‘Bahrain allies can’t kill revolution’
Thu Aug 11, 2011 8:10PM GMT

A Bahraini opposition leader says the revolution in Bahrain is “not going to stop,” despite the all-out Saudi and American support for the suppressive regime in Manama. “I can confirm that the revolution is not going to stop, and that this regime, in its present form, is not going to survive for much longer, despite the Saudi and American support to the Al Khalifa dictatorship,” Saeed al-Shahabi from the opposition group of Bahrain Freedom Movement told Press TV on Thursday.

Anti-government protesters have been holding peaceful demonstrations across the Persian Gulf sheikdom since mid-February, calling for an end to the Al Khalifa family’s over-40-year-long rule over the country.

Shahabi predicted that the island would witness ‘more protests’ along with ‘more crackdowns’ and human right violations committed by the regime.

On March 14, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates deployed police and military forces in the country following a plea by the Bahraini regime to help it crush the nationwide protests there.

The Bahraini activist described the Saudi mercenaries involved in the attacks on the Bahraini people as ‘the source of all evil in the world today,’ saying they were responsible for the global terrorism, fanaticism, and extremism among other instances of criminality.

The Bahraini government is, meanwhile, being constantly backed by the United States, which has its Navy’s Fifth Fleet deployed in the country.

The support comes despite Manama’s record of human rights abuses and the numerous complaints lodged against it with the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

“The Bahraini people have no aim other than having the right to determine their own destiny, and establish their representative system in their own country,” Shahabi said.

New footage recently surfaced from the country, showing the Saudi-backed Bahraini forces’ violently dispersing the demonstrators.

According to local sources, scores of people have been killed so far during the government’s clampdown, with foreign troops contributing to intensification of violence.

According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, over 1,000 political detainees are currently being held in Bahrain’s prisons.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also severely criticized Manama for its brutality against the civilians and violent treatment of the doctors, nurses, lawyers, and journalists, who have voiced support for the revolution. …more w/video

Bahrain forces block roads to former protest hub
By BRIAN MURPHY, Associated Press – 1:08 p.m., Aug. 11, 2011

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Witnesses say security forces in Bahrain’s capital are blocking roads around a former protest hub after clashes with anti-government demonstrators in the Gulf island kingdom.

Witnesses say tanks and police vehicles surrounded Pearl Square, which had been the centerpiece for Shiite-led protests calling for greater rights from Sunni rulers in the strategic nation, which is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. The witnesses spoke on a condition of anonymity because they fear reprisals.

The blockades Thursday came after protesters in a Manama neighborhood called for a march back to Pearl Square, which was stormed by security forces several weeks after pro-reform demonstrations began in February.

Major protests have been crushed, but small-scale clashes have occurred nearly nightly for weeks.

The Associated Press …source

Pressure mounting on Gulf to depeg
By Waheed Abbas – Zawya

Study says falling dollar is putting inflationary stress on GCC economies. Pressure is mounting on the Gulf central banks to depeg their currencies in order to contain rising inflationary stress, according to a study released on Wednesday.

Kuwait-based Global Investment House said “the weakness in the US dollar will potentially aggravate GCC inflation by pushing up cost of importing goods to the region as it is heavily reliant on imports.

“Gulf will not only be exposed to its currency dropping against other currencies it will also be exposed to cost push inflation as well. The downgrade will undoubtedly increase pressure to de-peg the GCC currencies so as to contain inflationary pressures in the region however it a difficult decision to be made and one which involves other important factors that need consideration,” said Faisal Hasan, Head of Research at Global.

Despite the downgrade and its obvious effect on the dollar and its potential risk to Gulf currencies, UAE and Bahrain have already announced that they will maintain the dollar peg.

Hasan predicted that WTI crude oil price will range between $70 to $75 per barrel this year which is in the comfortable zone for the oil-producing Gulf state to maintain fiscal spending.
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Al-Jazeera defends Bahrain documentary
(AFP) – August 11, 2011

DUBAI — The head of the Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera English defended a documentary about this year’s unrest in Bahrain, in comments published Thursday, after an angry response by Bahraini authorities.

Al Anstey said in an interview with Qatar’s Peninsula daily that the documentary, “Shouting in the Dark,” did not include comment from Bahraini authorities because they refused to speak to the channel.

“We were not given free access. We were denied comment by the Bahraini authorities. Our producer was unable to access certain areas. Some sections of society also refused to comment,” Anstey told the newspaper.

He said the channel had waited in vain for a comment from Manama, and in the end, “the documentary was aired when it was complete.”

The documentary deals with the harsh government crackdown on popular protests in mid-March, in which authorities say 24 people were killed. It provoked an angry response by Bahrain, where the media have harshly criticised Al-Jazeera, which is financed by Qatar’s government.

“The Qatari media are carrying out disinformation and incitement to sedition in Bahrain,” the kingdom’s Al-Watan daily wrote on Monday.

Al-Jazeera’s Arabic channel, which had given extensive coverage to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, had been widely criticized by activists for its perceived timid coverage of the unrest in Bahrain, a fellow member with Qatar of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council.

The GCC, which also includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman, had dispatched forces to Bahrain to back the small kingdom’s Sunni-led dynasty against protests organised by the country’s Shiite majority. …source

U.S. Hires Shady Mercenary for Somali Proxy War
By David Axe Email Author – August 11, 2011 – Wired Danger Room

A French-born mercenary with a criminal record and possible ties to several African coups and at least one murder is the latest agent of the U.S. government’s out-sourced war in Somalia, according to The New York Times‘ ace Africa reporter Jeffrey Gettleman and others.

Richard Rouget, alias “Colonel Sanders,” works for Bancroft Global Development, a Washington, D.C.-based “private security company” that maintains an approximately 40-man team of self-described “mentors” in Mogadishu, Somalia’s embattled capital city.

Rouget and the other mentors — a mix of former French, Scandinavian and South African soldiers — help train the 9,000-strong, U.S.-funded Ugandan and Burundian peacekeeping force that doubles as the heavy army of the Somali Transitional Federal Government in its long war with the al-Shabab Islamic terror group.

Al-Shabab, the latest in a long chain of Somali insurgent groups, has allied itself with al-Qaida and last year pulled off a bloody twin bombing in Uganda. Al-Shabab actively recruits disaffected Somali-American teenagers to sneak into Somalia to fight. In 2008, one of these young recruits became the first known American-born suicide bomber when he blew himself up outside a Somali government building.

Uganda and Burundi have paid Bancroft $7 million since 2010 for counter-insurgency training, according to Gettleman and his co-writers. Washington refunds the two African countries for their training expenses. The D.C. company’s assistance has helped “turn a bush army into an urban fighting force,” one adviser told Gettleman — and is partly responsible for the transitional government’s big advances in Mogadishu and across Somalia in recent weeks. The Associated Press credits Rouget’s bomb disposal experts for the drastic reduction in African Union troops lost to roadside explosives.

But the battlefield success comes at the cost of American moral credibility. First, there were reports that the U.S.-backed transitional Somali government employs child soldiers as young as 12. And now America has endorsed, however indirectly, a man who for years has allegedly fought against stability, justice and self-governance in Africa.

The photos accompanying Gettleman’s piece depict the “husky,” 51-year-old Rouget accompanying Ugandan soldiers onto a Mogadishu rooftop to observe a gunfight between peacekeepers and al-Shabab troops. ”Give me some ‘technicals’ and some savages and I’m happy,” Rouget joked, using the slang term for pickup trucks fitted with heavy machine guns. The Associated Press calls Rouget “a cigar-smoking, poetry-quoting, whiskey-drinking former big game hunter” with “a long scar on his thigh from getting shot in Somalia last year.” …more

Forensic experts to see Bahrain ‘torture’ victims
shiapost | August 11, 2011

Cherif Bassiouni, Chairman of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry addressing a news conference in Manama (File Photo)

MANAMA — The international probe panel assigned to investigate recent unrest in Bahrain will have a team of forensic medical experts from outside the country come in to look at all individuals who have complained of physical mistreatment and torture.

Chairman of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, told the Press on Tuesday such plan to ensure better investigation. He said that individuals complaining of tortures will be visited at hospitals and detention facilities, as well as be welcomed at BICI offices.

He said that the panel has helped in the release 137 detainees. Two of the released detainees are former MPs, Mattar Mattar and Jawad Fairuz, members of the Al Wefaq National Islamic Society. “‘The investigative team has made a number of visits to prisons, detention centres and police stations, and hospitals, many of which have been unannounced. They have recorded and collected the testimonies of all the prisoners with whom they’ve met, as well as their families, including documenting reports of cases of mistreatment and torture,” he said.

The commission has interviewed over 300 people at its offices, in addition to an undisclosed number of persons interviewed in Bahrain hospitals, prisons and detention centres, and has received statements from 209 witnesses and victims. …source

Some freed Bahrain detainees to be tried – former MP
Wed Aug 10, 2011 2:00pm GMTBy Isabel Coles prosecution

DUBAI (Reuters) – Bahrain has released more than 100 detainees who had been facing military trials over their roles in anti-government protests earlier this year, but some of them will still be prosecuted in civilian courts, one of those set free said on Wednesday.

A panel of international lawyers which Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim monarchy invited to investigate the protests that mainly involved the Gulf state’s Shi’ite Muslim majority, said on Tuesday that a total of 137 people had been released.

Among the detainees, who walked free on Sunday, were Jawad Fairouz and Matar Ibrahim Matar, former members of parliament in the largest Shi’ite political bloc, al Wefaq.

Fairouz, who expects proceedings against him to be dropped, said some other detainees had been told they could not leave the country pending prosecutions in a civilian court.

“I heard they took some photos of them to show that they are in good health, so that later on when they re-appear in court there shouldn’t be any kind of claim they’re going to be tortured,” said Fairouz, who had been charged with spreading false news and taking part in illegal gatherings.

“When they released us they didn’t take any signature or any commitment from us that we were going to be referred to the civil court,” he said.

Among those likely to face trial in a civilian court is lawyer Mohammed al-Tajer, who was detained in April after defending people arrested during the protests, Fairouz added.

More than 1,000 people were detained after Bahrain crushed demonstrations in March for greater political freedom and an end to sectarian discrimination that Shi’ites say they face in access to land, housing and state employment. …more