From what I can see, all the facts point to the US being an imperialist power, governed by its own military industrial complex and the banking cartels. We torture people, lie, kill people, and force countries to buy our weapons. We protect our own war criminals, even to the point of preventing other countries from prosecuting them. We lie to our own citizens. We employ contractors in our wars, at several multiples of the cost of our own military, which avoids legal entanglements and a draft while funding companies who support our political leaders. Those contractors kill innocent civilians and conduct illegal activities on a regular basis.

If I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is: since all the facts already point to those things being true, it’s not worth reporting on any instances of them taking place. It’s not worth pointing to the graft, corruption, murder, illegal activities that stem from those things, because they are generally already known.

Am I getting that right? It is hard for me to believe, but it seems like that’s what you’re saying. I’m actually curious, not being sarcastic.

“Large halls provide the venues for the weekly parties where the boys’ owners, invite their friends to watch them dancing. Several different types of dances are popular, Daad says, and if the boy refuses to dance or performs badly, his master beats him with a long stick.
“We have to do that,” explains Daad. “We spend money on these boys, so they have to dance.”
Later into the night, once the dancing is over, the boys are frequently shared with close friends, for sexual favors. And by the end of the evening it is not at all uncommon for the boy to have a new owner, as the parties often provide the opportunity for buying and selling.”

So yeah. This is male sex slavery and they also get beaten. No shame to denounce that.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/246409 (Article from 2007!)

I’m not a conspiracy nut, but there are clear reasons to doubt the motivations of the UN. They are, in fact, basing its policy on the word of Western educated locals and backing that up with Western morals. The supporters may or may not have agendas of their own in causing unrest in the unstable and flawed Afghani government pecking order. Let me hear from some of the boys that have been “liberated” and who have no family to protect by lying and then I’ll get behind it being a problem we have a responsibility to intervene with.

Your third point does not make sense. You cannot take the position that being sold into slavery at 13 is worse (or better) than running away from an abusive household at 13; both result in degradation in the name of survival and the American variant usually leads to a brief, desperate life of addiction and crime. Both options are “sick”, but at least one keeps your kid sister from starving to death. You got any better ideas for little Abdul to pay for his mom’s penicillin?

The notion that an American company enabled the sexual and physical abuse of kids is a logical outcome of “the cause justifies the means” where cause is money+power and the means are everything else.

Companies are structured to eliminate compassion and human-ness for the sake of profit. This is normal.

Allowing self-interested military contractors to make decisions like this while dealing in money and people, while preventing journalists from reporting on the issues: not such a great model.

I find it hard to become outraged over the Washington rumour you mention, and I don’t know anything about the boys in Portland and Miami. Is there a similar angle to exploit for their benefit which has a realistic expectation of gaining more traction than this DynCorp/bacha bazi one?

Because if not – then that isn’t a productive story to be focusing upon right now, you know?

One of the prerequisites for doing something, however, is evidence that it’s going on at a specific location or in a certain group of people. Do you have any concrete ideas about how to obtain that information?

Regardless, just because something is happening in one place doesn’t mean we can’t also be upset that it’s happening in another place. Humanity is capable of being angry about more than one thing simultaneously.

However, I don’t think it’s incompatible with justice or wisdom to question whether the practice itself is any of our business when it, to all appearances, seems to be a working (if distasteful) solution to several problems in an alien culture. Especially when we haven’t dealt with the analogs of those problems in our own.

My bottom line is: our duty is to make sure our country and corporations are not materially participating in any of this nasty business, and advocate for harm reduction campaigns in the affected areas. We also have a responsibility to our own kids who find themselves on the streets in our own country.

If I did have any such information, don’t you think it would be just as dangerous to divulge it here as it would be in Afghanistan? Like the man said, “I love my life, too.” A good safe example would be to visit any Asian “special” massage parlor in the US if you want to meet some sex slaves.

I concede that humanity in general can be angry about multiple subjects; I just have trouble with trendy outrage that occludes problems we haven’t dealt with on our native soil yet.

Nail DynCorp to the wall; let the Afghanis (and the UN, if they are invited to the party) figure out what to do with their boy-brothel problems. Or should we install *another* corrupt government there to try and fix things up again?

The problem is, the ones I could think of have already been done, and no one cares:

Government contractors stole mass amounts of cash. Done.
US Government kills and/or tortures innocents. Done.
US Government lies. Done.
Banking industry rules the world. Done.
Federal elections were rigged. Done.
Random corporation sacrifices people for money. Done all the time.
US Government tortures its own innocent citizens. Done.
US Government kills a whistleblower. Done.
US Government spies on its citizens. Done.
Politicians are paid to vote against the citizen’s interests. Done, daily.

I mean seriously, try to think of something the government hasn’t done, or been convincingly accused of (we’ll leave the debates out of it). And what are people doing? They sure aren’t marching. What would make them revolt?

I had the thought today that revolutions don’t happen unless people are hungry or otherwise put out. People who have enough to eat and who are not seriously inconvenienced will simply ignore even their own idealism. Ideals are not enough for a revolution, in other words. It’s the big lie. Believing in it means you have to do something, so everyone just ignores it.

If you got some ideas what kind of revelation would cause serious change in the US – meaning that Americans pay more attention to it than who wins the World Series – then I’m all ears. UFOs, maybe? It would have to be photogenic evidence. And celebrity issues don’t count.

I am glad to know our government and our contractors are acting on our behalf, and are preventing us from knowing these hard facts.

The real problem is reporting on this kind of thing. It’s unseemly, and it hurts America.

I’m as liberal, as aware as anyone of the damage the West can do to another culture, but there is no way I can agree that it is ever OK to molest children. Or (in another example I have also seen from similar arguments) suggest that because it is “how it has always been in sub-saharan africa” that the West should not try to stop the practice of female circumcision.

I’m educated. I’m for limited, constitutional government and chant socialist is bad all day long.

There are people who think that $250,000/year are plutocrats. Anybody that is a wage earner, even those making 250K are not plutocrats.

http://www.theclassicalliberal.com

Read closely and you will notice this line:

“Frontline covered the phenomenon earlier this year”

Maybe you saw that there was a video included as well. I’m not saying that there won’t be greater or renewed attention on this due to wikileaks, I’m just saying that this information was already out there so it should not be used to justify the release of the rest of the information.