Torture Island

Welcome to Bahrain, the Empire’s Torture Island
written by Tom Burghardt – Pacific Free Press

Torture Island: Where Offshore Meets the National Surveillance State
by Tom Burghardt l Antifascist Calling…
From shady Wall Street banks and investment firms that rob people blind, to Western governments that prattle on about “democracy” and “human rights” while their favorite butchers torture and kill their own citizens, it’s a sick, sad world growing sicker and sadder by the hour.

It certainly can’t hurt when the U.S. Fifth Fleet has the back of those doing the killing, or when the killers are pampered ne’er-do-wells, a fabulously wealthy clique of hereditary princes for whom the word “medieval” was invented, who just so happen to lord over one of the planet’s financial bolt holes.

Last month, Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed that when “Bahraini jailers armed with stiff rubber hoses” beat 39-year-old school administrator and human rights activist Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar in a windowless dungeon in Manama, his jailers were armed “with another kind of weapon: transcripts of his text messages and details from personal mobile phone conversations.”

“It was amazing,” Al Khanjar told investigative journalists Vernon Silver and Ben Elgin. “How did they know about these?”

The answer is simple: from computers loaded with spy kit sold to Bahraini royals “by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks and NSN’s divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, according to two people whose positions at the companies gave them direct knowledge of the installations.”

Back in February, political floodgates opened across the Middle East as American-allied dictators were toppled by enraged citizens in Tunisia and Egypt, and threatened to do the same in Bahrain when pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets across the island nation.

The Al Khalifa clan responded as royals are wont to do: with brute force and considerable help from U.S. and Saudi “friends.” Scores were killed and many hundreds of others, including medical personnel, were seized and “disappeared” into regime black holes.

As The Guardian reported, while “Bahrain’s security forces are the backbone of the Al Khalifa regime,” in recent years “large numbers of their personnel are recruited from other countries, including Jordan, Pakistan and Yemen” and “are reviled as mercenaries by Bahrainis.”

But what of the gaggle of Western firms who hit the “sweet spot” selling despotic potentates everything from high-tech spy gear to machine guns and lethal gases: will they be “reviled as mercenaries” by media in the “democratic” West?

‘Institutionalized Corruption’

It’s hardly surprising that one of Siemens offloaded intelligence units, Trovicor, did a brisk business with Bahrain’s secret state. After all, considering the firm’s dubious track record and a corporate culture where “bribery was just a line item” according to The New York Times, why wouldn’t they?

More than two years ago when a spate of corruption prosecutions were settled, Siemens wound up paying some $1.6 billion to the U.S. government under provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, “the largest fine for bribery in modern corporate history.”

Former mid-level executive, Reinhard Siekaczek, told reporters Siri Schubert and T. Christian Miller that “he was one of several people who arranged a torrent of payments that eventually streamed to well-placed officials around the globe, from Vietnam to Venezuela and from Italy to Israel.”

“What is striking about Mr. Siekaczek’s and prosecutors’ accounts of those dealings,” the Times averred, “which flowed through a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants, is how entrenched corruption had become at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.”

The former executive said that between “2002 to 2006 he oversaw an annual bribery budget of about $40 million to $50 million at Siemens. Company managers and sales staff used the slush fund to cozy up to corrupt government officials worldwide.”

“Bribery was Siemens’s business model,” Uwe Dolata, the spokesman for the association of federal criminal investigators in Germany told the Times. “Siemens had institutionalized corruption.”

Such lucrative inducements to officials were meant to maintain the firm’s “competitive edge” overseas in the branch Siekaczek oversaw, “which sold telecommunications equipment.”

High-tech accouterments which ended up in the hands of Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar’s torturers.

Ahmed Aldoseri, the director of information and communications technologies at Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority told Bloomberg Markets, “If they have a transcript of an SMS message, it’s because the security organ was monitoring the user at their monitoring center.” …more