I don't even know how to react to this story

From Yahoo news - Jailed Iraqi children run free as marines roll into Baghdad suburbs

Around 150 children spilled out of the jail after the gates were opened as a US military Humvee vehicle approached, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Padilla told an AFP correspondent travelling with the Marines 5th Regiment.

"Hundreds of kids were swarming us and kissing us," Padilla said.

"There were parents running up, so happy to have their kids back."

"The children had been imprisoned because they had not joined the youth branch of the Baath party," he alleged. "Some of these kids had been in there for five years."

I am so very happy that these children have been freed. At the same time I am angry and disgusted at the fact that they were imprisoned in the first place. I know that there are children who are imprisoned here in the US. However, none of them are there because they failed to join the Boy Scouts. Even in the third Reich the Hitler Youth was voluntary.

Additionally Children in US detention facilities will never be, to quote the article "wearing threadbare clothes and looked under-nourished". What kind of regime of horrors has been running Iraq?

What I really want to do is find some of the 'anti-war' crowd and ask them to respond to this. Ending the practice of imprisoning children as political prisoners is very powerful reason to end a regime in my book.

As usual - when I have no words it is because Lileks has said it better. Go read today's Bleat it is up to the usual standard of greatness.