Youth Explosion

If this is true, it's positively, absolutely disgusting.

Pakistan's top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say.

A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 - huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year.

"[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars," a U.S. Defense Department official told reporters recently. He spoke on the condition that he not be named because of ongoing intelligence efforts to catch Mehsud, a prime target for a U.S. and Pakistani anti-Taliban campaign.

Of course if this is nothing more than Pentagon propaganda, it's still absolutely disgusting.

The fact that I don't know whether to believe this or not given both the source of the article (the Pentagon) and the outlet itself (The Moonie Times) speaks volumes about the last seven years in war reporting. In fact, the point that we have seven years of war reporting is in and of itself disgusting.