Note: Dr. Steven Miles (M.D. ’76) was interviewed for the cover story of the July-August 2007 issue of Minnesota magazine. The article written by him, below, is further explained in the editor’s note.

Whose Child Was This?

By Steven Miles (M.D. ’76)

“[The physician] reports one child hemorrhaging from his cavitary TB and dying.”

This sentence from the Army Surgeon General’s Assessment of Detainee Medical Operations for OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom], GTMO [Guantanamo], and OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] is the only U.S. recognition of a child who died bleeding into his (or her?) lungs while in our custody at the military prison called Camp Cropper prison near the Baghdad airport.

This child-prisoner’s death is not included in any Defense Department list of prisoner deaths; it does not appear in any death certificate, autopsy report, or Army investigation. We do not know whether the parents were told if, how, or when their child died. We do not know if the body was returned to them to bury in their family’s way.

We do know that the United States ignored the Geneva Conventions and Defense Department regulations that required the diagnosis and treatment of prisoners in Iraq for tuberculosis. This child had a smaller chance of getting TB treatment at Camp Cropper than he would have had in his war-wracked homeland.

Flickers of other children haunt the prison archives:

• General Janis Karpinski told of a boy at Abu Ghraib: “He looked like he was 8 years old. He told me he was almost 12. . . . He told me his brother was there with him, but he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother. He was crying.”

• Army Specialist Samuel Provance told Congress how the skinny 16-year-old son of Iraqi prisoner Hamid Zabar was stripped, doused with mud and water, and driven in an open truck around the prison yard on a cold winter night so that the suffering boy could be displayed to his father who was under interrogation.

• Sergeant John Ketzer watched an Abu Ghraib dog handler and another soldier terrorize two boys with dogs. The younger child was cringing behind the older one as the soldiers contested over which child would urinate on himself first.

• At Mosul prison in Iraq, a high school student, Salah Salih Jassim, was arrested along with his father. The student was not suspected of any crime. The student’s jaw was broken by the soldiers at the prison. The doctor did not bother to ask the boy how his jaw was broken or take the boy’s shirt off to look for other bruises.

• U.S. soldiers kidnapped the three sons of Abed Hamed Mowhoush from the family home in Iraq in late 2003. They left a message that the boys would be held hostage until their father surrendered to U.S. forces. Mowhoush turned himself in. He was beaten and stuffed head first into a sleeping bag that was wrapped with 20 feet of wire. An interrogator sat on Mowhoush. In suffocating, Mowhoush ransomed his sons with his life.

• At Abu Ghraib, a woman prisoner gave birth. The Defense Department took her baby to send to an orphanage or her family and she was handed over to a Tiger Team for interrogation.

President Bush has said, “I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world. The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values.”

In the spirit of clarity, who gave the order to abuse the 16-year-old son of Hamid Zabar? Who decided that kidnap for torture would be U.S. policy for 15-year-old Mohammed Mowhoush, the last relative to see his abused father alive. What does the baby taken from a mother’s breast know of his birth? What “worst of the worst” died in childhood as tubercular blood filled his lungs at Camp Cropper?

Steven Miles (M.D. ’76), author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House, 2006), is a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics.

Sources:

The tuberculosis incident is on page 20-7 of the Army Surgeon General’s report:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2005/detmedopsrpt_13apr2005.pdf

The crying boy at Abu Ghraib is mentioned on page 92 of the General Janis Karpinski deposition:

http://www.aclu.org/projects/foiasearch/pdf/DOD000089.pdf

The orphanage reference is on the first page of an Army specialist’s sworn statement:

http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/OathBetrayed/DOD%20822-862.pdf

The urination contest was first described on page 68 of Major General George Fay’s report:

http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/OathBetrayed/Fay-Jones%20Report.pdf