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McC camp is so desperate they will even pose

Posted By: as dems...just like Bradley yesterday. sm on 2008-10-26
In Reply to: First of all -- she is not all that wrong - A defected democrat here

Wouldn't be the first pub plant we've encountered. Role playing for the sake of argument will not win any elections. You have zero credibility.


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Bush III: McCain camp is so desperate they have to resort to swiftboating? nm
nm
Running scared....DESPERATE, DESPERATE
@@
Hmmm....I pose your question back to you....
are you on drugs?? lol.
You are right, I am desperate.

Desperate to have a little bit more money left out of my hard-earned checks to take care of my 3 kids.  Desperate to be able to quit one of my 3 jobs so I can spend more time with them before they grow up and leave the nest.  Desperate for the hard-working among us to finally catch a break and the lazy bums to have to sacrifice SOMETHING. 


I opened my house and home for 3 months to a neighbor of mine whose husband had left her and their child.  I got a real quick primer on the life of one of "those less fortunate ones".  It turns out all she wanted to do was lay in bed until 11, smoke, watch a few soaps, maybe or maybe not go to work for a couple of hours, smoke, eat, smoke, talk on my phone for 2 or 3 hours every night, smoke, then sleep for another 10 hours. 


Not an unfortunate one.   A lazy, lazy, lazy one.  Why work when you can get $$ every month for nothing?  It doesn't take them long to learn that lesson.  And she is teaching it to her children too.  


Something has got to give. 


 


Thats what happens when you are desperate to
nm
OMG........ HE'S GETTING DESPERATE!!
!!
Nobody's desperate...
Barack Obama is going to be our next president.

You guys are the desperate ones. You guys are the type of ignorant, uninformed people who give the former distinguished Republican party a bad name.
desperate attempt

to snag the unhappy Hilliary supporters.  They predicted this last night -- if McCain felt desperate after watching the Dem convention, he would pick a wild card candidate.  If he felt safe, he would go with Romney.  Tthanks for showing your cards, Mac.  Hill's people are progressive, they won't vote for a ticket that is against women's rights just because one is a woman.


Boy, they're getting desperate.....
x
You are so desperate you will vote for anything
The man refuses to even prove his citizenship...why?

You have never been able to refute any facts and that just bugs the crap out you.

Facts are your enemy...

Rattle on all you want but the man has been denied a call for dismissal to prove his citizenship by a judge, who says he has to prove it.


Desperate for the truth to come out about
By the way, you might want to ask youself a couple of questions. If Obama is so invested in, colluded and directly associated with ACORN and up to his eyeballs in corruption and scandal, why do you suppose he is preparing to bring the whole thing out in the open and shine a national spotlight on this issue? With the poll numbers and electoral map so favorable toward him just 17 days going into the election, why would he risk it all by going on the offensive and pursuing an issue that pubs would have us all believe should condemn his as unfit for office?

Oh yeah. I'm gonna just sit back and enjoy the ride.
You are getting desperate and still repeating the same phrases. NM

LOL! Either desperate or just plain sloppy.

Are THEY just plain stupid or do they think WE are? 


While we realize how desperate the pubs are to
"reinvent" their party, the notion that 1 sarcastic speech, void of policy and issues, by SP is going to cast some sort of hypnotic spell, suspend the nation in a state of collective amnesia, wave the fairy godmother's magic wand and make the last 8 years of pub policies that have raped our economy disappear is almost as insulting as thinking women outside the Christian right NeoCon factions will be voting with their genitalia. Our memories reach far beyond the sound bytes of this speech and, believe it or not, we have been paying attention.

JM selected a pick that he thinks can be sold as HC's equal, is just as much of a superstar as O and can deliver speeches that are just as inspiring. The campaign is transparent in their attempt to highjack the Change, Vision and Hope themes as well. Try your best, but what you cannot do is sell any of us on the idea that the pubs now can lay claim to being champions of the working class. Smoke and mirrors cannot disguise the fact that they will give tax cuts to the rich, favor corporations and be 4 more years of the same old poop.

JM's VP pick has shifted the party image right back into the category of NeoCon. Hello. That is what we are all trying run as fast and as far away from as we possibly can. O is the candidate of change, and no amount of spin will change that basic fact.
desperate smear tactics. nm
.
Still holding out that last desperate hope
DNC has proven this over and over and over and over and over again. Burden or proof is now on the Berg the Boob.
Th witch hunt is getting desperate.
Such thoughtless ignorance, such little time. Where to start? Obama's father left him mom when he was a baby. He is a child of divorce. In his entire life, he knew his father for 1 month. He has some communication with Kenyan relatives but not all of them. It is not surprising that they would not have that much in common, having been raised by different parents of different races halfway around the world from each other.

So, against this background, consider if you will how divorced families in the United States relate to one another. If you yourself were from a divorced family, would you necessarily keep up with the whereabouts of your dead father's HALF-sister wh you never knew? Would you even know her last name, her husband's name, how many children she has or even her hometown?

I would not expect him to even know she was in the United States, much less her legal status. Furthermore, I would not be sticking my nose into an elder relative's personal affairs, asking such questions as to her legal status. I would probably respect the elder and give her the benefit of the doubt. In fact, it would ot even cross my mind.

Having said that, there is another aspect of this family situation that comes into play. African family structures operate much, much differently than American families. Many tribes in Africa reckon the identity of their children through the MOTHER, not the father, like we do here in the west. Wives do not take their husband's names and neither do the children. Therefore, kinship via the mother's ancestors is central. So here we have a combination of divorce, death of a relative who abandoned his son, geographic separation, racial separation (being raised in a white world) and cultural separation. It is not at all hard for me to understand that he would not have known her legal status or even that she was still here. If the contribution came from a New York address, there would have been no reason for campaign workers to question its legality, nor would they have know she was his aunt.

All I need to know about Obama's family values is the way he treats his own wife and children and what he says about responsible parenting. I think is is ridiculous that you have the gall to sit in judgment over something you have no way of knowing anyhing about. Grasping at straws in the 11th hour of the campaign will not win any elections.
The witch hunt is getting desperate
While I realize that Obama's book is WAY over your head, you should be able to grasp at least its title...DREAMS of my father, as in how an abandoned son might imagine his father and feel the need to understand the parent he never knew. Unlike you, I do not get my information from YouTube, fringe chat rooms and Fix Noise, errr, I mean Fox News. I actually read BOOKS and have read up on Obama enough to know a little bit about the estrangement he feels from his Kenyan family and when I wrote that, I had Maya Soetoro-Ng in mind who maintains a relationship with Obama.

I studied African tribal family structures and America family structure in (now get ready) college...cultural and social anthropology, cultural geography and sociology of family courses for starters and have maintained an interest in cultural studies for more than 30 years, so I CONTINUED to read about these subjects of interest. Survivor TV would be on your level, not mine. Obama supporters are, how should I say this, known to be a tad more educated than (how did that political analyst says it yesterday?...oh, yes) the downscale McCain voter and as such are much less prone to the mob mentality that adopts and chants flock buzz words such as "sheeple" and the like. Then again, I would not expect you to be ale to wrap you brain around African tribal customs and how kinship reckoning affects cultural family value systems, especially outside of the lower 48, but I do think that Obama's global mentality probably get the gist of it.

Now, if you don't mind, I need a breath of fresh air and a little distance between myself and this ignorant post of yours.

You're just desperate for any port in the
My 401K is still down almost 50%, my home value has not begun to recover, and I'm looking at $trillions and $trillions in debt coming down the road that will literally smash all of us.

Grow up. The market moving from way, way in the dumper to a little bit less in the dumper is nothing whatsoever to crow about.

Oh - and besides, you'll remember that you're looking at the activities of money managers, who don't give a rip about what's going on in the real economy with the real folks. Remember?
LOL - geez, we're getting desperate, aren't we?

Why should O be desperate? Pubs have been spoiling for a fight
All nice and legal, headed up by a brilliant, constitutional attorney. DOJ is considering the request. Stay tuned.
Agree. It's called being desperate for attention.
nm
Her camp just came out and said she
xx
Looks like the McC camp is providing
Nice to see that tonge in cheeck is alive and well in the heartland. It is a welcome relief from all that cleaving gloom and doom negativity. A little humor never hurt anybody, but before long, we will be hearing how O's camp is using it to subvert the population into communist submission.
This is what happens when a political camp
ignorance as they support candidates that do not even have the sense to equip their supporters with enough ammunition to be able to defend their own party's own platform positions. Their white matter is so atrophied from lack of exercise that they are not able to come up with anything except vacuous statements such as these.

They travel in packs and set out on their hunts, in search of the slur, slander, dirt and lies, on a mission to convince themselves and each other of their social superiority and to bolster their delusions of grandeur, couched in their unfounded beliefs that they are the Ones...the pure, true, real Americans and that the opposing candidate and the "theys" that support him are the "Others," the cursed Moslem terrorists, subversive socialists, Anti-American militant camp of racial mongrels, the great unwashed underbelly of the nation, composed of factions of militant tribal warriors whose shared vision is to bring their country down.

Their eyes are glazed over after weeks and weeks of speaking with forked tongues as they get themselves all caught up in the rapture of self-righteous indigation and self assurance. The fervor of their mob mentality is reaching ever such higher proportions, whipped up into frenzies of verbal volleys, the rhetorical equivalent of suicide bombs, which they hurl without abandon across vast stretchs of cyberspace, confident their strikes are surgical and secretly hoping to take down as much collateral damage as possible. They start to mistake their bully pulpit sermons for strength in numbers, all forceful and mighty, these champions of truth and might.

This process is a natural by-product of weeks upon weeks of chanting hate-speech mantra, reinforced by spinmeisters and hammering hatred that issues forth from their fearless leaders at campaign rallies. This causes them to eventually adopt this kind of arrogance that ultimately morphs into some sort suspended, animated, twisted logic that actually allows them to believe that they are calling the faithful to arms, energizing their base, and calling forth armies of fellow true, pure Americans, marching to the polls down the road to nowhere.

Face it, Bradley, your guy is all washed up and your party's going down.
Who else got an email from the O camp?

I got one yesterday. They want help with their health "discussions" on health care.


"Over the coming weeks, thousands of Americans will be leading Health Care Community Discussions -- small local gatherings in which Americans are sharing thoughts and ideas about reforming health care. President-elect Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Tom Daschle are counting on Americans from every walk of life to help identify what's broken and provide ideas for how to fix it.

You can help shape that reform by leading your own Health Care Community Discussion anytime between now and December 31st. "


Do ya think I should do it? Do ya think I can get them to stop outsourcing? I'm not an O lover as you all know and I get a real kick out of this. How many of you O lovers got this email?


Camp Casey Connections

Still looking for live computer connections to Camp Casey.  So far this is what I have found


If you want to hear a live broadcast of what is going on in Crawford, you can go to this link and listen live:




http://www.bradblog.com/


If you so desire, you can also use this post as a way to post any updates you hear on what is going on in Crawford.


I just sent an E-mail to the Obama camp - SM

I wonder what he will do.  Or will he say one thing while doing another or completely ignore the situation. 


This is a repost, as it belongs on the Politics board.


Moderator


I did NOT imply that his camp started it....
in fact, I said the dailykos started it, and unless his camp blogs there and I don't know it, that is exactly what I meant. What I said is that when he asks his supporters not to continue and they persist, it reflects negatively on his candidacy in some people's minds...and that is all I said. I also said that I believe him and that he was sincere...and that his supporters are ignoring him. However, I have heard others suggest that he is saying that publically but behind the scenes his camp is fanning it. I did not say it, and I do not personally think it, and would not unless it was proven. All I am saying is that some perceive it that way.
Michelle's Boot Camp

http://www.publicallies.org/site/c.liKUL3PNLvF/b.2634379/


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Allies


 


Now McCain camp wants to postpone VP
debate to a later time.  They want to move this one on Friday to that time next week, and do the VP one "at a later date".  Something smells fishy! 
Where did I say McC camp provided this information?
the word "fodder." With Webster at your fingertips, you might try looking it up next time before you leap to unfounded conclusions.
Goes to show that McC camp will not hestitate to lie
for political gain.
The same vote that McC/W camp are trying/tried to suppress?
x
Obama camp outraged...
by the tough questions a conservative reporter asked Joe Biden.  Boycotting the station.  And said, are you ready, that that same reporter gave McCain softball questions.  Well hellooo....welcome to the real world, guys!!  Can you believe it?  Whine, whine.  You asked Joe hard questions about Marxism and Obama facing a crisis during his first 6 months (Joe's own quote) and that is NOT FAIR because you did not ask McCain hard questions.  And what has been the life of McCain and Sarah Palin with all mainstream media?  Hard questions.  Obama and Biden?  Major softball questions.  They got the tables turned on them and squealed like pigs stuck under a gate.   They need to do what they told Sarah Palin to do...GET TOUGH.  Ha!  When given the choice to run with the big dogs or stay on the porch....they are whining on the porch.  UNbelievable!! 
O camp donations not unlawful.
Current campaign finance laws do not require records to be kept on donations less than $200. If records are not required and hence, not kept, then they cannot be produced.

Both campaigns have solicited on-line contributions, some of which have questionable sources in the sense that they are not properly identified or identifiable, including McC contributions documentation that does not reflect geographic origins.

As a matter of fact, O camp donations ARE in compliance with FEC (as are McC's), so no investigation is "warranted." Furthermore, O camp has returned contributions they deem coming from "suspicious" sources.

In terms of the Nigerian donations, no one can stop ATTEMPTS by foreign nationals to contribute to candidates they support. It is not an issue unless they are actually ACCEPTED.




Didn't say that. Just would like to see McCain camp
x
I would like to see the Obama camp stand up for Joe's...
civil rights too.
That's the norm with the Obama camp
False ads and sexist ads.

Oh yeah, "class A campaign" - NOT.
That actually does look like an Obama camp leak....(sm)

but for good reason.  Obama wants transparency.  It would work to his favor for it to be known that he urged Bush for quick action.  He's putting pressure on Bush.  I think the point of the exercise is that when these things don't get done in a timely fashion or legislation cannot get passed, it puts the spotlight on the ones who would obstruct it.


If I'm not mistaken, they actually do record oval office meetings.  I think it was originally started to prevent misquotes.  They just don't let them out until years later.


OMG I forgot about boot camp
Your right - torture. I went through 2 months of sleep deprevation, exercising til I thought my body would fall apart, standing in lines for hours and hours while the drill sergeant stood yelling in my face with his bad breath I was a skumbag private, lower than dirt, get down and give me 20, etc, etc., Never mind if I didn't answer a question correctly. Then there was the obstacle course, repelling from an 80 foot tower, having to go into the gas chamber while they had gas going off, take off my gas mask and breath it in, then run outside to throw up. Marching 17 and 25 mile marches in the 112 degree heat, escape and evasion tactics, crawling under a barb wire fence on my stomach in mud pits while fires were being shot over our heads and keeping my weapon above the water (and lets not even mention what happened when people called it their gun and not weapon). Talk about humiliated. Or if we were caught sleeping during classes, etc, etc, etc.

Two months of that - yeah I'd sure call that torture. Am I glad I went through it? yes I am. Would I ever do it again? Heck no.
joan baez at camp casey

Video of Joan Baez at Camp Casey singing Where Have All The Flowers Gone.



Musician Joan Baez
Where Have All the Flowers Gone
08.21.05
QuickTime
DSL | 56K
Windows Media
DSL | 56K
RealMedia
DSL | 56K


Michelle's Boot Camp for Radicals

Michelle's Boot Camps For Radicals


By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 04, 2008 4:20 PM PT


Election ང: Democrats' reintroduction of militant Michelle Obama in Denver was supposed to show her softer side. But it only highlighted a radical part of her resume: Public Allies.





IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism





Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife became executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies in 1993. Obama plans to use the nonprofit group, which he features on his campaign Web site, as the model for a national service corps. He calls his Orwellian program, "Universal Voluntary Public Service."


Big Brother had nothing on the Obamas. They plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation camps where they'll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist, oppressive place in need of "social change."


The pitch Public Allies makes on its Web site doesn't seem all that radical. It promises to place young adults (18-30) in paid one-year "community leadership" positions with nonprofit or government agencies. They'll also be required to attend weekly training workshops and three retreats.


In exchange, they'll get a monthly stipend of up to $1,800, plus paid health and child care. They also get a post-service education award of $4,725 that can be used to pay off past student loans or fund future education.


But its real mission is to radicalize American youth and use them to bring about "social change" through threats, pressure, tension and confrontation — the tactics used by the father of community organizing, Saul "The Red" Alinsky.


"Our alumni are more than twice as likely as 18-34 year olds to . . . engage in protest activities," Public Allies boasts in a document found with its tax filings. It has already deployed an army of 2,200 community organizers like Obama to agitate for "justice" and "equality" in his hometown of Chicago and other U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Washington. "I get to practice being an activist," and get paid for it, gushed Cincinnati recruit Amy Vincent.


Public Allies promotes "diversity and inclusion," a program paper says. More than 70% of its recruits are "people of color." When they're not protesting, they're staffing AIDS clinics, handing out condoms, bailing criminals out of jail and helping illegal aliens and the homeless obtain food stamps and other welfare.


Public Allies brags that more than 80% of graduates have continued working in nonprofit or government jobs. It's training the "next generation of nonprofit leaders" — future "social entrepreneurs."


The Obamas discourage work in the private sector. "Don't go into corporate America," Michelle has exhorted youth. "Work for the community. Be social workers." Shun the "money culture," Barack added. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."


"If you commit to serving your community," he pledged in his Denver acceptance speech, "we will make sure you can afford a college education." So, go through government to go to college, and then go back into government.


Many of today's youth find the pitch attractive. "I may spend the rest of my life trying to create social movement," said Brian Coovert of the Cincinnati chapter. "There is always going to be work to do. Until we have a perfect country, I'll have a job."


Not all the recruits appreciate the PC indoctrination. "It was too touchy-feely," said Nelly Nieblas, 29, of the 2005 Los Angeles class. "It's a lot of talk about race, a lot of talk about sexism, a lot of talk about homophobia, talk about -isms and phobias."


One of those -isms is "heterosexism," which a Public Allies training seminar in Chicago describes as a negative byproduct of "capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and male-dominated privilege."


The government now funds about half of Public Allies' expenses through Clinton's AmeriCorps. Obama wants to fully fund it and expand it into a national program that some see costing $500 billion. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military, he said.


The gall of it: The Obamas want to create a boot camp for radicals who hate the military — and stick American taxpayers with the bill.



Incoherence must be contagious in the McCain camp.
Isn't that interesting? Just how rested would you be after 3 weeks staight of 2 or 3 plane trips a day across the country and back again during a heated primary season? Being a nonsmoker is not a qualification for the presidency. Are you seriously trying to get political traction by reminding us how Obama lost his mom to ovarian cancer in her early 50's? Just how desperate are you guys anyway? You've been watching too much Hannity. By the way, how's that economic plan coming along out of the McCain camp these days? Mum's the word, it seems. The polls tell us just how well that is working for ya.
OK, so the latest message out of the McCain camp
We recognize it by its underlying agenda of twisting a child's story into an Obama smear.
Incoherence is a contagious disease in McC camp
su
Why should he dignify McC camp culture war slurs
He's no different than any other dem....off to greener pastures in search of triple digit IQs.
McC camp speaking in forked tongues and
McCain has been the chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI) since 1993. Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian activist in question, helped found the Center for Palestinian Research and Study (CPRS). You see, his day job is that of highly respected educator. He served on the board of trustees there until 1999. The IRI funded the CPRS in 1998 and 1999 to the tune of $838,873. Oh my!

To make matters worse, McCain is now raising a ruckus with the LA Times, who is refusing to violate confidentiality of a source and "hand over" a video of Obama and the suspicious Palestinian activist/educator/trustee of the CPRS which McC's IRI funded. Should we be worried that McC cannot keep his "activists" straight, can't remember funding a suspicious Palestinian educator or the just the double standard 2-ton elephant in the room?
Relax. I was referring to the McCain camp.
x
This is an article from the UK Times about Camp Cropper....gives more details ...

From the The UK TimesSeptember 15, 2007

They have planted bombs and shot soldiers – now it is time for school

Martin Fletcher in Camp Cropper

Ammar winds up a ten-minute harangue against Saddam Hussein with questions to his students. “How many of you had relatives executed?” asks the 33-year-old history teacher. Eight put up their hands. How many lost relatives in the Iran-Iraq war? Twelve hands rise. How many think Saddam was a bad man? All 24 students assent.

Their sincerity, though, is hard to gauge. This is no normal class, despite the Harry Potter books in Arabic on the shelves.

Ammar’s pupils wear bright yellow jumpsuits with plastic sandals and white identity bracelets around their wrists. They are among the rapidly multiplying number of child fighters held in the Camp Cropper detention centre near Baghdad airport.

The children, who are aged between 11 and 17, stand accused of offences ranging from acting as lookouts for kidnappers to planting bombs and shooting soldiers. The US military is sending them to school to reeducate them, to rid them of jihadist cant, to clear their brainwashed heads of, for example, the notion that Saddam was a glorious leader who defied an evil and aggressive superpower .

Related Links
Gates: US troops in Iraq could be cut to 100,000
Iraqis vow to avenge America's murdered ally
Army interpreters told to leave Basra
“We want them to be able to think for themselves so they’ll pick up a book instead of an AK47,” says Brigadier General Mike Nevin, the centre’s commander.

Iraq’s children are among the worst victims of the war, a generation brutalised and traumatised by the constant violence.

The detention centre is a daunting place for a teenager. Dubbed Remembrance II or R2, is a maze of formidable five-metre-high (17ft) mesh fences topped by coiled razor wire, floodlights and watchtowers. From metal catwalks armed guards look down on concrete-floored pens where surly detainees in yellow jumpsuits linger outside their huts in the baking heat. Nobody has escaped yet.

There are 4,000 male detainees in R2 and, with President Bush’s troop “surge” in full swing, 60 more arrive each day. There are separate zones for Sunnis, Shias, foreign fighters, moderates, extremists, adults and juveniles. Roughly 85 per cent are Sunni. A quarter are diehard jihadists determined to continue their war against the infidel Americans even while in custody.

The hardliners hold Sharia courts, beat fellow detainees for smoking, listening to music or participating in US programmes. They start fires. They foment riots. They hurl water bottles filled with urine at the guards, and “chai rocks” made of tea and dust moulded into hard round balls. They fashion knives from fragments of razor wire or the ground-down ends of toothbrush handles. They make slingshots from soccer ball linings and whips from strips of towel. Occasionally detainees are murdered by their peers – earlier this year a 17-year-old was strangled.

The US has realised belatedly that the detainee population is a rich recruiting ground for the fanatics. It now strives to isolate the real hardliners – during riots guards fire paintballs at the ringleaders so they can be identified later – while wooing the rest with offers of paid work, “antiextremist enlightenment programmes” that include lessons from moderate imams and enhanced prospects of release.

But total segregation is impossible. The extremists do not advertise themselves. Some will shave their beards to blend in with the rest. And “rock mail” – messages wrapped round stones – permits the passing of orders and threats from one compound to another. “They are very determined. They never give up,” says General Nevin.

With the 828 juvenile inmates, however, the military is making an extra effort. It does not want them released after a year to become next year’s suicide bombers.

It judges a hundred or so to be beyond redemption, but the rest are now bussed daily to a new school outside R2 called Dar al-Hikmah, or Wisdom House.

The school is a row of prefabricated sheds ringed by blast walls. Here the inmates receive eight hours of lessons a day. They are taught to read and write, they play soccer and basketball, they have Iraqi civilian teachers and security is markedly more relaxed. “We’re trying to take them away from the environment they have at R2,” says Captain Ali Dipour, the principal.

The school has only been open a month, but General Nevin and the teachers say that it is working already. They say that the children’s hatred and anger is dissipating; that Sunnis and Shia teenagers are beginning to mix, that they no longer chant the names of Osama bin Laden or Moqtada al-Sadr at prayer or hurl abuse at their teachers. Leyla, the only woman teacher, says that the boys see her as something of a mother figure.

The claims are hard to test, but the classes certainly look orderly and the students attentive. As in a million other schools around the world, the walls are decorated with childish crayon drawings of animals, trees, houses and stick-figure humans. “They are just kids wanting to be kids,” says Captain Dipour.

Time will tell; but it is just conceivable that in this grim detention centre, some of these child fighters are enjoying a taste of normality for the first time in their lives.

— The number of American troops in Iraq could be reduced to about 100,000 by the time the next president takes over in 2009, Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, indicated yesterday.

Casualties of war

2m Iraqi children displaced by fighting

800,000 children receive no schooling

28% of children are malnourished

6 children, aged 10 to 15, are treated each month by US medics after planting roadside bombs

828 juvenile detainees are in Camp Cropper, up from fewer than 100 last year

Sources: Unicef, Save the Children, Oxfam, US military



Have your say

I didn't imagine that something like what you report could be happening today. I'm horrified. The fact that children are being brainwashed in the madrassas as well,, in the course of their "quran" learning, so they may immediately be "ordered" to become sucide bombers, whenever a mullah deems so, during the rest of their lives, should also be something widely published. ´Where are the "progressist" human rights activists? The UN activists? How come nothing is said in the media about this terrible reality? I am willing to dedicate my life to help organizing an initiative towards the ending of this situation.

Simon Salosny, Santiago, Chile

I want to say that you did an excellent job on this article. I'm nearing the end of my deployment here at Camp Cropper and I spent around seven months working with these kids. It is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my life, and now that I am leaving my only hope is that I have done some good here. I think I have with these kids. As a guard on the compound I've talked with a lot of them about their views, and told them mine, and told them that I am only here to help them. They use to ask me why I was here, most of them thought it was for money, but really it was for the prospect that I might be able to make a difference, and that was what I would tell them; that Maybe I could make a difference in their lives so they could live a normal life. I think it is sad that there are so many kids detained here, but while they are here maybe we can give them a chance. Thank you for showing some of the good that comes out of this war and our detention program.
SGT Bryan Scroggins

Bryan Scroggins, TROY, illinois


Really. Did the McCain camp call you and give you that news? sm
Maybe she just wanted to show she was a good sport, since they obviously lampooon her every single week.