it. We are all water-boarders now.
Interrogation Nation By Scott Horton at Harpers ,November 17, 2010 via Information Clearing House
- - Dahlia Lithwick at Slate offers the smartest take so far on George W. Bush’s noncoerced confession that he authorized waterboarding and aggressively defended torture as part of his “legacy” to future presidents:
The old adage held that if they couldn’t get you for the crime, they would get you for the coverup. But this week, it was revealed that both the crime and the coverup will go permanently unpunished. Which suggests that everything in between will go unpunished as well. In an America in which the former president can boast on television that he approved the water-boarding of U.S. prisoners, it can hardly be a shock that following a lengthy investigation, no criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man.
President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush Administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.
Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation’s defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.
While the British government is now taking steps to expose those involved in illegal activities ie renditions, abuse, torture etc. the Obama administration in the USA continues to ignore or even defend such policies.
The Necessary Reckoning on Rendition and Waterboarding:The UK has taken great strides in exposing its complicity with illegal detention and torture. If only the US would do the same. By Ken Kude at The Guardian, Nov. 17, 2010
...But let's not get too carried away with praise for the new government. The politics work strongly in favour of Cameron's position on this issue, with a united British public opposing torture, especially among the supporters of Cameron's political opponents. Importantly, the government preferred to fight these claims in court and keep information about its role in extraordinary rendition secret, but the courts rejected its attempt to hide behind official secrecy, and forced it to decide whether to pursue expensive and uncertain litigation or reach a settlement. It chose the later.
Neither of those conditions exist in the United States, enabling the former president to confess to a crime in his memoir and then brag about it on national television without any fear of accountability. When he was asked whether he approved the use of waterboarding on detainees, Bush said "damn right".
But for the Obama administration, even setting up something similar to the Gibson inquiry would be fraught with political peril, rather than the cost-free bonus it is for Cameron.
Then, there are the courts, which have steadfastly refused to do anything equivalent to their British counterparts and force the government to choose between secrecy and accountability. The Obama administration has adopted far too much of its predecessor's abuse of the state secrets privilege and has so far been very successful at stopping any litigation against the government alleging extraordinary rendition or torture.
...But the right solution to those challenges is certainly not to allow the government to exempt entire categories of activity from any judicial scrutiny, as is the case with the current application of the state secrets privilege adopted by the Obama administration.
As an advocate for responsible national security policies, I am pleased that the British government has decided to reach a settlement in these cases and admit, with legal force, the British government's complicity in the Bush administration's policies of extraordinary rendition and torture. As an American, I am disappointed that no such admission has come from my government and that our political and legal systems do not give me hope that one will be forthcoming.
And it appears that the Obama administration ignores International agreements pertaining to the use of Child Soldiers and so continues to support governments using Child Soldiers as long as they are used to fight terrorists. But Obama et al ignore that using "Child Soldiers" is a criminal act and amounts to abuse of children. These Child Soldiers are often pressured and coerced into becoming enlisted and are often abused by those who employ them.
Since the USA sees nothing wrong with incarcerating rather than according to International Law rehabilitating the "child soldiers" it captures on the battlefield we can take with a grain of salt any condemnation by the Obama administration of the use of "Child Soldiers" or how they are to be treated once captured.
4 Nations With Child Soldiers Keep U.S. Aid New York Times Oct. 29, 2010
... the Obama administration is allowing American military aid to continue to the four countries, issuing a waiver this week of a 2008 law, the Child Soldiers Prevention Act.
In a memorandum to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday, President Obama said he had determined that the waiver was in “the national interest.”
The memo offered no elaboration. But administration spokesmen said that the law, signed by President George W. Bush but effective only as of this year, would have penalized countries providing crucial cooperation with the United States, including in the fight against Al Qaeda militants. In some cases, they said, it was easier to press countries to stop using young soldiers if the United States remained closely engaged with them.
And now, they said, the four countries are effectively being given a year to change their ways.
“We put these four countries on notice by naming them as having child soldiers, and thereby making them automatically subject to sanctions, absent the exercise of a presidential waiver,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman...
Human rights groups expressed concern, saying that the decision raised questions about the administration’s seriousness about protecting children, sometimes not yet in their teens, from the rigors and hazards of military service.
Of the six countries the State Department identified as using child soldiers during 2009, only two — Somalia and Myanmar — were not granted exemptions from the law, and Myanmar receives no military aid from the United States.
“Everyone’s gotten a pass, and Obama has really completely undercut the law and its intent,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
The law generally prohibits American military financing, training and other defense assistance to countries found to recruit soldiers under the age of 18.
...Jesse Eaves, child protection policy adviser with World Vision, said he did not understand why the administration had not availed itself of a provision allowing specific cuts in military assistance to leave only programs explicitly helping demobilize child soldiers or professionalize national armies.
A White House official said this approach had been weighed but rejected as unwieldy.
Mr. Eaves said rights groups active on the issue were frustrated.
“This came as a total shock to everyone in the community,” he said. “At this point we’re just running to catch up.”
White House Says Child Soldiers Are Ok, if They Fight Terrorists by Michelle Chen, raceWire.org Nov. 15, 2010
...The phenomenon of child soldiers, like genocide, slavery and torture, seems like one of those crimes that no nation could legitimately defend. Yet the Obama administration just decided to leave countless kids stranded on some of the world’s bloodiest battlegrounds.
The administration stunned human rights groups last month by sidestepping a commitment to help countries curb the military exploitation of children. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reported that President Obama issued a presidential memorandum granting waivers from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to four countries: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Yemen...
...Strategically granting certain countries a pass on child rights reflects Washington’s warped attitude toward the global human rights regime. The U.S. has failed to ratify, or simply ignored, numerous human rights protocols, and (its)our ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child has languished. Human Rights Watch points out, “Only the United States and Somalia, which has no functioning national government, have failed to ratify the treaty.”
...According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers:In 2006 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) registered 59 children in detention during 16 visits to five places of detention or internment controlled by the USA or the UK in Iraq. US soldiers stationed at the detention centres and former detainees described abuses against child detainees, including the rape of a 15-year-old boy at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, forced nudity, stress positions, beating and the use of dogs. Following US troop increases in Iraq in early 2007, US military arrests of children there rose from an average of 25 per month in 2006 to an average of 100 per month. Military officials reported that 828 were children held at Camp Cropper by mid-September, including children as young as 11. A 17-year-old was reportedly strangled by a fellow detainee in early 2007. In August 2007 the USA opened Dar al-Hikmah, a non-residential facility intended to provide education services to 600 detainees aged 11-17 pending release or transfer to Iraqi custody. US military officials excluded an estimated 100 children from participation in the program, apparently on the grounds that they were “extremists” and “beyond redemption”.
Omar Khadr, the young Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay, remains trapped in a Kafkaesque quasi-judicial system without regard to the fact that he was a child when captured. Rights advocates ...have called for Khadr to be recognized as a child soldier, but the administration seems to think securing a conviction in Kangaroo Court takes precedence over international law. And because Khadr, like the other Gitmo prisoners, is identified with that faceless dark horde the U.S. has branded “terrorists,” Americans aren’t even inclined to see him as a human being, let alone as a juvenile soldier deserving of sympathy.
So America’s hypocrisy on children in war has many layers. Obama condemns the practice in theory, then undermines federal law by issuing waivers for our partners in Africa and the Middle East. And of course, Washington sees no problem with punishing child soldiers as adults when they’re aligned with the terrorists who are bent on destroying America.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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