Arguing Salvage of the Unsalvageable – Bahrain Showboat Reform as a meme of Saudi Fascism

U.S. Urged to Leverage Security Cooperation with Bahrain
By David Elkins – 23 March, 2101 – IPS

WASHINGTON, Mar 23, 2012 (IPS) – As government crackdowns continue, Bahrain is attracting more international visitors than just those coming in preparation for next month’s Forumla One Grand Prix.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa recently hosted Dr. Jimmy Gurulé, a law professor at Notre Dame University and former U.S. assistant attorney general, to “assess the country’s pretrial detention policies and procedures”.

Dr. Gurulé’s delegation, which was sponsored by the American Bar Association and the U.S. State Department, included a visit to Jawa prison, a major detention facility in Bahrain.

The Bahraini government is “in the process of implementing the necessary legislation, the necessary authority of judicial inspections of prisons”, Dr. Gurulé told IPS.

“They are sincere and intent to implement the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report and intend to implement them fully…the fact that they brought me out suggests that they’re acting in good faith and wanting to implement the recommendations,” he said.

“The most effective way of preventing instances of torture is to ensure that detainees are afforded rights of consul immediately after detention…but there is a dearth of human rights lawyers in the country,” Gurulé said.

Despite reports of increasingly deadly government tactics to suppress protestors and unofficial detention facilities where security forces beat and torture civilians, the Bahraini government has remained, rhetorically, committed to implementing reforms – a claim Western governments, particularly the U.S., seem unwilling to contest publicly.

“(T)he government is taking some actions, but it doesn’t seem to be acting very effectively,” Bill Marczak, a director at Bahrain Watch, a human rights group, told IPS.

“Yes the government issued a police code of conduct on Jan. 30, and set up an Interior Ministry ombudsman, but there are concerns about the independence of the ombudsman, and police still continue the same abuses with impunity.”

A “major non-NATO ally” of the U.S., the Saudi-backed al-Khalifa monarchy has housed the U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet and U.S. Naval Central Command since 1971 – the base for most of the U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf as well as the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Of primary concern for U.S. policy makers are strategic and political rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran – however exaggerated or understated these rivalries may be – as well as regional security issues, according to some experts.

“The vast majority of connection and effort and diplomacy has been between through the White House and the Pentagon…that is significant because it means that the security architecture is how it gets it leverage,” Dr. Toby C. Jones, a professor of modern Middle East History at Rutgers University told IPS.

“But it can be argued that that leverage has not been used effectively,” Jones added.

Saudi Arabia, which has largely avoided the popular demands for political change in the region, has a large interest in preventing religious and ethnic tensions in Bahrain from spilling over into its eastern provinces that serve as major hubs for oil production and transportation – tensions that the Saudi monarchy has attributed to Iranian machinations. …more