Child Killers

The USA's claim to be 'the land of the free' has taken yet another clobbering during the last couple of weeks, with Amnesty launching an attack on America's rate of execution of child offenders:

"Two thirds of the world's known executions of child offenders in the past decade occurred in the USA, including the only four in the past 18 months," Amnesty International said. "This is now the only country that openly continues to carry out such executions within the framework of its regular criminal justice system."

For a nation built on justice, liberty and human rights, the USA has clearly lost sight of what is important. A soicety which executes its children is probably beyond external assistance. Only Americans themselves can have any effect on a regime increasingly turning against its own citizens.

Amnesty has also highlighted and criticised the use of torture by US forces in Iraq. (Torture, in all modern definitions, includes: sleep deprivation by bright light, sleep deprivation by loud noise, being forced to remain in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time, hooding and the threat of summary execution; all crimes being perputrated by the US military authority in Iraq since the official end of hostilities following Iraq's liberation). It is certain that Saddam Hussein used such practices, and probably even worse, but that is no excuse for continuing with them. The United States has a disturbing history of cynicism when it comes to human rights. In the recent conflict, the White House and Dept of Defense both complained about US prisoners of war being shown on Iraqi television, while 'detainees' at Guantanamo Bay are not even legally defined as prisoners of war, so as to afford them fewer rights even than a POW.

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July 24, 2003 | Filed Under General 

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