Robert Fisk: I saw these brave doctors trying to save lives – these charges are a pack of lies
Eyewitness: Bahrain didn’t invite the Saudis to send their troops; the Saudis invaded and received a post-dated invitation – Tuesday, 14 June 2011

Has the Khalifa family gone mad? Yesterday, the Bahraini royal family started an utterly fraudulent trial of 48 surgeons, doctors, paramedics and nurses, accusing them of trying to topple the tin-pot monarchy of this Sunni minority emirate. The defendants in this flagrantly unfair military court are, of course, members of the majority Shia people of Bahrain. And since I was a witness to their heroic efforts to save lives in February, I can say – let us speak with a frankness that the Bahraini rulers would normally demand – that the charges are a pack of lies.

Doctors I saw, drenched in their patients’ blood, desperately trying to staunch the bullet wounds of pro-democracy demonstrators shot in cold blood by Bahraini soldiers and police, are now on trial. I watched armed policemen refusing to allow ambulances to collect the wounded from the roads where they had been cut down.
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These are the very same doctors and nurses I stood beside four months ago in the Sulaimaniya emergency room, some of them weeping as they tried to deal with gunshot wounds the like of which they had never seen before.

“How could they do this to these people?” one of them asked me. “We have never dealt with trauma wounds like these before.” Next to us lay a man with bullet wounds in the chest and thigh, coughing blood on to the floor.

The surgeons were frightened that they did not have the skills to save these victims of police violence. Now the police have accused the doctors and staff of killing the patients whom the police themselves shot.

How could these fine medical men and women have been trying to “topple” the monarchy?

The idea that these 48 defendants are guilty of such a vicious charge is not just preposterous. It is insane, a total perversion – no, the total opposite – of the truth. The police were firing at demonstrators from helicopters.

The idea that a woman and child died because they were rejected by doctors and refused medical treatment is a fantasy. The only problems medical staff encountered at the Sulaimaniya hospital – and again, I was a witness and, unlike the Bahraini security authorities, I do not tell lies – was from the cruel policemen who blocked patients from reaching the medical facility.

In truth, of course, the Khalifa family is not mad. Nor are the Sunni minority of Bahrain intrinsically bad or sectarian. The reality is clear for anyone to see in Bahrain. The Saudis are now running the country. They never received an invitation to send their own soldiers to support the Bahraini “security forces” from the Bahraini Crown Prince, who is a decent man. They simply invaded and received a post-dated invitation.

The subsequent destruction of ancient Shia mosques in Bahrain was a Saudi project, entirely in line with the kingdom’s Taliban-style hatred of all things Shia. Could the Bahraini prime minister be elected, I asked a member of the royal court last February? “The Saudis would not permit this,” he replied. Of course not. Because they now control Bahrain. Hence the Saudi-style doctors’ trial.

Bahrain is no longer the kingdom of the Khalifas. It has become a Saudi palatinate, a confederated province of Saudi Arabia, a pocket-size weasel state from which all journalists should in future use the dateline: Manama, Occupied Bahrain. …source

Bahrain expels a freelance journalist from kingdom
19 June 2011 -BCHR

Freelance journalist Finian Cunningham was ordered out of Bahrain on 18 June by the authorities as a result of his critical journalism covering the popular uprising and the subsequent, ongoing brutal repression of the peaceful pro-democracy movement. He had been living in Bahrain for three years, and was there at the outset of the recent uprising on 14 February.

In a recent interview for US-based blogtalkradio, on 12 June, Cunningham assessed the lifting of the state of emergency and the call for “national dialogue” by the Al Khalifa rulers as a hollow, cynical public relations exercise designed to deceive from the ongoing reality of state terror and violation of human rights. It appears, he added, that Washington and London are also trying to give legitimacy to the rulers by welcoming their initiative for slleged dialogue. Such an endorsement by Western governments is preposterous given the heinous realities of crimes against civilians and can only be seen as a cynical defense of the indefensible by the US and British.

Cunningham also wrote several articles posted on Globalresearch.ca and other news agencies detailing cases of murder of civilians by Saudi-backed forces, torture of prisoners and the illegal detention of medical personnel. He also higlighted US and British complicity in these crimes against humanity and these governments’ hypocrisy over their claims of supporting democracy and international law while turning a blind eye to what is happening in Bahrain.

He is now based in Belfast, Ireland, where he is continuing to work as a critical journalist on Bahraini politics, and the brutal repression by the regime against the people’s struggle for democratic freedom. He is currently writing a book on the exploitation by the unelected Al Khalifa monarchy of the population and natural resources of Bahrain.

Writing from Belfast today, Cunningham said: “My lasting impression of Bahrain is not the brutish nature of its illegitimate rulers, but the bravery and decency of its ordinary men, women and youth in their noble struggle for freedom. The night before I left Bahrain, on Friday 17 June, I witnessed a peaceful protest of up to 150,000 people in Sitra demanding their legitimate right for freedom. This was the biggest public rally by the pro-democracy movement since the Saudi-backed crackdown that began on 14 March with the invasion. After three months of state-sponsored murder and terror, the people of Bahrain have not been defeated by the despotic regime and their despotic allies. The people are showing that they are winning the battle of wills because they have truth and justice on their side, while the regimes have only the negative unsustainable energy that comes from hate, killing and destruction. The people are stronger than ever and are more determined than ever to bring democracy and freedom to Bahrain.” …more

U.S.-Saudi rivalry intensifies Existential
The quest for greater influence includes a tug of war over Jordan, just one example of the contest between the longtime allies split over the democracy uprisings sweeping the region.

Paul Richter and Neela Banerjee, Los Angeles Times
June 19, 2011

Reporting from Washington—
Senior U.S. diplomats have been dropping by the royal palace in Amman almost every week this spring to convince Jordanian King Abdullah II that democratic reform is the best way to quell the protests against his rule.

But another powerful ally also has been lobbying Abdullah — and wants him to ignore the Americans.

Saudi Arabia is urging the Hashemite kingdom to stick to the kind of autocratic traditions that have kept the House of Saud secure for centuries, and Riyadh has been piling up gifts at Abdullah’s door to sell its point of view.

The Saudis last month offered Jordan a coveted opportunity to join a wealthy regional bloc called the Gulf Cooperation Council, a move that would give the impoverished kingdom new investment, jobs and security ties. To sweeten the pot, the Saudis wrote a check for $400 million in aid to Amman two weeks ago, their first assistance in years.

The quiet contest for Jordan is one sign of the rivalry that has erupted across the Middle East this year between Saudi Arabia and the United States, longtime allies that have been put on a collision course by the popular uprisings that have swept the region.

“We do have a lot of friction there,” said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The ‘Arab Spring’ has injected tension into the relationship.”

The Obama administration has generally supported the protests, and urged the region’s governments to share more power. But when President Obama demanded reform from Arab regimes in a major speech last month, he carefully avoided any mention of Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy that brooks little or no dissent.

Riyadh, which believes the U.S. is turning its back on loyal allies, is trying to step out of America’s shadow. It is embracing a foreign policy that often diverges from Washington’s — and sometimes seeks to undermine it. …more