As Helpful Spook has posted in an earlier comment, a German TV magazine, Report Mainz, will today report on child abuse in US prisons in Iraq. Their press announcement (in German) refers to a statement form an ICRC official in Genvea: “Between January and Mai of this year we have registered 107 children during 19 visitations at 6 different locations. All those location were under control of coalition troops.”
The magazine did get its hand on an internal UNICEF document. There it is mentioned, that UNICEF is trying to get access to a special prison for children, errected by coalition forces. In July 2003 UNICEF requested to get access to this prision which was denied. “Unsufficient security in the area of the prison” forstalled visits by independend observers “since December 2003”.
An Aljazeera Reporter who had been imprisoned in Abu Graibh describes to the magazine how a 12 year old girl was bashed by US soldiers. The journalist reports of a prison for children: “When they did bring me to my prison cell, there was a camp for children, young, under age of puberty. For sure there were hundreds of children in this camp.”
Author Rick Pearlstein took notes (via Brad De Long) at a Seymour Hersh lecture: ´He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, “You haven’t begun to see evil…” then trailed off. He said, “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”.´
Sgt. Samuel Provance, of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion has witnessed specific cases and talks about it.
The UNICEF document Report Mainz has explains the outcome: “The percieved unjustified imprisonment of male Iraqis including juveniles … is becoming the main reason for the growing frustration of Iraqi adolescent and a potential for the radicalisation of this population group.”
As Richard Clarke writes in his book review on “Imperial Hybris”: “The Iraq invasion gave a new cause to the jihadists and new evidence to Arab militants that Americans are the “new crusaders” – i.e., foreign infidels bent on conquest. The result has been more recruits, more suicide bombers and more money to the jihadists.”
The child abuse by coalition troops will give something more valueable to the jihadists. A fresh generation of fighters, already deeply motivated to defeat their enemies at any costs.