You Can't Shame the Shameless

I want to go back briefly and finish talking about child soldiers because I finally got back to reading that book I saw on the plane my first day on the job. Remember P.W. Singer’s book, Children at War? I finished that and then dug into more of his writing on the subject.
(Incidentally, all of Singer’s articles are all available on his page at the Brookings Institution Website.)
Anyway…after reading his book and this article, I am convinced that the Agency belongs on the shameful list of international criminals who use children in battle and our motives and behavior are strikingly similar.

One similarity is that the paramilitary groups mentioned in the book like Rwandan war lords, the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka to name a few, recruit abandoned and orphaned children who have no adult protection. The Tamil Tigers, whose 26 year long civil struggle recently came to a halt, had a bonanza of new recruits just after the tsunami decimated the coast of Sri Lanka, There were many homeless orphaned children who were welcomed into the children's army to fight and die for a cause they did not understand.

We all select our victims the same way hyenas do--we look for the sick, the helpless and the young. The Agency has spotters in many hospitals across Italy and when a young girl is admitted who has no family or no money, we swoop in and offer "to help."

Henrietta, for example, was a victim of home invasion where the robbers weren't content to just take property. They spent a few days torturing and killing the entire family. Henrietta was left for dead with extensive physical and mental trauma from her ordeal.

Angie, another of our cyborgs, was the victim of a near-fatal car accident. The most tragic detail of her story was that her parents were driving the car that hit her and astonishingly, it was no accident. Her father's business was about to fail and to raise some fast cash, he deliberately set out to kill her in order to collect on her life insurance policy.

Triella, our oldest cyborg was "rescued" from a gang of child traffickers in Amsterdam. Hillshire, her handler was part of the police team that broke up the gang and brought them to justice.

Rico was born paralyzed and had been bed-ridden her entire life. Her parents' resources and patience with caring for her were exhausted so they signed her over as a ward of the state. At that point the Agency stepped in to help.

I see now that even as adults, Jean's and my own recruitment happened partly because we were vulnerable after our parents, sister and Jean's fiancee were killed by a terrorist car bomb. We, too, were orphans.

Another similarity is that we choose children because, as Dr Bianchi says, the young mind is plastic and easy to manipulate and they learn fast. We take advantage of the natural child/parent bond and the younger ones develop fierce loyalties to their handlers. Dependent children can be easily conditioned to obey and if they are stubborn, because they are small they can be forced. One Rwandan handler bragged that he could train a child to use a light weight Kalashnikov in 30 minutes. His army of children needed no basic training, no expensive uniforms, and no big food bills. He just needed a strong supply of orphans as cannon fodder and the conflict could go on indefinitely.

There are 300,000 child soldiers in the world today in more than 70 military organizations in 19 countries. Everyone condemns the fact but the practice continues and grows. It seems that no matter how many laws are passed or how many international agencies draft resolutions against such practices, nothing shames us into stopping. Groups who recruit children to kill know very well that they are violating international law and moral codes that have existed for thousands of years and that knowledge is the heart of the problem. They have never been ignorant about whether or not it was ethical or confused about what exactly was allowed under international law. They continue to break the law and stay “off the record” as much as possible.

The biggest challenge of all in ending child soldiering lies in the types of conflicts that employ the young. Children tend to be recruited in long-running civil wars, the kind that simmer for years or even decades, just like our conflict with Padania. Unfortunately, these wars constitute the main form of armed conflict today. Until they stop, the recruitment of children never will.

Those who use child soldiers, and here I include my Agency, and myself are, by definition, willing to ignore and transgress longstanding ethical norms. Those who recruit children, send them into battle, and force them to commit murder are simply unlikely to be persuaded by moral appeals or any kind of rational discourse. As Singer says, “One cannot shame the shameless.”

Last week the 26 year long civil war ended in Sri Lanka, when the leader of the Tamil Tigers was killed. I hope the war will be over for the child soldiers in Sri Lanka the same way I decided the war was over for Henrietta.

The Slippery Slope

(This video will give you a look our first meeting)


I remember that the hospital room was dimly lit and the diminutive patient looked even smaller and more helpless amid the tangle of tubes and wires that were holding her together. Her body, salvaged from devastating injuries, was in the process of being “retro fitted” with bionic parts that would make her an indestructible fighting machine. Her mind had been wiped of memories and she was being psychologically and pharmacologically programmed to be an obedient, guilt free assassin. They asked me to stand by so I’d be the first thing she'd see when she awakened to her new identity. I felt like I should have greeted her with flowers or cuddly plush teddy bear but they told me that her life would be easier if she got used to her new status immediately-- so I placed a SIG P239, a semi-automatic pistol, on the coverlet.


Jean warned me that the first meeting would be hard to take and he was right. Henrietta was the same age as our sister was when she died in a terrorist bomb attack and she did look a lot like our little Enrika. But after the initial shock, I was surprised and kind of horrified at the ease with which I did everything they asked of me beginning with my offering her the gun. My instincts were shouting to comfort and protect this little girl but Dr. Belisario, Dr. Bianchi and my brother, Jean all convinced me to follow their orders. The two Doctors wore white coats and I wondered if I was being manipulated like the subjects in the Milgram Experiments that took place in 1961. You’ll see the similarities if you read about it. Penn State owns the original historic footage and offers it for sale and you can see a short segment here. I'm also giving you a link to an interesting reenactment here.


The experiment used authority figures in white lab coats to urge test subjects given the role of “teacher” to give other test subjects given the role “learner” increasingly strong electric shocks when they answered questions incorrectly. Milgram wanted to know if regular individuals would obey orders rather than follow their own set of values. Milgram’s experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and he summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

That first day I met Henrietta, I pushed away my own instincts of protection and care and began my descent into obeying orders that were incompatible with my own values and in fact with fundamental morality. Throughout our time together, I would ask her to do things that a 10 year old should not even hear about and I would stand by and watch other handlers mistreat their young charges without trying to stop them. I let myself be convinced by the doctors and their white coats that what I was doing was necessary and in fact was the kindest way of dealing with this child.



When she finally did awaken and I looked into her eyes, I saw the trust and love (provided by the psychotropic drugs they euphemistically call conditioning) and I felt the bond they promised. I imprinted her with her new name, Henrietta, and her signature weapon, the SIG P239--then she drifted back to sleep. My role as her handler and teacher would begin as soon as her body healed. Like Milgram's experiment, I would become the “teacher” who would train the “student” by following orders and inflicting the Agency’s brand of manipulation on these budding cyborg assassins. Over the next few months, Henrietta and I would train hard, bond emotionally, and I would teach her to kill the Padania terrorists and anyone else the Agency deemed to be enemies of our country.

I prided myself in the fact that I did not let them give her too much "conditioning" and I tried to treat her like a normal little girl by taking her out for ice cream. Doing these little favors let me convinced myself that I was better than the other handlers but the low dosage presented a new set of dilemmas that I'll talk about next time. Aside from my lame attempts to treat her humanely, I was no better than the subjects in the experiment, I ignored her vulnerability and emotional pain and continued to use her in the name of Agency for the good of the nation.