On Monday, Omar Chatriwala reported in Foreign Policy on revelations from cables newly released by Wikileaks on pressure applied to Al Jazeera by the Bush administration. On Tuesday, the Qatar government suddenly replaced Wadah Khanfar, the director-general of the al-Jazeera satellite TV network, with Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, an executive at Qatargas and a member of the country’s ruling dynasty.
Al Jazeera has been making waves in the Middle East ever since it aired its first broadcast on Nov. 1, 1996. In its news dispatches and talk shows, the pan-Arab satellite channel, which is funded by the state of Qatar, has been a strident critic of U.S. foreign policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories, even while it has been a thorn in the side of many an Arab autocrat. But after the last dump of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, on Aug. 30, articles have begun to circulate — especially in Iranian and Syrian media outlets — about Al Jazeera’s close relationship with a surprising interlocutor: the U.S. government.
In particular, a newly released cable issued by the U.S. Embassy in Doha and signed by then ambassador Chase Untermeyer, details a meeting between an embassy public affairs official and Wadah Khanfar, Al Jazeera’s director general, in which the latter is said to agree to tone down and remove what the United States terms “disturbing Al Jazeera website content.”
There have been longstanding accusations that Al Jazeera serves as an arm of its host nation’s foreign policy, and earlier leaked documents referred to the news organization as “one of Qatar’s most valuable political and diplomatic tools,” which could be used as “a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries.” Another document urges Sen. John Kerry to engage the Qatari government on Al Jazeera during a visit to the Gulf country, saying, “there are ample precedents for a bilateral dialogue on Al Jazeera as part of improving bilateral relations.”
Despite those assertions by U.S. diplomatic sources, both the network and the Qatari government fiercely insist that it is editorially independent and free from interference.
Skeptics take the latest leak as proof, though, that Al Jazeera is susceptible to external pressures, not least in part due to the document’s summary:
PAO [Public affairs officer] met 10/19 with Al Jazeera Managing Director Wadah Khanfar to discuss the latest DIA [U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency] report on Al Jazeera and disturbing Al Jazeera website content…. Khanfar said the most recent website piece of concern to the USG [U.S. government] has been toned down and that he would have it removed over the subsequent two or three days. End summary.
In what some are seizing upon as evidence of an American-Qatari conspiracy, the cable, dated October 2005, continues with a quote from Khanfar saying, “We need to fix the method of how we receive these reports,” mentioning that he had found one of them “on the fax machine.”
Later, there is a reference in the memo to a sort of understanding that’s been reached between Al Jazeera and the U.S. government:
On a semantic level, [Khanfar] objected to the use of the word “agreement” as used in the August report on the first page, under the heading “Violence in Iraq”, where a sentence reads: “In violation of the station’s agreement several months ago with US officials etc”. “The agreement was that it was a non-paper,” said Khanfar. [A non-paper is diplomatic jargon for a proposal that is unofficial and has not been committed to.] “As a news organization, we cannot sign agreements of this nature, and to have it here like this in writing is of concern to us.”
Leaving it at that, the cable appears to be a smoking gun showing Al Jazeera at the U.S. government’s beck and call. Iran-owned Press TV uses this to conclude that “the US government has previously had a say in what content to appear on the al-Jazeera website.” The website ArabCrunch similarly denounced Al Jazeera for responding to U.S. pressure, and says the cable “might have revealed the reason behind the AJ one sided coverage of Iraq in the recent years.” Read in their full context, though, this and other leaked cables tell a very different story.
An Ethiopian reporter has fled the country after being named in a WikiLeaks cable, in what a media rights group said was the first instance of one of the leaks causing direct repercussions for a journalist.
Wikileaks recently published all its cables unredacted, naming sources that were removed by partner media organisations, including the Guardian.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said reporter Argaw Ashine fled at the weekend after being interrogated over the identity of a government source mentioned in a leaked 2009 US cable. Argaw was the local correspondent for Kenya’s Nation Media Group.
The cable said Argaw was told by an unnamed source that the government would target six journalists from a newspaper seen as critical of the government. That paper closed later that year after citing harassment and intimidation.
Joel Simon, the New York-based CPJ’s executive director, said: “The threat we sought to avert through redactions of initial WikiLeaks cables has now become real. A citation in one of these cables can easily provide repressive governments with the perfect opportunity to persecute or punish journalists and activists.
“WikiLeaks must take responsibility for its actions and do whatever it can to reduce the risk to journalists named in its cables. It must put in place systems to ensure that such disclosures do not reoccur.”
It’s a clever maneuver and it’s used again and again.
They are attacking me not because of what I did. They are attacking me because of who I am.
Not only does this put the self-declared victim in an invulnerable position — no one can change or should need defend their simple identity — but this also deflects criticism by insinuating that it springs from bigotry or blind hatred.
A few months after the Israeli Defense Forces had slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians — men, women and children — in Gaza in 2009, Israel’s ambassador to Turkey, Gaby Levy, spoke to the US ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey, and expressed his concern about deteriorating Israeli-Turkish relations.
Levy’s explanation, with which Jeffrey concurred, was that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hates Israel. “He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously,” Levy claimed.
Jeffrey commented: “Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm Levy’s thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel.”
In other words, Erdoğan’s attitude towards Israel had nothing to do with his reaction to Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians. It was the product of simple hatred — the implication thus being that there would be nothing that poor little Israel could do in order to make amends.
Erdoğan has been in office since 2003. In early 2006, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described relations with Turkey as “perfect.” In 2007, Israel’s President Shimon Peres was honored by being invited to address the Turkish parliament — it was the first time an Israeli president had addressed the parliament of a Muslim-majority country.
In 2008, right up until Israel launched the war on Gaza, Turkey was helping mediate indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria.
Turkey mediated five rounds of talks between Israeli and Syrian officials. Toward the end of Olmert’s term the two sides were on the verge of resuming direct negotiations.
At the last meeting between Olmert and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish leader called Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and relayed messages to and from Olmert. But after Operation Cast Lead began in December 2008 and the freeze in negotiations with Syria, Erdoğan said Olmert had stabbed him in the back.
In 2010, while Israel was refusing to allow Turkey to serve as a mediator with Syria, former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Omert said during a conference at Tel Aviv University:
We can reach an understanding with the Syrians which would change the map in the Middle East. A decision on this issue must be made. It’s too easy being angry at Erdogan, but it would be wise to reconcile with him. He is a fair mediator. We need negotiations with Turkish mediation.
Now we learn from Wikileaks that during this period in which Turkey, under Erdogan’s leadership, had made unprecedented efforts to serve as a peace-broker between Israel and its neighbors, key Israeli and American diplomats were in collusion with each other, reinforcing their shared and counter-productive view of Turkey’s prime minister.
Levy and Jeffrey were not looking at a real obstacle to diplomacy. They were revealing their own incompetence as diplomats by playing the game: it’s not what we do; it’s who we are.
E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/26/2019
TAGS: PREL PGOV TU IS
SUBJECT: ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TRACES HIS PROBLEMS TO ERDOGAN
REF: ANKARA 1532
Classified By: AMB James F. Jeffrey, for reasons 1.4(b,d)
¶1. (C) During an October 26 call on the Ambassador, Israeli Ambassador Gabby Levy registered concern over the recent deterioration in his country’s bilateral relations with Turkey and the conviction that the relationship’s decline is attributable exclusively to Prime Minister Erdogan. Levy said Foreign Minister Davutoglu had relayed a message to him through the visiting Czech foreign minister that “things will get better.” He had also fielded messages from senior civil servants, xxxxx urging him to weather quietly Erdogan’s harsh public criticisms of Israel. The latter claimed Erdogan’s repeated angry references to the humanitarian situation in Gaza are for “domestic political consumption” only.
¶2. (C) Levy dismissed political calculation as a motivator for Erdogan’s hostility, arguing the prime minister’s party had not gained a single point in the polls from his bashing of Israel. Instead, Levy attributed Erdogan’s harshness to deep-seated emotion: “He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously” and his hatred is spreading. Levy cited a perceived anti-Israeli shift in Turkish foreign policy, including the GoT’s recent elevation of its relations with Syria and its quest for observer status in the Arab League.
¶3. (C) Comment: Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm Levy’s thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel. xxxxx discusses contributing reasons for Erdogan’s tilt on Iran/Middle East isues, but antipathy towards Israel is a factor.
Yesterday — more than a full year after it first released selected portions of purported chat logs between Bradley Manning and government informant Adrian Lamo (representing roughly 25% of the logs) — Wired finally published the full logs (with a few redactions). From the start, Wired had the full chat logs and was under no constraints from its source (Lamo) about what it could publish; it was free to publish all of it but chose on its own to withhold most of what it received.
Last June — roughly a week after Wired‘s publication of the handpicked portions — I reviewed the long and complex history between Lamo and Wired Editor Kevin Poulsen, documented the multiple, serious inconsistencies in Lamo’s public claims (including ones in a lengthyinterview with me), and argued that Wired should “either publish all of the chat logs, or be far more diligent about withholding only those parts which truly pertain only to Manning’s private and personal matters and/or which would reveal national security secrets.” Six months later, in December, I documented that numerous media reports about Manning and WikiLeaks were based on Lamo’s claims about what Manning told him in these chats — claims that could not be verified or disputed because Wired continued to conceal the relevant parts of the chat logs — and again called for “as much pressure as possible be applied to Wired to release those chat logs or, at the very least, to release the portions about which Lamo is making public claims or, in the alternative, confirm that they do not exist.”
Now that Wired has released the full chats, I just want to highlight a few passages that they concealed, and dispassionately lay out several key facts, so that everyone can decide for themselves if Wired told the truth about their conduct and assess the journalistic propriety of it. Before I first wrote about Manning’s arrest and the conduct of Wired‘s reporting of it, I interviewed Poulsen by email and published the full exchange. Just look at what he told me about the material Wired was withholding:
GG: Last question: you published what were clearly excerpts of the chats between Lamo and Manning – did he provide you with the whole unedited version and if, so, do you intend to publish it? Or is what you published everything he gave you?
KP: He did, but I don’t think we’ll be publishing more any time soon. The remainder is either Manning discussing personal matters that aren’t clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information that I’m not throwing up without vetting first.
So Poulsen claimed that the concealed portions were either (1) personal matters or (2) sensitive government information that needed vetting (Wired made a similar claim when releasing the log excerpts, claiming that what was withheld was either “portions of the chats that discuss deeply personal information about Manning or that reveal apparently sensitive military information”). As it turns out, while some of what Wired withheld was certainly personal information about Manning of no newsworthy relevance (and nobody, including me, ever objected to that material being withheld), substantial portions of what they withheld do not even arguably fall within those categories, but instead provide vital context and information about what actually happened here. To say that Poulsen’s claims about what Wired withheld were factually false is to put it generously.
Ask any Egyptian how much of an influence the Internet was in the nation’s uprising, the first thing they’ll probably do is roll their eyes at you. I’ve certainly mentioned it countless times – International media found the perfectly convenient package of the Facebook revolution fueled by a Google executive. A better lede couldn’t have been written if they had made it up themselves.
But the thing is, there is as much fiction in that phrase as there is fact. Yes the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said, created by the Google executive Wael Ghonim, was instrumental in mobilizing a certain demographic in Egypt. But long after Hosny Mubarak was toppled, figures have emerged to prove that calling the uprising in Egypt in any way, shape or form, a Facebook Revolution, is almost as ridiculous as the short-lived name, the Lotus Revolution, a name which had absolutely nothing to do with the movement.
In case you’re curious, the Lotus Revolution was a name that followed the just as ill-thought out name for the Tunisian uprising, the Jasmine Revolution. Both names were no doubt dreamed up by journalists who had visited the countries once upon a time, and were enamoured with the exotic, oriental, incense-filled alleyways of Cairo and Tunis. The reality of these uprisings couldn’t be further from the Orientalist postcard snapshot that is continually forced down our throats.
The reality of the uprising in Tunisia is that it was sparked by a young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, who lit himself on fire, because that was the only form of protest he had left to use. The reality of the uprising in Egypt is that it was sparked by a young man, Khaled Said, who was brutally beaten to death in an alleyway, while people watched, helpless as he begged for his life.
So with that in mind, it’s no surprise that the Wikileaks parody ad that seemed to be taking a bit of credit for the Egyptian revolution has sparked outrage among Egyptian activists.
As the fallout of Cablegate continues to consume column inches, gigabytes, and cabinet meetings across the world, the realisation that this is about more than one man, one organization, and one massive leak seems to be slowly sinking in. While some argue that stories and comment focusing on the process of the leak and the fallout for the organisation only distract from the stories contained within the cables themselves, it is clear that this element is as vital (in the short term at least) as the contents of the cables. We find ourselves in the middle of an unprecedented public debate on Internet freedom and the role of the state online. In this debate much has been written about the motives and background of Wikileaks (some bad, some excellent) while other parties involved have avoided the same scrutiny. Of particular interest in the current discussion is the role of the State Department which under Hillary Clinton’s leadership has played an important and contradictory role in the debate on Internet freedom.
Back in more innocent times, in January of this year, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the Newseum (a 250,000-square foot monument to media complacency) in which she introduced the concept of “21st Century Statecraft” – a term referring to the recent State Department push for the use of social and new media for diplomatic and geopolitical ends. In this speech she affirmed the US’s commitment to the “principles of internet freedom”, a new Human Right for the 21st Century. Clinton waxed lyrical about the ethical, financial, political and practical reasons why freedom of access and use of the internet should be considered an absolute right – noting that America “stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas”. The State Department, it seemed, was committed to a comprehensive and open approach to online freedom and engagement, a new stance for a government which had hitherto tended towards a more iterative approach to interaction with the modern world.
Stephen J. Kim, an arms expert who immigrated from South Korea as a child, spent a decade briefing top government officials on the dangers posed by North Korea. Then last August he was charged with violating the Espionage Act — not by aiding some foreign adversary, but by revealing classified information to a Fox News reporter.
Mr. Kim’s case is next in line in the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on leaks, after the crumbling last week of the case against a former National Security Agency official, Thomas A. Drake. Accused of giving secrets to The Baltimore Sun, Mr. Drake pleaded guilty to a minor charge and will serve no prison time and pay no fine.
The Justice Department shows no sign of rethinking its campaign to punish unauthorized disclosures to the news media, with five criminal cases so far under President Obama, compared with three under all previous presidents combined. This week, a grand jury in Virginia heard testimony in a continuing investigation of WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group, a rare effort to prosecute those who publish secrets, rather than those who leak them.
The string of cases reflects a broad belief across two administrations and in both parties in Congress that leaks have gotten out of hand, endangering intelligence agents and exposing American spying methods.
But Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the fizzling of the Drake prosecution “ought to be a signal to the government to rethink its approach to these cases.” He said the government had many options for punishing leaks: stripping an official’s security clearance, firing him or pursuing a misdemeanor charge. Instead, it “has been leaping to the most extreme response, felony charges,” he said.
In a video, titled “House Arrest”, and released by WikiLeaks, they claim that three cameras have been erected to watch who enters and leaves his temporary home.
The video, published today on Telegraph.co.uk, marks his six months on bail. It shows one of the cameras outside the entrance to Ellingham Hall, Norfolk.
Mr Assange has lived there for six months while he fights extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual crimes, which he denies.
All of the cameras have been installed since Mr Assange moved there in mid-December.
On the video, Sarah Harrison, one of the WikiLeaks’ team, says: “This is one of the three cameras that is outside each entrance of the property.
“We suddenly noticed them appearing since we have been here. We believe they are monitoring everything that goes in and out of the property.”
A supporter of the Army private suspected of supplying classified documents to the WikiLeaks website on Wednesday refused to testify to a federal grand jury, accusing the U.S. justice department of using Nixon-like fear tactics to intimidate advocates of transparency in government.
David House, a founding member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, said he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination after being subpoenaed to the federal courthouse in Alexandria. Prosecutors have convened a grand jury there to investigate the WikiLeaks disclosures.
House told reporters after his appearance that nearly all the questions posed by prosecutors centered on Bradley Manning, who is being held at Fort Leavenworth while military authorities conduct their own investigation into whether he illegally leaked sensitive documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. House said he was not asked any questions about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Justice Department, House said, “is very frantically trying to link Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, and they’re casting a very wide net.”
Just in time to spoil the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Obama Justice Department is trying to do what Richard Nixon couldn’t: indict a media organization.
A grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is under way in Alexandria, Virginia. The Justice Department has already subpoenaed the electronic records of many former WikiLeaks volunteers and at least three people have now been subpoenaed to testify in a case that could potentially criminalize forms of investigative journalism.
Many comparisons have been made between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, and most have focused on the landmark decision in New York Times v. United States that essentially banned prior restraints—or censorship orders—on the press. But long forgotten in Nixon’s war on the press is an equally dangerous legal maneuver: Nixon convened a grand jury to indict The New York Times and its reporter, Neil Sheehan, for conspiracy to commit espionage—the same charge Obama’s Justice Department is investigating Assange under today.
To hear it from the New York Times (and Hillary Clinton), the US government’s latest efforts to support overseas dissidents are nothing more nor less than the noble expression of the American love of freedom. Perhaps that’s why this article makes no reference to Wikileaks (or Haystack) but does in part rely on information derived from classified diplomatic cables “obtained” by the paper. That presumably means classified information revealed by the administration to journalists who can be relied on to incorporate such information into a government-approved narrative.
The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”
This freedom-narrative gets a bit farcical, however, when we are told that an “independent” cellphone network is being constructed in Afghanistan using towers built inside US military bases. It’s only by paragraph 37 that we are reminded, “The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering.” Indeed.
Which begs a question — a question that the New York Times reporters do not venture to ask: Do the administration’s efforts to provide global revolutionaries with better tools have more to do with enhancing the US government’s ability to monitor these rapidly evolving networks, than with advancing democracy?
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.
Criminal defendants of all stripes in national security cases, including Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair and al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, have long sought to work government secrets into their defense.
The hope is the prosecutors will skip a trial rather than expose sensitive information in court.
This strategy worked perfectly in the just concluded leak case against a former National Security Agency official, Thomas Drake. But civil libertarians doubt the setback for prosecutors will halt the Obama administration’s vigorous legal attack on leakers, and the government shows no signs of backing off other cases.
After all, the strategy of threatening to expose secrets at trial to ward off charges has a decidedly mixed history for national security defendants. The practice is known as graymailing the government.
Drake pleaded guilty Friday in federal court in Baltimore to a single misdemeanor charge in a deal with prosecutors that avoided a trial in the case accusing Drake of passing classified material to a Baltimore Sun reporter.
Drake had faced up to 35 years in prison had he gone to trial and been convicted. The lesser charge carries a penalty of up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
Drake’s defense was that he was a whistleblower exposing waste in an NSA program called TrailBlazer. That ill-fated effort was to have overhauled the agency’s vast computer systems to capture and screen information flooding into the agency from the Internet and cell phones. Begun in 2002, the project eventually cost $1.2 billion, but never worked as intended and was scrapped in 2006.
For more on the case, read Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article, “The Secret Sharer.”
It is of little surprise that in the weeks following the killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader, in a Pakistani military garrison town, the Pakistani relationship with the United States has been described using various analogies of romantic dysfunction: as an abusive relationship, as one partner cheating on another, and as a failing marriage where the partners stay together for the sake of the children.
The children, in this case, being various distinct (but linked) violent, armed groups that are waging war on both parties, separately and at times in concert.
But if the relationship between these states really is a romantic entanglement gone wrong, then the latest batch of US embassy cables to be leaked by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks is like having access to the email and text message exchanges between the two, revealing the many faces of the partnership.
In short, the cables show that while the Pakistani government wears a certain face in public, rejecting US missile strikes on its territory and military cooperation on Pakistani soil with aggressive rhetoric about sovereignty, in private, both military and civilian officials approve (or “acquiesce”, to use a term from one of the cables) to both of these.
The world faces a watershed moment in human rights with tyrants and despots coming under increasing pressure from the internet, social networking sites and the activities of WikiLeaks, Amnesty International says in its annual roundup.
The rights group singles out WikiLeaks and the newspapers that pored over its previously confidential government files, among them the Guardian, as a catalyst in a series of uprisings against repressive regimes, notably the overthrow of Tunisia’s long-serving president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
“The year 2010 may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights,” Amnesty’s secretary general, Salil Shetty, says in an introduction to the document. “It is also the year when repressive governments faced the real possibility that their days were numbered.”
But, Shetty adds, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere, remains unpredictable: “There is a serious fightback from the forces of repression. The international community must seize the opportunity for change and ensure that 2011 is not a false dawn for human rights.”
The rival Palestinian movements Fatah and Hamas agreed Wednesday to reconcile and form an interim government ahead of elections, after a four-year feud, in what both sides hailed as a chance to start a fresh page in their national history.
Israel said the accord, which was brokered in secrecy by Egypt, would not secure peace in the Middle East and urged Abbas to carry on shunning the Islamist movement, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007 after ousting Fatah in a civil war.
Forging Palestinian unity is regarded as crucial to reviving any prospect for an independent Palestinian state, but Western powers have always refused to deal with Hamas because of its refusal to recognize Israel and renounce violence.
“We have agreed to form a government composed of independent figures that would start preparing for presidential and parliamentary elections,” said Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of Fatah’s negotiating team in Cairo. “Elections would be held in about eight months from now,” he said, adding the Arab League would oversee the implementation of the agreement. (Reuters)
Zvi Bar’el writes: For the past four years, it has been clear to Fatah and Hamas that they had no alternative but to reach a reconciliation. The controversy was over the price. Even now, when the draft agreement is signed, the portfolio allocation, the type of election, the date of the election and the designated ministers and prime minister have yet to be agreed on.
The successful implementation of the reconciliation agreement is largely dependent on both sides recognizing that they will have to make decisions and cooperate without outside help. There is no certainty that Assad, who navigated Hamas’ diplomatic moves, is in a position to continue setting the Middle Eastern agenda, as he had hoped after Mubarak’s fall. It is clear to Fatah, and especially Mahmoud Abbas, that General Tantawi’s Egypt is not Mubarak’s Egypt and the Egyptian public pressure to open the Gaza border and the regime’s readiness to respond would deprive him of the main leverage over Hamas.
The reconciliation has direct bearing on Abbas’ intention to ask the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state. Such a state would include the Gaza Strip, as had been agreed in the Oslo agreement and as Abbas reiterates constantly. Abbas will not be able to pass himself off as one who represents the Palestinian people without reconciling with Hamas, especially when Gaza has played such a major role in evoking international sympathy, perhaps even more than Abbas’ infrastructure in the West Bank.
Operation Cast Lead, the Turkish flotilla and the prolonged blockade of Gaza, as well as Israel’s settlement policy, helped Abbas persuade world leaders to remove their support from Israel’s position and adopt the Palestinian-state idea.
The reconciliation was enabled, among other things, by the fact that Hamas will not be obliged to recognize Israel, because if the United Nations recognizes the Palestinian state, Hamas’ specific recognition would be meaningless. Hamas will be part of a Palestinian government making sovereign decisions. Hamas has already said in the past it was willing to recognize all the agreements and decisions accepted by the Arab League, including the Arab Initiative.
Even the United States will not be able to object to a united Palestinian government, in which Hamas is a partner. After all, it had agreed to accept and even support, economically and militarily, a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah was partner. Nor will the United States and Europe be able to object to general elections in the territories, or deny their results, when the West is demanding Arab leaders implement democratic reforms.
Israel could find itself isolated yet again if it objects to the reconciliation or the election. (Haaretz)
David W. Lesch writes: Early this year, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad portrayed his country as being different, almost immune from the uprisings that had beset Tunisia and Egypt. The mouthpieces of the Syrian regime consistently echoed this arrogance, even to the point of siding with the protestors in their Arab brethren countries. They pointed out that the septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders of these states were out of touch with their populations. They were also corrupt lackeys of the United States. The implication, of course, was that Asad, a relatively young 45, was in touch with the Arab youth. He also confronted the United States and Israel in the region and supported the resistance forces of Hamas and Hizbullah, thus brandishing credentials that played well in the Arab street.
This may have bought him some time, but it was a misreading of the situation—or denial of it. Having met with Asad a number of times over the past 7 years, I can almost guarantee that he was absolutely shocked when the uprisings in the Arab world started to seep into his own country. I believe he truly thought he was safe and secure…and popular beyond condemnation. But not in today’s new Middle East, where the stream of information cannot be controlled as it has been in the past. The perfect storm of higher commodity prices, Wikileaks, and the youth bulge—and their weapon of mass destruction, the social media—have bared for all to see widespread socio-economic problems, corruption, and restricted political space, and authoritarian regimes can no longer shape or contain this information. In this Syria was no different.
One might recognize the stages of shock in Asad, similar to the five stages of grief. Following his denial, Asad displayed incredulity, even anger that fueled a blatant triumphalism, apparent in his initial speech of March 30 that incorrectly placed the bulk of the blame for the uprisings in Syria on conspirators and foreign enemies, thus ignoring the very real domestic problems that lay at the root of public frustration and despair.
Asad then reached the bargaining stage, where one attempts to do anything possible to postpone one’s fate. There is recognition of problems and attempts to address them, apparent in Asad’s speech to his new cabinet on April 16, when he announced the lifting of the almost 50-year state of emergency law, among other proposed reforms. But the protests and associated violence continued. The most dangerous phase could be if Asad withdraws into seclusion, trying to come to grips with the reality of the situation. This is dangerous because Bashar might cede his leadership role to others, and filling the void could be hardliners who advocate an even harsher crackdown. This may be what is happening now. One hopes that Asad passes through this stage very quickly and reasserts himself toward the final one, that of acceptance. (Syria Comment)
Dozens of tanks have been reported to be en route to Deraa, the Syrian city at the centre of protests against President Bashar al-Assad, as a series of EU nations protested at the increasingly bloody government crackdown that is now believed to have killed more than 450 people.
Deraa remained largely cut off to outside communications but sources reported gunfire again on Wednesday. Amnesty International quoted eyewitnesses who said army snipers were shooting at injured people on the streets and those who tried to reach them.
Witnesses reported seeing a convoy of at least 30 army tanks leave an area near the Golan Heights front line with Israel and head south, apparently towards Deraa, where the protests against Assad’s authoritarian regime began six weeks ago. (The Guardian)
Joshua Landis writes: Bashar al-Assad is determined to quell the Syrian revolt, which is why he has sent in the military with tanks and is now arresting the network of opposition activists and leaders that his intelligence agencies have been able to track.
There is an element of “shock and awe” to the operation. Tanks are clearly not useful for suppressing an urban rebellion, but they demonstrate the superior firepower of the state and the determination of the president. It is a classic military strategy – go hard and quick. Take out the opposition before t has a chance to harden and develop a durable command a reliable cell structure. This is precisely what the US military tried to do in Iraq. It is what it failed to do in Libya, when it allowed Qaddafi to regroup and regain control of Tripoli and Western Libya after his initial confusion and weakness.
I do not believe that the regime will be able to shut down the opposition. Unlike the Iranian opposition, which was successfully put down, the Syrian opposition is more revolutionary, even if, perhaps, not as numerous in the capital. The Green movement did not call for the overthrow of the regime and an end to the Islamic republic, but only reform. The Syrian opposition is revolutionary. Although it began by calling for reform, it quickly escalated to demand an end to the regime. It is convinced that reform of the Baathist regime is impossible and Syria must start over. It wants an end to the Baath Party, an end to Assad dynasty, an end to domination of the presidency and security forces by the Alawite religious community, and an end to the domination of the economy by the financial elite which has used nepotism, insider trading, and corruption to monopolize the ramparts of trade and industry. In short, the opposition abhors most aspects of the present regime and is working to uproot it. It is more determined and revolutionary than was the Iranian Green movement that Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei successfully suppressed. (Syria Comment)
Moved by escalating violence in Syria, European leaders warned Tuesday that they will impose new sanctions on Damascus unless President Bashar al-Assad halts his bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters.
The warnings reflected a growing sense of outrage in European capitals since Assad sent tanks and armored personnel carriers into the rebellious southern city of Daraa on Monday, firing at youths in the street and inflicting a death toll estimated by human rights activists at two dozen. (Washington Post)
Another 203 members of Syria’s ruling Baath party announced their resignation Wednesday in protest of the deadly crackdown on protesters, raising the number to 233, according to lists seen by AFP.
The latest group to step down were members from the Houran region, which covers the flashpoint town of Daraa in the south of the country. Earlier 30 members resigned from the restive city of Banias in northwest Syria. (AFP)
NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.
White House officials said President Obama had been briefed on the more energetic bombing campaign, which included a strike early on Monday on Colonel Qaddafi’s residential compound in the heart of Tripoli, the capital.
United States officials said the effort was not intended to kill the Libyan leader, but to take the war to his doorstep, raising the price of his efforts to continue to hold on to power. “We want to make sure he knows there is a war going on, and it’s not just in Misurata,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity in discussing military planning.
The NATO campaign, some officials said, arose in part from an analysis of Colonel Qaddafi’s reaction to the bombing of Tripoli that was ordered by President Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago. Alliance officials concluded that the best hope of dislodging the Libyan leader and forcing him to flee was to cut off his ability to command his most loyal troops.
“We don’t want to kill him or make a martyr out of him in the Arab world,” said a senior NATO diplomat familiar with the evolving strategy. “But if he sees the bombing happening all around him, we think it could change his calculus.” (New York Times)
A statement in French by 61 Libyan tribal leaders, delivered to Bernard-Henri Levy. Automated translation by Google Translate.
We, heads or representatives of the tribes of Libya, met today in Benghazi, around Daihoum Doctor, member of the National Transition Council. Faced with threats to the unity of our country, facing the maneuvers and propaganda of the dictator and his family, we solemnly declare this.
Nothing can divide us.
We share the same ideal of a Libya free, democratic and united.
Every Libyan has certainly had its origins in a particular tribe. But he has complete freedom to create family ties, friendship, neighborhood or fellowship with any member of any other tribe.
We train, we, the Libyans, a single tribe, the tribe of Libyans free, fighting against oppression and the evil spirit of division.
It is the dictator, trying to play the Libyan tribes against each other, dividing the country and rule. There is truth in this myth, it has fed an ancestral opposition today to a rift between tribes of Fezzan, of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.
Libya tomorrow, once the dictator gone, will be a united Libya, including the capital Tripoli and will be where we are finally free to form a civil society according to our wishes.
We take this message, told a French philosopher, to thank France and through France, Europe: it is they who have prevented the bloodshed that we had promised Gaddafi, it is thanks to them and with them that we build Libya free, and one tomorrow.
Evidence of the ferocity of the fighting in Libya’s western mountains was clear Monday at the Nalut central hospital. One young rebel lay dead under a shroud; nobody yet knew his name. Some were too badly injured to talk. One said a battle that day – in which loyalist troops were forced to retreat six miles with heavy losses – was a “big victory.”
“It is the heart that is fighting,” said the fighter as he lay in a hospital bed. He refused to be pictured wearing an oxygen mask “because they will say Qaddafi is winning.”
Few journalists have so far crossed into these western mountains, but the picture now emerging is that of a heavily outgunned militia – perhaps better organized than the rag-tag rebels in the east – that has leveraged local knowledge, international support, and deep-seated anger at Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi into unlikely victories. (Christian Science Monitor)
Moammar Gadhafi has suffered military setbacks in recent days in western Libya, a sign that his grip may be slipping in the very region he needs to cling to power.
His loyalists were driven out of the center of the city of Misrata, a key rebel stronghold in Gadhafi-controlled territory. A NATO airstrike turned parts of his Tripoli headquarters into smoldering rubble. And rebel fighters seized a border crossing, breaking open a supply line to besieged rebel towns in a remote western mountain area.
Front lines have shifted repeatedly in two months of fighting, and the poorly trained, ill-equipped rebels have given no evidence that they could defeat Gadhafi on the battlefield. The Libyan leader has deep pockets, including several billion dollars in gold reserves, that could keep him afloat for months. And his forces continue to bombard Misrata from afar, unleashing a fierce barrage Tuesday on the port – the city’s only lifeline to the world. (AP)
The Western bombing campaign in Libya is now in its sixth week but despite a series of eye-catching NATO initiatives there is little sign of a decisive military shift that will bring a quick end to the war.
And there are few signs either of significant divisions within Muammar Gaddafi’s government that would hasten a political solution to the conflict.
NATO, which took over the air campaign from a coalition led by France, Britain and the United States a month ago, can point to some successes in protecting civilian populations in eastern Libya from attack including in Benghazi and Ajdabiyah.
But the siege of Misrata continues and the commander of the NATO operation, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, conceded on Tuesday that the alliance had yet to remove the threat posed to civilians by Gaddafi’s forces. (Reuters)
Aisha el-Qaddafi, the daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, likes to tell her three young children bedtime stories about the afterlife. Now, she says, they are especially appropriate.
“To make them ready,” she said, “because in a time of war you never know when a rocket or a bomb might hit you, and that will be the end.”
In a rare interview at her charitable foundation here, Ms. Qaddafi, 36, a Libyan-trained lawyer who once worked on Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team, offered a glimpse into the fatalistic mind-set of the increasingly isolated family at the core of the battle for Libya, the bloodiest arena in the democratic uprising that is sweeping the region.
She dismissed the rebels as “terrorists” but suggested that some former Qaddafi officials who are now in the opposition’s governing council still “keep in touch with us.” She pleaded for dialogue and talked about democratic reforms. But she dismissed the rebels as unfit for such talks because of their use of violence, hurled personal barbs at President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at one point, appeared to disparage the basic idea of electoral democracy. (New York Times)
The secret document described Prisoner 269, Mohammed el-Gharani, as the very incarnation of a terrorist threat: “an al Qaeda suicide operative” with links to a London cell and ties to senior plotters of international havoc.
But there was more to the story, as there so often is at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. Eight months after that newly disclosed assessment of Mr. Gharani was written by military intelligence officials, a federal judge examined the secret evidence. Saying that it was “plagued with internal inconsistencies” and largely based on the word of two other Guantánamo detainees whose reliability was in question, he ruled in January 2009 that Mr. Gharani should be released. The Obama administration sent him to Chad about five months later.
The secret assessment of Mr. Gharani, like many of the detainee dossiers made available to The New York Times and other news organizations, reflected few doubts about the peril he might have posed. He was rated “high risk,” and military officials recommended that he not be freed. But now, a comparison of the assessment’s conclusions with other information provides a case study in the ambiguities that surround many of the men who have passed through the prison at Guantánamo Bay. (New York Times)
Jason Burke writes: Hidden deep in the leaked Guantánamo files is a small but important trove of information, too historical and too technical to have commanded much space in newspapers keener on hyperventilating about “nuclear al-Qaida hellstorms” this week. Each of the 700-plus files includes a short biography of its subject. These cover his “prior history” and “recruitment and travel” to wherever he became fully engaged with violent extremism and, with brutal if unintended efficiency, demolish three of the most persistent myths about al-Qaida.
The first is that the organisation is composed of men the CIA trained to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan who then turned on their mentors. In fact among the bona fide al-Qaida operatives detained in Guatánamo Bay there are very few who are actually veterans of the fighting in the 1980s, and none of these were involved with groups that received any substantial technical or financial assistance from the US, even indirectly via Pakistan.
The second is that an “international brigade” of Islamist extremists was responsible for the Soviet defeat. The records make it clear that their combat contribution was negligible.
The third myth is that most of those currently waging “jihad” against the Crusader-Zionist alliance or the “hypocrite, apostate regimes” of the Muslim world were actively recruited by al-Qaida and brought, brainwashed, to Afghanistan to fight or be trained. The descriptions of almost all those in Guantánamo genuinely associated with al-Qaida shows that in fact they spent much time and money overcoming many difficulties to find a way to reach al-Qaida. They were not dumb or vulnerable youths “groomed” to be suicide bombers; they were highly motivated, often educated and intelligent, men. (The Guardian)
An explosion early Wednesday on a gas pipeline in the northern Sinai Peninsula cut supplies of Egyptian natural gas to Israel for the second time this year, according to Israeli and Egyptian officials, in what many here suspected was an act of sabotage by local Bedouin or possibly Palestinians.
The blast came as the authorities in Cairo began to investigate public suspicions of corruption and mismanagement by the former Mubarak government in its gas export deal with Israel. It also prompted renewed calls in Israel for the country to reduce its dependency on outside sources and speed up development of its own newly found gas fields.
“Regional instability is likely to continue in the near term, and we must attain energy independence,” Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister of Israel, said in a statement.
Details of who carried out the attack remained unclear. Egyptian security officials said a package containing TNT caused the blast. There were no immediate reports of casualties and it was not known how long repairs would take. (New York Times)
On Sunday April 24, 2011 WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The details for every detainee will be released daily over the coming month.
The Guantánamo files reveal the often fragile physical and mental condition of Guantánamo’s oldest and youngest residents, who have included an 89-year-old man and boys as young as 14.
In 2002 Guantánamo prisoners were described as “the worst of a very bad lot” by Dick Cheney, US vice-president. “They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort.”
But the internal files on some prisoners paint a very different picture. A 2002 assessment of Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, Mohammed Sadiq, who was then 89, revealed dementia, depression and sickness. “His current medical issues include major depressive disorder, senile dementia and osteoarthritis, for which he receives prescribed treatment.” The Afghan national was also being assessed for prostate cancer. (The Guardian)
Among the most dismaying stories to emerge is that of three hapless Tajiks caught up in a roundup of foreigners in Karachi in 2002.
The trio appear to have spent almost two years being interrogated and maltreated, first at the notorious Bagram airbase, and then at Guantánamo, before being released.
The prison files reveal that they were listed as “enemy combatants” on arrival , but turned out to be entirely innocent.
The then base commander, Maj-Gen Geoffrey Miller, signed reports to the US Southern Command HQ in Florida confirming that two of the men were not enemy combatants and he was having them sent home. He added: “It is undetermined as to why the detainee was transferred to GTMO.”
Reports on the third man, Shirinov Abdulghafar Umarovich, are missing from the files, but he was reported to have also been released and returned to Tajikistan on 31 March 2004 along with the two others, Mukhibullo Abdulkarim Umarov and Mazhar Udeen.
The camp files disclose that the three were “arrested at a small library in Karachi”. Almost two years after their eventual release, a journalist for the US magazine Mother Jones, while trekking in the Pamir mountains, stumbled across Umarov back at his remote home village and tape-recorded an interview.
Umarov’s story, now confirmed by the classified prison camp files, is that the three were living in a room in the University of Karachi library, and looking for work, when they were rounded up by Pakistani police and given to the Americans. A suicide bomb had exploded and at the time, the US were reported to be paying bounties of between $5,000 and $25,000 per al-Qaida prisoner.
Umarov said he had received no compensation since. He reportedly asked his interviewer: “Why did they keep a man for two years with no reason? Why? They caught me and kept me as a prisoner of war. What war, may I ask? When was I involved? I was sleeping when they came and dragged me out of my bed.”
He described going on hunger strike, and being put in the isolation “cooler” at Guantánamo, for complaining to an investigator. “The soldiers took all my clothes and left me there.” During the day, two electric coils were used to overheat the 3ft by 5ft metal cell. At night, frigid air was pumped in. “Some prisoners wouldn’t last the night and had to be taken to the doctor,” he said. “They kept me there for 10 days – and for no reason.”
The three Tajiks were among more than 100 detainees taken to Guantánamo for little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (The Guardian)
By October 2004, two years into his detention at the Guantánamo Bay prison, Ali Abdullah Ahmed had established a corrosive reputation among prison officials. Mr. Ahmed’s classified file said he was a hunger striker, “completely uncooperative with interrogators,” and “had a history of aggressive behavior in the camp, often defiantly failing to comply with instructions.”
Twenty-one months later, the military announced that Mr. Ahmed, a Yemeni, and two other prisoners had simultaneously hanged themselves.
Their deaths in June 2006 — the first at Guantánamo — fueled a debate between military officials, who deemed the suicides “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us” by jihadists seeking martyrdom, and prison critics, who interpreted them as an act of despair by men with little hope of a fair trial or release.
Since then, two other detainees have succeeded in killing themselves — one in 2007, and another in 2009. Against that backdrop, a collection of secret detainee assessment files obtained by The New York Times reveal that the threat of suicide has created a chronic tension at the prison — a tactic frequently discussed by the captives and a constant fear for their captors.
The files for about two dozen detainees refer to suicide attempts or threats. Others mention informants who pass on rumors about which prisoner had volunteered to kill himself next and efforts to organize suicide attempts. Two prisoners were overheard weighing whether it would create enough time for someone to end his life if fellow prisoners blocked their cell windows, distracting guards who would have to remove the obstructions. (New York Times)
Said Mohammed Alam Shah, a 24-year-old Afghan who had lost a leg as a teenager, told interrogators at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that he had been conscripted by the Taliban as a driver before being detained in 2001. He had been caught, he said, as he tried to “rescue his younger brother from the Taliban.”
Military analysts believed him. Mr. Shah, who had been outfitted with a prosthetic leg by prison doctors, was “cooperative” and “has not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies,” according to a sympathetic 2003 assessment. Its conclusion: “Detainee does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests.”
So in 2004 Mr. Shah was sent back to Afghanistan — where he promptly revealed himself to be Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-born militant, and began plotting mayhem. He recorded jihadist videos, organized a Taliban force to fight American troops, planned an attack on Pakistan’s interior minister that killed 31 people, oversaw the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, and finally detonated a suicide bomb in 2007 as the Pakistani Army closed in. His martyrdom was hailed in an audio message by none other than Osama bin Laden.
The Guantánamo analysts’ complete misreading of Abdullah Mehsud was included among hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at the prison in Cuba that were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held at Guantánamo over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word “possibly” 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times. (New York Times)
On Sept. 11, 2001, the core of al-Qaeda was concentrated in a single city: Karachi, Pakistan.
At a hospital, the accused mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole was recovering from a tonsillectomy. Nearby, the alleged organizer of the 2002 bombing in Bali, Indonesia, was buying lab equipment for a biological weapons program. And in a safe house, the man who would later describe himself as the intellectual author of the Sept. 11 attacks was with other key al-Qaeda members watching the scenes from New York and Washington unfold on television.
Within a day, much of the al-Qaeda leadership was on the way back to Afghanistan, planning for a long war.
A cache of classified military documents obtained by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks presents new details of their whereabouts on Sept. 11, 2001, and their movements afterward. The documents also offer some tantalizing glimpses into the whereabouts and operations of Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The documents, provided to European and U.S. news outlets, including The Washington Post, are intelligence assessments of nearly every one of the 779 individuals who have been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. In them, analysts have created detailed portraits of detainees based on raw intelligence, including material gleaned from interrogations. (Washington Post)
The Bahraini King bragged about intelligence contacts with Israel, and instructed that official statements stop referring to Israel as the “Zionist entity,” according to the latest trove of documents revealed by WikiLeaks.
On February 15, 2005, U.S. ambassador to Bahrain William Monroe met with the leader of the small kingdom, Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa – the same king whose position is now threatened by popular protests.
Monroe wrote to Washington the next day, saying the meeting was amiable and that the two sat near the fireplace on a cold and unusually wet day. Their conversation lasted about an hour and a half, and at some point moved to the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The king said he was pleased with the developments in the peace process.
He also revealed to the ambassador that he had instructed his public information minister to stop referring to Israel in official statements of the kingdom as the “enemy” or the “Zionist entity.”
An international humanitarian organization said Thursday that Bahraini authorities turned hospitals into “places to be feared” during a deadly crackdown on anti-government protesters in the Gulf country.
Doctors Without Borders condemned the arrest of injured opposition supporters being treated at medical facilities. In a statement, the organization said Bahrain’s security forces used hospitals and health centers as “bait to identify and arrest those (protesters) who dare seek treatment.”
The capital’s Salmaniya medical complex, in particular, was at the center of the country’s turmoil, treating hundreds of injured demonstrators. The military took control of the facility, and doctors and patients there said soldiers and policemen interrogated and detained them.
The BBC has obtained images of alleged police brutality against peaceful protesters in the Bahraini capital Manama, where fears of a systematic crackdown on pro-democracy activists are growing.
Pictures sent by a human rights activist show police from Bahrain’s Interior Ministry, and others in plainclothes, their faces hidden by balaclavas.
The police are seen beating and kicking men who are handcuffed and hooded.
The attack occurred on the outskirts of the capital Manama last Wednesday, 30 March, on a busy stretch of road opposite a popular shopping mall.
Eyewitnesses, some of them crying, described a scene that one said “was like watching a horror film.”
But the attack is not isolated.
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