Why would anyone think teenaged pages matter to people who don't mind supporting
things like this?
Two young sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk.
Yousef al-Khalid, 9, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, 7, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi where their father had been hiding.
We've heard that waterboarding was one of the methods used to loosen Mohammed's tongue, but there hasn't been much in the press lately about the interrogation method that happened to be his children.
Apparently it's not a big deal.
Mohammed fled just hours before the raid but his sons and another senior al-Qaeda member were found cowering behind a wardrobe in the apartment.
The boys have been held by the Pakistani authorities but this weekend they were flown to America where they will be questioned about their father. CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.
"We are handling them with kid gloves," said one official [note: apparently missing the irony of the statement]. "After all, they are only little children, but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."
[...] He has been told that his sons are being held and is being urged to divulge future attacks against the West and reveal the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
"He has said very little so far," a CIA official said on Saturday. "He sits in a trance-like state and recites verses from the Koran. But while he may claim to be a devout Muslim, we know he is fond of the Western-style fast life. His sons are important to him. The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him."
http://webpages.charter.net/...
The story was originally broken by Wall Street Journal reporters Jess Bravin and Gary Fields. The original link for that WSJ story has dissolved into the ethernet of time since 2003, but it appears here.
JESS BRAVIN and GARY FIELDS, The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, March 4, 2003
Other than torture or truth serum, American authorities have an array of options in extracting information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
[...] U.S. authorities have an additional inducement to make Mr. Mohammed talk, even if he shares the suicidal commitment of the Sept. 11 hijackers: The Americans have access to two of his elementary-school-age children, the top law-enforcement official says. The children were captured in a September raid that netted one of Mr. Mohammed's top comrades, Ramzi Binalshibh.
When interrogators finish with Mr. Mohammed, he is likely to face a U.S. military tribunal, but that will probably be years from now.
The kidnapping of children to force their parents to talk was a strategy that worked so well in the "war on terror" that it was adopted in the war on Iraq later in 2003.
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 28, 2003; Page A01
BAGHDAD -- Over the past six weeks a small but intense war has been conducted in the mud-hut villages and lush palm groves along the Tigris River valley, fought with far different methods than those used in the campaign that toppled president Saddam Hussein.
[...] Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info."
They would have been released in due course, he added later.
The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.
Kids matter so little to U.S. leaders that child detainees in Abu Ghraib were subjected to a macabre "game" that was not halted until abuses were made public in 2004.
An Army investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has found that military police dogs were used to frighten detained Iraqi teenagers as part of a sadistic game, one of many details in the forthcoming report that were provoking expressions of concern and disgust among Army officers briefed on the findings.
Earlier reports and photographs from the prison have indicated that unmuzzled military police dogs were used to intimidate detainees at Abu Ghraib, something the dog handlers have told investigators was sanctioned by top military intelligence officers there.
But the new report, according to Pentagon sources, will show that MPs were using their animals to make juveniles -- as young as 15 years old -- urinate on themselves as part of a competition.
When I first read about instances of this tactic, I compiled all the news reports I'd read on the subject and forwarded them to U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole, then-U.S. Sen. John Edwards, and U.S. Rep. David Price, asking for an inquiry into whether these methods were being used by the United States.
Aaron Mullins, a legislative aide in Sen. Dole's office, talked with officials at the U.S. Department of Defense in July 2003 and confirmed that, yes, the United States was indeed using this tactic, and that it was considered both "safe and effective" -- that the children are not harmed, and that "if they were cleared of wrongdoing" they are "usually released."
I wrote about that in 2004 here.
It comes as no surprise that teenaged pages are not deemed worthy of protection by GOP leadership. Even when presented with confirmation that children are being harassed, abused, and even tortured, they just don't care much as long as they get what they want and no one raises a stink about it.
Here are just a few dKos links related to how our government has kept children out of harm's way:
Children in Iraq Prisons
Children at Abu Ghraib
Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib Part I
Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib Part II
Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib Part III
German TV claims US soldiers abused kids in secret Iraq prisons
Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the videos - Hersh
As GOP Congress members posture in those creepy photo ops and press conferences with children, you can see more than mere hypocrisy and political desperation; you can see people who care so very little about human life that they won't stop abuses against young people unless their reelection depends on it.
If that's what it takes, let's make their reelection depend on it. Save a child: vote your conscience.