Peace and Justice Post

Gulf State that Attacked Pro-Democracy Demonstrators Serves as Key Port for U.S. Navy since World War II

CBS Evening News,  Feb 17, 2011

(CBSNews) THE PENTAGON – The free flow of oil, the containment of Iran and the defeat of al Qaeda, those are the stakes in the Persian Gulf and why the U.S. Navy has about 30 warships assigned to its 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.

Complete Coverage: Anger in the Arab World

The world’s attention was focused Thursday on the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom. Bahrain’s capital is under lockdown after government troops attacked protesters overnight. At least five people were killed. Hundreds were wounded. In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Bahrain’s government to show restraint.

(Scroll down to watch a video of this report)

The U.S. Navy has maintained a presence in Bahrain since World War II. The kingdom plays a vital role in protecting American interests.

“This whole area depends upon the ability to maintain naval and air forces in the region,” said David Mack, a scholar at the Middle East Institute who once served as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

And it’s not just Bahrain. It’s Kuwait, which is the staging area for operations in Iraq. It’s Qatar, where the headquarters for U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East is located along with an air base used by bombers flying strikes in Afghanistan.

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By JAMES ZOGBY, Counterpunch, Feb 17, 2011

If one lesson is to be learned from the remarkable events unfolding in Egypt, it is that Arab public opinion matters. For too long Arab voices have not been listened to, nor have Arab sensibilities or aspirations been respected. The Egyptian people have not only risen up, demanding to be heard, they have also challenged other Arabs and the West to pay attention to what they are saying.

Last Thursday night, I watched a remarkable scene unfolding on television. As my dinner partner, Patrick Seale, and I sat transfixed watching the BBC, there, on one half of a split screen, was president Hosni Mubarak making a last ditch effort to save his rule. On the other half screen were throngs in Tahrir Square.

The disconnect was real. Mubarak was talking, but he simply wasn’t listening. He played every card at his disposal: the caring father, the patriot, the xenophobe, the reformer and more. Maybe, I thought, he was reaching out beyond the square to those he thought might also be listening. But if his imagined and hoped-for audience was there, they were not responding. The crowd in the square was listening, and his lack of responsiveness to their concerns only served to inflame them and deepen their resolve.

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by Jacob G. Hornberge, The Future of Freedom Foundation, Feb 16, 2011

Once it became clear that Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak was on the way out, U.S. officials quickly shifted gears and took the side of the demonstrators, the people who had suffered for 30 years under the brutal Mubarak dictatorship. U.S. officials even offered their guidance for moving Egypt toward a democratic political system.

Of course, all this pro-democracy hoopla was designed to disguise the fact that the U.S. government has been the prime partner and enabler of this brutal dictatorship for the entire 30 years under which the Egyptian people have suffered. It has been the U.S. government that has been providing the $60 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to Mubarak and his henchmen in the Egyptian military and secret police. It has been the U.S. government that has been paying the salaries of Egypt’s jailors and torturers for the past three decades. It is the U.S. military that has been training the Egyptian military.

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GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — A group of well respected religious scholars in Gaza City congratulated the Egyptian people on “ending the tyranny and injustice” of the nation’s former president, and called on the new leadership to continue the trend by opening the Rafah crossing.

Calling themselves the Palestinian Scholars Association, the group issued a statement on Sunday, two days after former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced his stepping down from power.

“The scholars of Palestine have followed closely the developments of the Egyptian revolution,” the statement said, adding that the group believed the new Egyptian cabinet and the military council could make “serious changes for the better,” and said they hoped that one of the changes would be to the policy of closure at the Rafah crossing.

Closed in 2006 after the Palestinian Authority was ousted from power, the crossing remained sealed for two years, after which it was opened for four days every four months to allow students, patients and international passport holders in and out of the coastal enclave. In June, the crossing was opened permanently, but travelers still had to have officials permission to leave the Strip.

The closure of Rafah followed only a few months after Israel began imposing restrictions at its crossing points with Gaza, in the wake of the capture of an Israeli soldier by resistance factions.

Closures and openings at Rafah have been seen to be coordinated with Israel, and accusations against the Mubarak regime for collaboration have frequently been launched.

With a new leadership barely in Place, the association of scholars urged a quick reconsideration of the crossings closure policy.

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, February 14, 2011

Twenty years ago, as Americans were celebrating Valentine’s Day, Iraqi husbands and fathers in the Amiriyah section of Baghdad were peeling the remains of their wives and children off the walls and floor of a large neighborhood bomb shelter.

The men had left the shelter the evening before, so their wives would have some measure of privacy as they sought refuge from the U.S.-led coalition bombing campaign, which was at its most intense pre-ground war stage.

All of the more than 400 women and children were incinerated or boiled to death at 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 13, 1991, when two F-117 stealth fighter-bombers each dropped a 2,000-pound laser-guided “smart bomb” on the civilian shelter at Amiriyah.

It was one of those highly accurate “surgical strikes.” The first bomb sliced through 10 feet of reinforced concrete before a time-delayed fuse exploded, destroying propane and water tanks for heating water and food.

Minutes later the second bomb flew precisely through the opening that had been cut by the first and exploded deeper in the shelter creating an inferno.
Fire rose from the lower level to the area where the women and children were seeking shelter – and so did the boiling water. Those who did not burn to death immediately or die from the bombs’ impact were boiled or steamed to death in the intense heat.

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When the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt shattered the deep freeze that has afflicted Arabs for almost four decades, countries fond of touting democracy should have been leading the celebrations. Instead, the reigning mood among elites in the United States, and especially in Israel, was one of fear and trepidation.

Though the Obama administration sounded a supportive note for the popular rebellion near its beginning — and later, when Mubarak’s ouster was a foregone conclusion — it has also issued nervous caveats, citing the dangers of rapid change and the merits of Mubarak’s intelligence chief, torturer Omar Suleiman. The reversal came on the back of pressure exerted by America’s other clients in the Arab world and Israeli leaders, who both dread the prospect of region-wide revolt.

Accompanied by a chorus of spineless pundits, America and its allies began mouthing the rationales of the dictator himself: stability is good; change is bad; horrors will befall us if the Muslim Brotherhood wins a share of power.

The hand-wringing of other Arab autocrats should not be discounted, but it is the potential disruption to the Egypt-Israel relationship that animates American concern. The Israelis have made known their fear that change in Egypt will leave them bereft of friends “in the neighborhood” — a serious predicament for a state founded, through ethnic cleansing, on top of the neighborhood.

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Jeremy R. Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, February 15, 2011

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), videos of the collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center 7 on September 11, 2001 show the building succumbing to a fire-induced progressive collapse. Many independent researchers and scientists, however, including over 1,400 professional architects and engineers who have signed a petition calling for a new investigation, disagree, pointing to evidence that it was deliberately brought down in a controlled demolition.

Despite the dramatically different conclusions drawn, there does exist widespread agreement on both sides on a number of important questions. Proponents of both hypotheses agree that the damage to WTC 7 sustained from the impact of debris from the collapse of the north tower (WTC 1) was not an initiating or determinative factor in the collapse. Both sides also agree that the system of transfer trusses and girders in the building that allowed it to be constructed above the Consolidated Edison New York electric power substation played no role in the collapse, that hypothetical fuel oil fires from tanks stored in the building for emergency generators was not a causal factor, and that the office fires did not result in any significant loss of strength of the building’s load-bearing steel columns.

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“The Revolution Came and The Revolution Went; Unrest Turned Back Into Discontent” –Marat Sade

It is now the long morning after, as protesters returned to Tahrir Square to clean it up and savor their victory. There were even some initial scuffles with the military that may be overanxious to assert control and show that it is in charge.

In all the joy of the moment—the type of joy we see so rarely these days in the news—in all the electrifying coverage, and congratulations in the capitals of the West that stood by Mubarak for decades, there is still vast uncertainty.

The Egyptian military, now nominally in charge, has no culture of democracy much less any history of fostering real change. Funded with support from abroad, it is subject to influences from all its many new found friends of “democracy,” especially its patrons in Washington.

It has already sounded the trumpet of reassurance that it will live up to its promises to assure new elections while keeping the country’s foreign commitments intact including the peace treaty with a nervous Israel, and likely is loyalty to the war on terror as well.

It has now dissolved the parliament and suspended the constitution, meeting two key demands of pro-democracy protesters. At the same time, It has also, so far, committed itself to keep the structure of the Mubarak regime in place.

How will this sit with a euphoric public?

So far, we have seen a takeover, but not yet the makings of a transformation. When millions of people were in the streets, they had power. When they are not, power reverts to institutions and a bureaucracy considered the most stifling in the world,

Egypt has been a police state with more than a million informers. That will not change easily.

Already a CIA assistance team has been dispatched, all in the name of guaranteeing democracy, of course. The Mossad’s role has been more low key but you can assume it’s there.

Almost every revolution is menaced by the threat of a counter-revolution and this one is no exception.

On the American right, the big fear stoked by Fox Fuhrer Glenn Beck is from the Islamic boogieman. “This isn’t about Egypt, this is the story of everyone who has ever plotted, or wanted, to fundamentally change or destroy the Western way of life,” he and his cronies warn.

On the left, the worry is that the movement for change is not organized enough to insure change, or even clear about what it wants now. Its leaderless momentum won Mubarak’s ouster, but can it win its desire for a real democracy and economic justice?

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By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, 15 February 2011

Inspired by the Egyptian people’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, protests continued to spread in the Middle East on Monday, as Washington scrambled to reassure Israel and pro-US regimes in the region of its continued support.

For a fourth straight day, demonstrators in cities throughout Yemen clashed with security forces and mobs of plainclothes policemen and hired thugs posing as supporters of the US-backed government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

In the capital city of Sana’a, the anti-government demonstrations grew in size on Monday. The AFP news agency said that over 3,000 people attempted to march towards the city’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square to demand the ouster of President Saleh, who has ruled the country for more than 32 years.

As they neared the square, they were attacked by riot police using batons, rifle butts and electric cattle prods. Mobs of plainclothes police thugs then attacked demonstrators with daggers and broken bottles.

Among those demonstrating were the country’s lawyers dressed in black robes. The protesters chanted, “The people want the regime to step down,” “leave Saleh” and “After Mubarak, Ali.”

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by Micael Fullerton, Foreign Policy Journal, Feb 14, 2011

This year will mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 disaster. In these 10 years, not only have extremely important scientific questions about this tragedy gone unanswered, but they have even been ridiculed to the point of deranged absurdity. We owe a valid scientific explanation to the 3000 victims on that day, the steadily dying health-stricken first responders, the dead and wounded soldiers, and the untold thousands upon thousands of dead and injured Afghans and Iraqis resulting from the terrifying never-ending “war on terror”. Critics of those skeptical of the official story of 9/11 have often objected that an alternative theory has never been put forth. To that end, this article will put forth a scientific theory for one important aspect of the 9/11 event, the Building 7 collapse.

(Photo: http://911research.wtc7.net)

On September 11, 2001 a third building came down. This building was 7 World Trade Center (WTC 7), a 47-story building about the width and length of a football field. NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was tasked with officially explaining how WTC 7 fell. Their theory is documented in the report entitled Final Report of the Collapse of Building 7[1]. Many people are under the mistaken impression that NIST’s theory of how WTC 7 fell down is a valid scientific theory. In science however, a valid theory must be the simplest theory available that best explains all the available empirical data.[2] This article will show that the NIST theory is a highly convoluted theory that cannot explain important observations.

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