Wierd. For the last two days, the PM news programme on BBC Radio 4 has been discussing the recent admission by (iirc) the US military commander in control of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, that there are several Afghani children who have been detained there, since the war in Afghanistan.
This has elicited the reactions you’d expect from UNICEF, etc., seeing as it’s in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
However, there’s nothing on any English-language news pages I can find; just this Der Spiegel story, not even on the BBC news site itself.
Update: Didn’t look hard enough! Here it is. Also, the Irish Times reports:
(General Richard Myers) responded sharply to questions about critical world reaction to the detention of three children, ages 13 to 15, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where the US military holds suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members.
‘Despite their age these are very dangerous people,’ he said. ‘Some have killed. some have said they will kill again.’
Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said the US was ‘keeping them down there to keep them off the streets’.
Hmm. On the BBC, the commander of the joint task force at Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller was interviewed; he said that the children had been press-ganged into fighting for the Taliban, and had been victims of abuse during that time. ‘very dangerous people’?