Innocent Weapons

          In the movie The Hurt Locker we see one of the several ways children are used as weapons. One of the main characters, Sergeant First Class William James, who plays a member of an elite bomb squad, was forced to defuse a body bomb that was sewn into the corpse of a young boy.
         Children have increasingly become a popular weapon for terrorists and insurgent groups. They are used for body bombs, militia, menial workers such as cooks, planting bombs, and even as suicide bombers. Children are recruited for several different reasons. One reason would be that they are vulnerable or easily coerced into doing what they are told. People are also not as wary of children because they are viewed as innocent so its easier for them to not get caught before the act is done. Children don't always join of their own free will, some are threatened and forced to comply. Some are promised protection, food, money, and a chance at a better life if they join the fight. John Horgan stated in his special for CNN that   the TTP , a terrorist group in Pakistan, have been recruiting children as operatives for years.

        The children are recruited, taken, or even given to the Taliban by their parents. They are trained in special camps to do whatever the group orders. Most of the children told of horrible treatment, beatings, and, for some, even rape. A rehabilitation center for the children who are arrested or captured by officials, named Sabaoon, works hard to help them turn their life around and escape from the Taliban.  
       Children in the program are helped by a team of psychologists and spend anywhere from 6 months to 3 years in the program. Since it was created in the 2000s, Sabaoon has had 188 students graduate. Just like any program, Sabaoon is not 100% effective, but most graduates never return to the fight. The children trained to do unspeakable things get a new chance at life and a bright future. Wether or not the child is innocent or completely rehabilitated is something to question.  Can you really rehabilitate someone who has spent their whole childhood brainwashed to kill innocent people? Are these children truly innocent?

Prisoners of War : Ignored and Abandoned

    During the Vietnam War there were thousands of prisoners of war captured. Some were returned but some weren't so lucky. After the war-ending treaty was signed in January of 1973 the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs started their job on finding and returning the lost soldiers. Former Massachusetts Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry was appointed as chairman of the committee. It has now come to light that Kerry  may not have been as honest as we thought.

    Though North Vietnam returned 591 of the captured prisoners, evidence shows that there are many still held back as a bargaining chip for the $4 billion in repairs promised by the U.S. It was the Committee's job to investigate the integrity of the evidence. Sidney Schanberg argues in her article "When John Kerry's Courage Went M.I.A." that Kerry had other plans. Schanberg argues that instead of focusing on the lost soldiers, his main objective was normalization of relations with Hanoi. Though that goal was not a bad one, it largely interfered with the retrieval of those men.

   There has been evidence of more than 1,600 firsthand sightings, almost 14,000 secondhand reports, intercepted radio messages about prisoners being moved by captors,reports from informants, and clear satellite photos of rescue signals. All of this evidence was labeled "inconclusive" and ignored. There were many complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials that live-prisoner evidence was being covered-up and that the Pentagon was destroying files to keep the families and public from finding out. Kerry has consistently denied all of the allegations of his cover-up. 

    Colonel Millard Peck, former head of the Pentagon's P.O.W/M.I.A office, resigned in disgust in the first year of Kerry's leadership of the committee. In his last address he said, "The mind-set to 'debunk' is alive and well. . . Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow-through on any of the sightings . . . The sad fact is that. . .From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was in fact abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with 'smoke and mirrors' to stall the issue until it dies a natural death."

    How many prisoners of war were left behind? The evidence claims that hundreds were never returned home. Those who were abandoned by the country they fought so bravely for. The country they risked their lives for. What happened to those who never came home?