Iran might let diplomats visit suspected nuclear site
27 August, 2012 – By Yeganeh Torbati, Fredrik Dahl – Reuters

DUBAI/VIENNA: Iran indicated on Monday it might allow diplomats visiting Tehran for this week’s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit to go to the Parchin military base, which U.N. nuclear experts say may have been used for nuclear-related explosives tests.

When asked about the possibility, Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhoundzadeh said: “Such a visit is not customary in such meetings…However at the discretion of authorities, Iran would be ready for such a visit,” the Iranian government-linked news agency Young Journalists Club reported.

The tentative offer was made just three days after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) again failed to gain access to Parchin for its inspectors at a meeting with an Iranian delegation in Vienna.

Iran is hosting the NAM summit, which ends on Friday, at a time when the West is trying to isolate the Islamic Republic over suspicions it is seeking a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran says its atomic programme has only peaceful aims.

Any visit to Parchin by NAM representatives would do little to calm Western concerns or those of the IAEA whose talks with Iran on the agency’s stalled probe into suspected atom bomb research in the Islamic state ended on Friday without agreement.

“Any tour the Iranians conduct for visiting NAM officials would be nothing more than a very, very bad publicity stunt,” a senior Western diplomat in Vienna told Reuters. “It is the IAEA that should have been given access to Parchin.”

The U.N. body suspects that Iran has conducted explosives tests in a steel chamber at Parchin relevant for the development of nuclear weapons, possibly a decade ago.

“RIDICULOUS”

Citing satellite pictures, Western diplomats say they suspect Iran in recent months has been cleansing the site where the experiments are believed to have taken place of any evidence of illicit nuclear activity.

The IAEA is voicing growing concern that this would hamper its investigation if it ever gained access to Parchin.

Last week diplomatic sources said Iran had covered the building believed to house the explosives chamber with a tent-like structure, fuelling suspicions about a clean-up there.

Iran says Parchin, a vast complex southeast of Tehran, is a conventional military facility and has dismissed allegations about it as “ridiculous”.

Monday’s Iranian media report did not make clear whether the NAM diplomats would be able to visit the location in Parchin which the IAEA wants to see or only other areas of the complex.

Akhoundzadeh said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is due to attend the NAM summit later in the week, might be able to visit Iran’s atom sites, but his spokesman denied any such plan.

“There are no such plans for a visit of that kind by the secretary-general while he is in Iran for the Non-Aligned Movement summit,” spokesman Martin Nesirky said in New York.
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Bahrain Rights Activist Denied Entry to Egypt
27 August, 2012 – POMED

Prominent Bahraini opposition activist, Maryam al-Khawaja, was denied entry into Egypt Sunday. Khawaja, daughter of human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja who was sentenced to life in prison for his in role in last year’s uprising, has been an outspoken critic of Bahrain’s government and has accused Arab governments of “continuing repressive security cooperation despite political change in the region,” according to Reuters. An Egyptian airport official said Khawaja’s name was on a list of people who have been denied entry at the airport, and that “The ban is based on a memorandum from the national security authorities.” Khawaja told Reuters, “We’ve been having problems with Bahraini activists getting into Egypt for years. We thought with the revolution it would change, but it hasn’t.”

Additionally, Bahrain’s International Affairs Authority (IAA) denied reports of the resignation of John Yates, Senior Policy Adviser to the Ministry of Interior. While Yates’ initial contract expired in July, the IAA stated that “he remains as an important adviser to the Minister of Interior, overseeing police code of conduct and implementation of reform measures.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Yemen, security forces report that a gunman opened fire on protesters at a sit-in in Taiz Sunday, killing one. Activist Shaher Mohammed Saeed says he heard and saw gunshots from a white pick-up truck driving past protest tents in Taiz at dawn. The protests are calling for reform related to last year’s uprising that outed Yemen’s long-time president.

Elsewhere, Kuwait’s opposition announced plans for a public gathering on Monday evening as it seeks to exert public pressure on the government to reverse its decision to consult the constitutional court on the constitutionality of the controversial electoral law that changes the constituency system and the number of candidates each voter is able to elect. Several political groups and ex-lawmakers said they would take part, hoping to see reforms that include an elected government and the growth of political parties. …source

Separate City to be Built for Saudi Women: Reductio ad absurdum
By: Colin S. Cavell, Ph.D. -August 26, 2012

On August 6, 2012, the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (MODON) issued a press release which highlighted, once again, the utter absurdity of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This writer has written previously on the rampant corruption, perversity, cruelty, and utter criminality of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and this latest insight into the workings of the House of Saud—i.e. the family that runs this gulag—defies rationality and further exposes the insanity of the rulers of this captive nation. Once again, we see how monarchy distorts the mind, corrupts the body politique, and deforms society into bizarre contortions as it attempts to reconcile its contradictions.

MODON’s press release stated that it had initiated work on planning and development of “the first industrial city being readied for women workers in the Kingdom. It will be launched in Al-Ahsa 2nd Industrial city which is located in Hofuf near Al-Ahsa airport,” reads the release. And while the press notice indicated that job opportunities would be created for “both men and women,” it was the focus on the separation of the sexes in the workplace that caught the attention, and outrage, of news agencies and observers from around the world. With an estimated costs of 500 million riyals or about $133 million, the new city is expected to create only about 5000 new jobs.

“The city,” the development authority announced “is distinguished from other industrial cities for its proximity to residential neighborhoods to facilitate the movement of women to and from the workplace. It is also characterized by allocating sections equipped for women workers in environment and working conditions consistent with the privacy of women according to Islamic guidelines and regulations.”

Nearly half of Saudi Arabia’s 28 million population and over 60 percent of the country’s university students are female and yet only about 15 percent of the entire Saudi workforce is comprised of women. Al Arabiya reports that 78 percent of the Kingdom’s university graduates are unemployed.

Reporter Homa Khaleeli of the UK-based Guardian newspaper writes that the “country already has separate schools, segregated universities (and the biggest all-female university in the world) not to mention offices, restaurants and even separate entrances for public buildings. Now industrial hubs are to be built so that women can be hidden away even further than their current dresscode of abaya, headscarf and niqab allows.” The proposed KSA development is “so extreme,” remarks Khaleeli, that “the plans bring to mind the US’s racial divide under the Jim Crow laws, ensuring ‘separate but equal’ institutions for black and white people.” Furthermore, she correctly points out, “like the legalised discrimination in the US, ‘equal’ in this context means no such thing. The female half of the adult population of Saudi Arabia is considered unfit to control their own lives. Women cannot decide whether to leave the house, whether or who to marry, whether to work or study, whether to travel, what to wear, or even whether to have major surgery—without the consent of a male guardian.”

Brett Wilkins, writing in Digital Journal, notes that the city “is being billed as a way for women to achieve a greater degree of financial independence while obeying the strict gender segregation dictated by the kingdom’s Wahhabi Muslim rulers and enforced by the dreaded mutaween morality police.” Describing KSA as being “run by the world’s most repressive religious fundamentalist monarchs,” Wilkins lays bear the facts that in Saudi Arabia, “women are subject to a strictly enforced gender apartheid. They aren’t allowed to vote or drive. They cannot be treated in hospitals or travel without written permission from their husbands or male relatives. One woman who was kidnapped and raped by seven men was sentenced to 90 lashes of the whip for being in a vehicle with an unrelated male. When she went to the media with her story, her sentence was increased to 200 lashes. In 2002, 15 girls needlessly died when the mutaween locked them inside their burning school and stopped firefighters from saving them because they weren’t ‘properly’ dressed in black robes and headscarves.”

As The Week put it, “Saudi Arabia has a problem: The Persian Gulf kingdom has an increasingly educated, increasingly unemployed female population and ultraconservative laws and customs that forbid women from mingling, much less working, with men.” In other words, this is a recipe for civil war. Being prodded by its western ally, the USA, to reconcile its deformed society to contemporary production methods and enter into modernity—at least into the nineteenth century by western standards—King Abdullah, in September of 2011, announced that by 2015 women will be able to vote and run in local elections. But don’t hold your breath, as such statements are issued from time to time by the Saudi royals only to please their American protectors and never meant to actually be implemented.

Contradiction upon contradiction is plaguing the House of Saud, and nearly every solution they propose to address their multiplicity of problems is prone to failure by the contortions of their belief system. On the one hand, the house of Saud bills itself as “the custodian of the two holy mosques” in Mecca and Medina and, hence, as the “true” guardians and interpreters of Islam. On the other hand, they defy Islam and common sense by denigrating the female half of the population as either subordinate or inferior to men, if they consider women to be human at all.

In coddling these neanderthals, the US sets itself up for payback, as can be witnessed by the current Republican Party courting Saudi Arabian financial contributions as well as campaign donations from the other oil-rich monarchs of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council in their attempt to unseat Barack Obama from the US presidency. The latest example of this disparagement of women was spewed forth from the mouth of Missouri Congressman Todd Akin who claimed just last week that women cannot become pregnant from something he calls “legitimate rape”. This comment and others prompted the following response from Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine: “the comments from Akin reinforce the perception that we in the Republican Party are unsympathetic to issues of paramount concern to women.” And, yet, the Republican Party continues to compete to see how extreme they can be in relegating American women back to the status of their Saudi counterparts: subordinated, strictly regulated, covered up, denied equal personhood, and stripped of their legal status as citizens.

Akin was only following the party line, as Republicans in the last year since becoming the majority in Congress in the 2010 midterm elections, have proposed redefining rape and thus limiting the charge to only cases described as ‘forcible rape’ in order to deny women access to health services, voted to defund Planned Parenthood (the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider and advocate), repeatedly tried to restrict women’s access to health care services, and held a Congressional House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Obama Administration’s contraception rule in February of this year with five men and no women. Indeed, as in much of the Republican Party’s assault on women, female input into formulating their proposals is entirely absent. It is no wonder that Olympia Snowe, quoted above, is stepping down from her position as a Republican senator.
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Britain’s barbaric ‘special relationship’ with Arab dictators
27 August, 2012 – By Finian Cunningham – PressTV

While the majority of Bahrainis struggle with poverty, discrimination in the labour market, unemployment, ill health and squalid housing, the Al Khalifa clan lives in luxurious palaces on confiscated lands, enriched through rampant business corruption, under-the-table deals with foreign banks and investors, and, of course, embezzlement of the island’s oil industry.”

The image of British Prime Minister David Cameron greeting Bahrain’s King Hamad on the steps of 10 Downing Street last week conveys a subtle message of Britain’s presumption of global superiority. It also betrays the real role of Britain’s rulers in the suppression of democracy and human rights around the world.

The taller Cameron, in dapper pinstripe suit, is seen extending a benevolent hand to the dumpy little Arab tin-pot king who is donning a medieval-looking headdress and robe.

It would appear, from the photo-op, that patronage is being afforded by a thoroughly democratic leader to an antiquated ally from the Arabian desert, the latter in need of jolly-good-old Anglo-Saxon tutelage in the art of modern statecraft.

How civilized. The British premier invites the Bahraini monarch into the iconic dwelling near the supposed “mother of all parliaments” for a serving of English tea and cakes over “low-key talks”.

On the agenda, according to one of Britain’s “liberal” newspapers, the Guardian, the prime minister raised, apparently, the troubling matter of human rights as well as – and this is the unmentioned significant bit – trade opportunities for British businesses in the Persian Gulf kingdom.

It is a scintillating scenario of British conceit and pretence of decency. We are thus inculcated with the impression that Britain is the epitome of refined democracy. Cameron, you see, is enquiring of business opportunities while also doughtily expressing to his Al Khalifa Arab guest concerns over human rights. The British rulers, you see, are not just wrangling for a quick pound. Oh no, they have ethics and principles to defend and uphold as well.

Commenting on the meeting, Bahrain’s foreign minister Shaikh Khalid Al Khalifa (a relation of the king – as is the whole government of that kingdom) said another subject on the agenda was “regional stability”. (In that disclosure, Shaikh Khalid let the cat out of the bag, but more on that later.)

Let’s cut through the woolly British media reportage that serves to reinforce, subliminally, a self-styled sense of civilised greatness. The truth is that the British government does not give two figs about human rights in the oil shaikhdom of Bahrain. It never had any concern and it still doesn’t. By reporting that Cameron raised the issue of human rights with King Hamad, the British media are indulging in conceit that there is genuine concern about the matter among its political establishment. But history shows that to this day, human rights in Bahrain (and elsewhere) are frankly anathema to Britain’s geopolitical interests.

The absolute Al Khalifa monarchy was installed in Bahrain by the British Empire more than 200 years ago. The so-called royal rulers of Bahrain were then nothing more than a tribe of Bedouins elevated by British military force to positions of lordly privilege in Bahrain. The Al Khalifas were, to put it plainly, barbaric impostors who were fortified on their new island abode to safeguard British trading interests in the Persian Gulf en route to imperial India. It was a typical British quid pro quo. The Al Khalifa cut-throats got a throne to sit on, underpinned with “Protectorate” status, while the ever-so polite British got to rule the waves.

The Sunni Al Khalifa band of brigands was imposed against the will or consent of the indigenous Shia population of Bahrain. To this day, that is the crux of the grievance among the Bahraini majority. The Al Khalifas enriched themselves by exploiting the people from their British-protected palaces. Older people in Bahrain will tell you about the times when the Al Khalifas would send their thugs into the villages to collect taxes and tributes from the farmers and fishermen on pain of death. The young shaikhs would also drive into hamlets and take any young female that they desired for their gratification.

Such crude suzerainty may not be quite as brazen today. Today, Bahrainis are exploited and raped in more insidious ways through rigged elections and ring-fencing of the economy to satisfy the Al Khalifa rulers. While the majority of Bahrainis struggle with poverty, discrimination in the labour market, unemployment, ill health and squalid housing, the Al Khalifa clan lives in luxurious palaces on confiscated lands, enriched through rampant business corruption, under-the-table deals with foreign banks and investors, and, of course, embezzlement of the island’s oil industry.

Bahrainis have consistently protested this British imposition of despotic monarchy. They want an elected government to run the island’s oil wealth democratically, for the wellbeing of the populace, not for the crony aggrandisement of the Al Khalifa dynasty and its entourage of hangers-on. This is a basic democratic demand, a fundamental human right. Yet how could such a distortion of natural justice be sustained? Enter the British government, and in recent decades, the American too.

Down through the decades when the indigenous Bahrainis – Shia as well as Sunni – would regularly rise up against their Al Khalifa overlords, it was the British government and its military might that safeguarded the position of monarchy. In the 1950s and 60s, British troops stationed on the island opened fire on striking oil workers.

When Bahrain was finally granted nominal independence in 1971, the British may have officially left by the front door, but they came back in through the back window, as one old Bahraini memorably described it. The state security apparatus was – and continues to be – overseen by British military intelligence. It is one of the most brutal security apparatuses in the world. A notorious founding figure was Colonel Ian Henderson who was the head of the kingdom’s national security agency from 1968 to 1998. Henderson oversaw the administration of unrelenting vicious repression, during which thousands of Bahrainis deemed to be a security threat were detained without trial and tortured often at the hands of Henderson himself. …more