KOB is cash cow for Western Security Profiteers – buys British General Graeme Lamb’ political support for £1.5m

Graeme Lamb: British general’s company paid to support Bahrain dictatorship
By Andrew Gilligan – 11 March, 2012 – Telegraph

BRITAIN’S former military commander in Iraq has extravagantly praised a dictatorial Arab regime after it paid his company £1.5million to “support [its] stance before the international community”.

Lt Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, a former director of Special Forces and commander of the Field Army, last month described the Gulf state of Bahrain as a “little gem… the leading point of change, reforms and progress since the 1920s” and attacked the Western media for “unfairly” lumping it in with Tunisia, Libya and Syria.

“There it is just systematic, state-sponsored abuse of its own people,” he told Bahrain’s Gulf Daily News. “And nothing can be further from the truth here.”

At least 50 civilians have been killed, according to Amnesty International, after Bahraini and Saudi forces put down non-violent demonstrations last spring calling for political reform, democracy and an end to Sunni domination over the country’s Shia majority.

In proportion to Bahrain’s tiny population, the death toll is higher than in Tunisia or Egypt. Five members of the security forces have also died.

At least 30 places of worship have been destroyed by the regime and medical staff at the main hospital were jailed for up to 15 years in military courts for treating protesters, though retrials in civilian courts have been ordered following an international outcry.

Gen Lamb has recently complained in the British media that Bahrain has been “hounded”. He called for a more “balanced viewpoint” and said “majority rule was tried in the early years of independence and failed”.

He partly blamed the uprising on “Iranian malevolent influence” and said the West should listen to the country’s “silent majority”.

Tender documents on the Bahraini government website show that last July, the regime’s media council paid £1.5million to a British company described as “3G (UK)” for “a media campaign to support the Kingdom of Bahrain’s stance before the international community”.

The only British lobbying company called 3G said it worked exclusively for UK clients and had received no payment from Bahrain.

Gen Lamb confirmed that the company referred to was in fact the Good Governance Group, also known as G3, for which he is a “special adviser”.

“I now know that is the case [that G3 was paid by Bahrain],” he said.

“A number of people are trying to add two and two together to make four, or six. You’ll say whatever you are going to say, but [my support for Bahrain] is not part of that contract. It is something that I have believed for a long time and it is nothing to do with any business interests I have.”

Last year G3, which employs former service chiefs, officials and diplomats, was drawn into Liam Fox’s resignation as defence secretary after it emerged that it had paid international travel costs for Dr Fox’s close friend, Adam Werrity.

A spokesman for G3 refused to comment.

Gen Lamb is also a director of Aegis Defence, which has one of its four overseas offices in Bahrain.

Since the killings, the tender documents show, the Bahraini government appears to have mounted an intense but subterranean public relations offensive to rehabilitate its image. …more