America’s Unsavory Allies
A look at the some of the bad guys the U.S. still supports.
BY URI FRIEDMAN | OCTOBER 28, 2011

The U.S. caught a lot of flak this year for having partnered with Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi before uprisings rocked the Middle East. But in his speech on the Arab Spring in May, President Barack Obama suggested that the days of America narrowly pursuing its interests in the region without the broader priority of promoting reform and democracy were over. “We have embraced the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator,” Obama declared.

Not entirely. Sometimes, it’s difficult to reconcile that revamped formulation of American foreign policy with diplomatic realities. Take two events this week. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. is operating a drone base in Ethiopia, a country Freedom House recently downgraded to “Not Free” because of “national elections that were thoroughly tainted by intimidation of opposition supporters and candidates.” Only days earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the autocratic Central Asian leaders Islam Karimov and Emomali Rakhmon to discuss how they can help with the war in Afghanistan. “If you have no contact you will have no influence, and other countries will fill that vacuum who do not care about human rights,” Clinton explained ahead of her visit, adding that “it’s a balancing act.”

In fact, even with its post-Arab Spring foreign policy, the U.S. is still engaged in that controversial “balancing act” with a number of repressive leaders. Let’s take a look at eight of the worst offenders. …more

In Praise of a Bahraini Police Officer
11-4-2011 – By Brian Dooley – Director, Human Rights Defenders Program

Remember that photo from Tiananmen Square in 1989 where the guy with the shopping bags stands in front of the column of tanks? It’s an inspirational image – the unarmed man defying four tanks.

There are really two heroes in that picture. The man with the shopping bags and the man in the tank who refuses to shoot him or run him over. Protestors were being killed in and around Tiananmen Square that week and it wouldn’t have been unusual if the tank had opened fire on the unarmed man.

But the guy in the tank held his fire, possibly defying orders from his superiors. The tank commander’s career, and possibly his life, were on the line. And he did the right thing. When police officers or soldiers refuse to commit human rights abuses it’s particularly impressive – these people have everything to lose by disobeying orders in the name of conscience.

Ali Jasim Al Ghanmi

During the Arab Spring, we’ve seen it in Syria. One Syrian soldier explained how he was sent to an area of unrest. “We received the order from our officers to shoot at anything that moved, even unarmed children and the elderly in Harasta. We got close to them, we threw our weapons on the ground and the people protected us. When our officers saw that, they opened fire on us. One of my colleagues was hit in the shoulder but we succeeded in taking him into hiding.” Some Libyan soldiers were reportedly executed for refusing to fire on protestors in February.

In Bahrain, too, an unknown number of the security forces have been detained for joining the calls for democracy and refusing to join the regime’s violent crackdown. Bahrain is ruled by a monarchy, and in February hundreds of thousands of protestors congregated to demand political reform.

Bahrain is an increasingly volatile state, and its violent crackdown continues. Foreign Policy Magazine last week named it as one of the U.S.’s ‘Unsavory Allies,’ right up there with Equatorial Guinea and Uzbekistan as embarrassing friends.

Ali Jasim Al Ghanmi is a 25 year-old policeman, married with a daughter. On February 17 he heard that protestors in Bahrain were being shot by the security forces – he went to the hospital and helped the medics treating the wounded.

Dressed in his uniform, he went to the crowd of protestors and publicly announced he would no longer work for the repressive dictatorship. He was carried on the crowd’s shoulders and became a mini-celebrity among the protestors, impressed that a policeman would take such a stand.

He went into hiding after the security forces attacked and removed the protestors from the central protest area of the Pearl Roundabout in mid-March. His family said they received threats that he had to turn himself in. He was eventually discovered on May 4 and arrested. His family says their house was raided twice after that date anyway, and his brothers and mother assaulted.

Ali claims he was tortured in detention and, since September 24, has been put in solitary confinement as punishment for shouting ‘Down, down, Hamad’ in the prison yard – the chant of protestors against the country’s king. He is waiting to be tried on charges including Inciting hatred against the regime, Inciting military personnel against the regime and Absence from duty.

People like Ali Jasim Al Ghanmi, who put conscience above all else, are heroes of the Arab Spring, and they should not be forgotten.

U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq
By THOM SHANKER and STEVEN LEE MYERS – October 29, 2011 – NYT

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.
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The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after President Obama’s announcement this month that the last American soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of December. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presidential campaign, but American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.

After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to permit as many as 20,000 American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense. …more

The GCC shows its true colors
By Mohammed Ayoob – March 16, 2011 – Foreign Policy

Two-thousand Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) troops, most of them from Saudi Arabia, entered Bahrain on Monday — ostensibly to provide security to government installations “threatened” by protestors. In fact, such a show of force, with more troops on the way, is an attempt by the Saudi-led GCC to stiffen the resolve of the ruling house in Bahrain to put down the democracy protests if need be with force. The violence unleashed by the Bahraini army and police against peaceful protestors on Tuesday was the direct outcome of the Saudi/GCC military intervention.

Various interpretations have been put forward as to the reasons behind the Saudi-led military intervention. These include pre-empting the emergence of a pro-Iranian, Shia-dominated government in Bahrain and tilting the balance in favor of the hard-line faction among the al-Khalifa and against the more moderate faction allegedly led by the crown prince.

What is missing from these explanations is a discussion of the essential nature of the GCC that has propelled it to intervene in the internal affairs of a member country. The Gulf Cooperation Council was established in 1981 in the wake of the Iranian revolution, ostensibly to promote economic cooperation and defend its members against external threats. However, it quickly became clear that given the similar nature of oil producing rentier economies in the Gulf, talk about increasing economic exchange was merely a façade. So was the argument that the Gulf monarchies needed an organization to coordinate their external security policies. The only act of major security cooperation they engaged in was to supply billions of dollars to the Saddam regime in Iraq, first to help it invade Iran in 1980 and then to stave off an Iranian victory that seemed imminent between 1982 and 1984.

Their lack of capacity to protect themselves against external threats was clearly demonstrated in 1990 when Iraq occupied Kuwait. Despite the billions spent by Saudi Arabia in particular to acquire state of the art weaponry from the United States, the kingdom had to invite in a half million American troops to defend itself and eventually force Iraq out of Kuwait. It was clear that the Gulf monarchies, above all Saudi Arabia, the largest and most powerful among them, were incapable of defending themselves against external threats, actual or presumed, without American boots on the ground.

The real reason for the establishment of the GCC in 1981 was not defense against external enemies threatening the security of GCC states but cooperation against domestic challenges to authoritarian regimes. Its main task was and continues to be coordination of internal security measures, including sharing of intelligence, aimed at controlling and suppressing the populations of member states in order to provide security to the autocratic monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The establishment of the GCC was in large measure a reaction on the part of the Gulf monarchies to the Iranian revolution of 1979 in which people’s power toppled the strongest autocracy in the neighborhood. The Arab autocracies of the Gulf did not want to share the Shah’s fate.

That ensuring the security of autocratic regimes was the principal reason for the existence of GCC has become crystal clear with the military intervention by Saudi-led forces in Bahrain to put down the democracy movement and prevent the freedom contagion from spreading to other parts of the Gulf. It is true that the Saudis are apprehensive of the Shia majority coming to power in Bahrain because of the impact it could have on its own restive Shia minority in the oil-rich east of the country. Riyadh is also worried about the impact of a change in regime in Bahrain on the balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the region. (One can, however, argue that Saudi military intervention in Bahrain’s affairs will in fact redound to Iran’s benefit in the long run by further de-legitimizing the al-Khalifa rule in Bahrain).

But these are secondary explanations. The primary concern of the Arab autocracies in the Gulf is the suppression of democratic movements regardless of the sectarian character of the populations engaging in democratic struggles. They are worried that if any of the autocracies fall or even reach a substantial compromise with democratic movements it will have a domino effect in the entire Gulf region consigning all of them to the dustbin of history. The GCC was established as an instrument to protect and prolong autocratic rule on the Arabian littoral of the Gulf. Its military operation in Bahrain has clearly shown this true colors.

Mohammed Ayoob is university distinguished professor of international relations at Michigan State University. …source

Amal, First Political Party in Bahrain and the Region under Kangaroo Military Trials
A Brief Report on The attack and Detention of Amal Political Society Leadership

On the second of May 2011, around two o’clock early morning, a special team of the so-called national security of Bahrain raided the house where AlMahfoodh and his two sons were living with his friend’s house in Jabalat-Habshi . The members of the team were all masked and fully armed with electric-shock weapons and with different types of personal guns and pistols, and they were accompanied by some members of the police. The masked armed people were around 40 persons and they just raided the house of one of the friend of AlMahfoodh . The team members attacked the house by sneaking from the roofs of the house and broke the entrances to only break everything and destroy every piece of furniture in the house.

The members of the national security team attacked AlMahfoodh with his two sons, and his friend, beating them violently with hoses, sticks, boxes and kicks. They also assaulted them verbally with bawdy language and cursed them and their Shiite faith. The house was destroyed totally, and even the fences of the stairs were broken and thrown away. Much property was stolen from the house from perfumes and watches, to money and jewelry. After some time, the four of them were taken in separate cars with their eyes covered to unknown destinations.

After around a month and a half, the family of AlMahfoodh received a phone-call from him and it lasted for 6 minutes. He did not know where he was, and he did not recognize the date or time at that moment. In addition, he could not speak about any of his being subject to torture; neither could he speak about his health. The whole family was very concerned because his voice was very thin and his focus was not acceptable.

After a bit less than two months, the family received a call from the National Security, and they were told to have a visit with their detainee in the Prison of “DryDock Center of Detention”. The visit allowed only 4 of his family members, not allowing any access to personal stuff or requirements such as toothpaste and shampoo. The visit lasted for 10 minutes where the detainee and the family were accompanied by 6 of the national security guards. Prior to the detainee’s entrance,the family was told that the conversation allowed is limited to the family status only,without any reference to the political situation or anything else. The family was asked to appoint a lawyer to speak for AlMahfoodh in the First Hearing of the Military Court – which was only after 4 days of meeting the detainee. See full report on Amal Leaders for Freedom HERE