Innocent Children - Heartless bastards

Human suffering during war is bad, it has been so for tens of thousands of years and will never get better. War is hell it has been said, and the incumbent suffering of the victims of war, both on the battlefield and off is heart wrenching at times, and at times so sorrowful that one has to step back, take a deep breath and know that eventually, some good will come from the tragedy.

And so it was in central Baghdad when Iraqi soldiers and members of the 82nd Airborne looked over the wall into an orphanage for children with special needs. According to CBS reporters there to record the incident:

They saw multiple bodies laying on the floor of the facility," Staff Sgt. Mitchell Gibson of the 82nd Airborne Division told CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan. "They thought they were all dead, so they threw a basketball (to) try and get some attention, and actually one of the kids lifted up their head, tilted it over and just looked and then went back down. And they said, 'oh, they're alive' and so they went into the building."

Inside the building, a government-run orphanage for special needs children, the soldiers found more emaciated little bodies tied to the cribs. They had been kept this way for more than a month, according to the soldiers called in to rescue the 24 boys.

"I saw children that you could see literally every bone in their body that were so skinny, they had no energy to move whatsoever, no expression on their face," Staff Sgt. Michael Beale said.

"The kids were tied up, naked, covered in their own waste — feces — and there were three people that were cooking themselves food, but nothing for the kids," Lt. Stephen Duperre said."

The photographs under the read more link are heart breaking. They show the worst that man can do when dealing with retarded or otherwise mentally deficient children. Having spent years working with the mentally retarded, I know both how many needs they have, as well as the true joy on their faces when they have, after much trial and error learned something new. They need to catch the bastards that did this and open a very large can of whoop-ass on them, then sentence them to 50 years hard labor for each child they abused.

Warning, these photos are graphic

And lastly, a US Soldier helping out! God Bless him, who ever he is

H/T to LGF