Children At Gitmo -- News From London

Pressure on Pres. Bush to close the "Gitmo" detainment camp has increased, with his closest ally -- Great Britain -- reacting to this latest revelation:

The notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay has been hit by fresh allegations of human rights abuses, with claims that dozens of children were sent there - some as young as 14 years old.

Lawyers in London estimate that more than 60 detainees held at the terrorists' prison camp were boys under 18 when they were captured.

They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized - including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.

The Bush administration has claimed that normal rules of war and human rights conventions do not apply to "enemy combatants" who were al-Qa'ida or Taliban fighters and supporters.

Clive Stafford Smith, a legal director of Reprieve (a London-based legal rights group) and lawyer for a number of detainees, said it broke every widely accepted legal convention on human rights to put children in the same prison as adults - including US law.

The Bush Administration is on record as saying:

Bush administration's assurances to the UK that no juveniles had been held there. "We would take a very, very dim view if it transpires that there were actually minors there," said an official.

Because the detainees have been held in Cuba for four years, all the teenagers are now thought to have reached their 18th birthdays in Guantanamo Bay and some have since been released.

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt Commander Jeffrey Gordon, insisted that no one now being held at Guantanamo was a juvenile and said the DoD also rejected arguments that normal criminal law was relevant to the Guantanamo detainees.

"There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations... Age is not a determining factor in detention. [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us."

The Department of Defense was forced to release a list of Guantanamo detainees for the first ever earlier this month. Besides juveniles, people suspected of being "soldiers" or enemy combatants, the list included journalists from al-Jazeera news service, who are non-combatants. The US has been accused of targeting al-Jazeera reporters and facilities, especially in one bombing raid where at least one al-Jazeera reporter was killed. The US has pled a "friendly fire" defense to these charges.