DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA: Parading America's child soldiers to war

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-171213.html



Parading America's child soldiers to war
By Ann Jones
Dec 17, '13

The US Congress surely meant to do the right thing when, in the fall of 2008, it passed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA). The law was designed to protect kids worldwide from being forced to fight the wars of Big Men. From then on, any country that coerced children into becoming soldiers was supposed to lose all US military aid.

It turned out, however, that Congress - in its rare moment of concern for the next generation - had it all wrong. In its greater wisdom, the White House found countries like Chad and Yemen so vital to the national interest of the United States that it preferred to overlook what happened to the children in their midst.

As required by CSPA, this year the State Department once again listed 10 countries that use child soldiers: Myanmar, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Seven of them were scheduled to receive millions of dollars in US military aid as well as what's called "US Foreign Military Financing". That's a shell game aimed at supporting the Pentagon and American weapons makers by handing millions of taxpayer dollars over to such dodgy "allies", who must then turn around and buy "services" from the Pentagon or "materiel" from the usual merchants of death. You know the crowd: Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, and so on.

Here was a chance for Washington to teach a set of countries to cherish their young people, not lead them to the slaughter. But in October, as it has done every year since CSPA became law, the White House again granted whole or partial "waivers" to five countries on the State Department's "do not aid" list: Chad, South Sudan, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia.

[idwiyo]

1. k&r

[RC]

3. And yet more proof of our For Profit, trouble and war mongering ways.

How much more peaceful would the world be, were we not supplying death machines world wide, to any and every location we foment hate and discontent in?

[Feral Child]

4. K&R n/t