arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Day Care in the Name of National Security?

About Those Kids in Camp X-Ray
by DAVE LINDORFF

Word that the Bush Administration's goons down in Guantanamo Bay have been detaining children under the age of 16 among the "enemy combatants" that they spirited out of Afghanistan following the rout of the Taliban suggests a new strategy for dealing with America's daycare crisis.

We know that as Bush and the conservative Congress continue to hack away at the nation's already tattered welfare "safety net," increasing numbers of single parents are being forced to abandon their small children at home while they go off to remote minimum-wage jobs or workfare assignments in an effort to make enough money to feed them.

Day care is not an option for these people. The federal government has been slashing daycare funding, while financially strapped states are rushing to exit the child-care subsidy business.

What's a welfare mother to do?

Bush, the Pentagon and John Ashcroft's increasingly inappropriately named Justice Department have provided us with the answer: detention in the name of national security.

All these working mothers and fathers need to do is get their little offspring to toddle around carrying small arms (the guns don't have to be loaded, for goodness sake!) while spouting easily taught phrases like "Allah Akhbar!" or "Death to America!" and they'll quickly be picked up and placed in confinement where they'll be watched day and night and fed regularly.

Alternately, if the parents in question are undocumented aliens, they might just claim to the Immigration Department that their kids were born overseas and don't have proper visas. That would lead to their being taken away and put in detention, too.

According to Pentagon officials, the youthful enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo are not being kept in cages like their elders, so presumably they are being treated in a manner more appropriate to their tender years--probably kept in some locked base rec room with a big-screen TV set tuned perpetually to the Cartoon Channel or WB.

Since this is pretty much what unlicensed child care services are doing in low-income neighborhoods anyway, parents can feel confident that their children are getting at least as good care in government custody as they would have been getting in a local child care facility, and at taxpayer expense instead of their own.

The only drawback I can see to this scheme is that under Pentagon and Justice Department rules since 9/11, relatives don't have visitation rights where illegal aliens or enemy combatants are concerned.

We could work on this, perhaps getting Congress to amend the rules where minor detainees are involved. Surely the "family friendly" Republican majority would see the logic in such a rule change.

If not, at least poor struggling parents would know that their kids were getting three square meals a day in government custody.

COMMON ! Write articles with substance. This is a crappy one and you know it ! I guess your running out of things to write about ?

Why don't you write about how many children just lost their father/mother in this war to free another nations parents ?
Why don't you write about the resolve of a great nation to help give freedom, peace and education a chance ? Why don't you write about the 45 year old guy from america who has been teaching the young girls in Pakistan by the k2 mountains, how to read and write ? He sold everything he had in 1996, and rallied children and people in the usa to give "penny donations". This resulted in over 50k being donated, and over 12 schools being built. Educating people around the globe will be the demise of terrorism. We all know that, you should too.

"23 April 2003

USA Children Detained at Guantanamo Should Be Released, Says Amnesty International

US Has Had Ample Time to Determine Status of All Detainees, Inaction Inexcusable
(WASHINGTON) - Amnesty International today called for the immediate release of the children in detention at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay. If the US military will not release the children, then they should be charged with a recognizable offense, provided with full judicial safeguards applying to youthful offenders, and transferred to a suitable juvenile detention facility, the organization stated.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/2003/usa04232003.html

"Agence France-Presse
Fri Apr 25, 7:17 PM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - US soldiers stripped four suspected Iraqi thieves naked and burned their clothes before pushing them into the street, journalists from a Norwegian newspaper who witnessed the incident told AFP."

For pictures of this, see

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/stripped-iraqis.htm