It’s hard to know exactly how these abhorent policies are transmitted. There is much secrecy, and now with trials starting there is an incredible whitewash. But make no mistake, use of detained children to pressure adults has been US policy.

(2) If you think I enjoy this for partisan reasons, you’re dead wrong. This just makes me so sick, and I really, really hate seeing my country, that I love very, very much, involved in this sort of thing. Like I said in an earlier post, I should be jaded by now, after 25 years of research on and protest of torture in US client states, for example by grads of the School of the Americas. But it still hurts my soul deeply. There’s nothing more that I want than for it not to be true. But it is.

I say that I want Kerry to win because he’s the only chance we can stop this. Whether he will or not, or even come clean to the world in the next four years is unknown, probably doubtful. But the Bush administration is pathological and must be removed. Take a look at Steve Cambone, Rumsfeld’s aid and a principle designer of the current Terror War detention system. He’s done more to inspire terror against America than any other man. You just have to hope that a new administration will clean out these characters and send them back to a Stephen King novel, where they belong.

Okay, the story quotes reps from several human rights groups who decry the secrecy and dearth of information. But why won’t the Americans be more forthcoming? Enough is known to raise major alarms.

“Proof of the widespread arrest and detention of children in Iraq by US and UK forces is contained in an internal Unicef report written in June.”

Look, child detention is “widespread”! All over Iraq.

And here’s what witnesses say happens to these kids:

“An Iraqi TV reporter Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz saw the Abu Ghraib children’s wing when he was arrested by Americans while making a documentary. He spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib.

“‘I saw a camp for children there,’ he said. ‘Boys, under the age of puberty. There were certainly hundreds of children in this camp.’ Al-Baz said he heard a 12-year-old girl crying. Her brother was also held in the jail. One night guards came into her cell. ‘She was beaten,’ said al-Baz. ‘I heard her call out, ‘They have undressed me. They have poured water over me.’

“He says he heard her cries and whimpering daily – this, in turn, caused other prisoners to cry as they listened to her. Al-Baz also told of an ill 15-year-old boy who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed. Guards then brought in the child’s father with a hood over his head. The boy collapsed again”….

“The categorisation of these children as ‘internees’ is worrying since it implies indefinite holding without contact with family, expectation of trial or due process.”

From the horse’s mouth, “A highly placed source in the Pentagon said: ‘We have done investigations into accusations of juveniles being abused and raped and canÂ’t find anything that resembles that.’”

But Sy Hersh says he saw the video tape. I’ll trust Hersh long before I’ll trust a high Pentagon official.

Still, even they admit they hold and segregate kids aged 16-17. Just that means Bush’s claim that the “children’s prisons are closed forever” is a mockery.

Answer: because that would deprive you of making this a partisan hammer to bludgeon the President and Rumsfeld with.