AgapeRevolution.com

 The story below is a very interesting story in its own right.  I would like to draw attention to the very last sentence though.  This is a sad story with a happy ending that makes us very proud of our U.S. soldiers.  Its also interesting to contrast the gut reaction of the troops to the way the ”caretakers” went about their business while the kids lived in such conditions.  How could those caretakers allow such things to happen and even when they had food and clothing right there to help ”its most vulnerable”?  In fact, our society has the most comprehensive and the most vigorously defended arguments that support the horrible treatment of society’s most vulnerable.  All one must do is log onto a liberal blog, attend a college, lawschool or medical school class, turn on the TV or listen to 5 of 9 Judges and listen to the justifications for abortion to understand what was going through the heads of the people in the position of caring for those kids.  If life has no value other than who we think contributes the most, or deserves to be given priority when we have to choose betweeen killing one and forcing one to be burdened with the responsibility of caring for them, what we saw in Iraq in this story is supported 100% by the same rationale. In fact, I would argue that these kids had more of a fighting chance than the weakest in our society.  At least they can be seen. When you click on the link to the story to see the pictures, ask yourself this question.  Would it be acceptable for CBS to put pictures of aborted children to illustrate the evil that is abortion?  Not a chance.  In fact, it is looked at as completely unacceptable.  Why do we do it here?  Why do we have movies like roots and Schindlers List?  It is simply because sometimes we have become so far down the road from morality that words don’t phase us.  Sometimes a picture is the last ditch effort to awaken the sense of Good that is inherent in God’s creation. 

Another good example of this is the anti-smoking commercials that recently have aired on numerous channels.  The two variations involve one where the protestors take enough body bags to equal the amount of people who die each day from smoking, filled with what looks like dead bodies , and piles them in front of a tobacco company and tells them to look at how many people die each day from smoking.  The other involves the same number of people who all walk and drop “dead” to the ground in the middle of the street in a performance intended to show the toll on human life that smoking provides.   Interesting, I didn’t hear any professors or any of my friends mentioning how they support the message but not the medium of presenting the message.   Truth is Truth baby, Pictures a Picture and a Body is a Body. 

(CBS News) BAGHDAD:  See full Story: It was a scene that shocked battle-hardened soldiers, captured in photographs given to CBS News.

On a daytime patrol in central Baghdad just over than a week ago, a U.S. military advisory team and Iraqi soldiers happened to look over a wall and found something horrific.

“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 there 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 emaciated little bodies tied to the cribs, CBS News reports exclusively. They had been kept this way for more than a month, according to the soldiers called in to rescue the dying 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 Beal 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.

Logan asked: so there were three people cooking their own food?

“They were in the kitchen, yes ma’am,” Duperre said.

With all these kids starving around them?

“Yes ma’am,” Duperre said.

It didn’t stop there. The soldiers found kitchen shelves packed with food and in the stock room, rows of brand-new clothing still in their plastic wrapping.

Instead of giving it to the boys, the soldiers believe it was being sold to local markets.

The man in charge, the orphanage caretaker, had a well-kept office — a stark contrast to the terrible conditions just outside that room.

“I got extremely angry with the caretaker when I got there,” Capt. Benjamin Morales said. “It took every muscle in my body to restrain myself from not going after that guy. But I did the right thing and I turned him over to the Iraq authorities which were also on the scene.”

He has since disappeared and is believed to be on the run. But the two security guards are in custody, arrested on the orders of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The two women also working there, who posed for pictures in front of the naked boys as if there was nothing wrong, have also disappeared.

“My first thought when I walked in there was shock and then I got a little angry that they were treating kids like that, then that’s when everybody just started getting upset,” Capt. Jim Cook said. “There were people crying. It was definitely a bad emotional scene.”

There was nothing more emotional than finding one boy who Army medics did not expect to survive. For Gibson, that was the hardest part:

Seeing a boy who was at the orphanage, where Logan reported from, “with thousands of flies covering his body, unable to move any part of his body, you know we had to actually hold his head up and tilt his head to make sure that he was OK, and you know the only thing basically that was moving was his eyeballs,” Gibson explained. “Flies in the mouth, in the eyes, in the nose, ears, eating all the open wounds from sleeping on the concrete.”

All that, and the boy was laying in the boiling sun — temperatures of 120 degrees or so, according to Gibson.

Looking at the boy today, as he sits up in his crib without help, it is hard to believe he is the same boy, one week later — now clean and being cared for along with all the other boys in a different orphanage located only a few minutes away from where they suffered their ordeal.

Another little boy shown in the photos was carried out of the orphanage by Beal. He was very emaciated.

“I picked him up and then immediately the kid started smiling, and as I got a little bit closer to the ambulance he just started laughing. It was almost like he completely understood what was going on,” Beal said.

When CBS News visited the orphanage with the soldiers, it was clear the boys had been starved of human contact as much as anything else, Logan said. Some still had marks on their ankles from where they were tied. Since only one boy can talk, it’s impossible to know what terrible memories they might have locked away.

The memory of what he saw when he helped rescue the boys that night haunts Ali Soheil, the local council head, who wept throughout the interview.

Later at the hospital, Lt. Jason Smith brushed teeth and helped clean up the boys. He and his wife are both special education teachers and he was proud to tell her what the soldiers had done.

“She said that one day was worth my entire deployment,” Smith said. “It makes the whole thing worthwhile.”

This is a tough test for the Iraqi government: How a nation cares for its most vulnerable is one of the most important benchmarks for the health of any society.