17th July 2013

BAHRAIN MEDIA ROUNDUP

Bahrain Rattled by Bombing Near Royal Palaces
A bombing outside a mosque near the royal palaces has rattled Bahrain, prompting authorities and main opposition groups in the violence-wracked Gulf kingdom to denounce the attack. No one was injured in the blast, which struck late Wednesday in the mosque parking lot during evening prayers. But it was a rare explosion near the site of the royal residences, pointing to widening attacks by militant factions as part of the 29-month unrest. Bahrain's majority Shiites are seeking a greater political voice in the strategic Sunni-ruled nation, home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. Read More arrested, and there had been widespread use of torture in custody. forget about the smaller, but no less important corners of the globe. The small island nation of Bahrain has been in the depths of political unrest for years. Protests have been increasing in number and ferocity since the start of the Bahraini Uprising of 2011, sparked by the Arab Spring, but Bahrains protests have seen coverage drop off in mainstream media since 2012. Contrary to what this lack of attention implies, the issues that sparked the protests initially have not been resolved in Bahrain. Read More leaks as Cablegate(a data dump of some two hundred and fty thousand classied US diplomatic les) and the 2007 Collateral Murder video, which depicted US forces in Apache Helicopters killing over a dozen peopleincluding two Reuters journalistsin a suburb of Baghdad. Wikileaks has labeled the cache of almost two million diplomatic records the Kissinger Cables. Nearly two hundred thousand of the cables were written between 1973 and 1976, which coincided with Henry Kissingers tenure as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Read More

The Continuing Struggle in Bahrain

In recent months protests have erupted in Turkey, Bulgaria, and most recently in Brazil. These new protests add to the increasing number of countries that are experiencing poor government-to-citizen relations. As the list grows longer it becomes easy to focus only on the biggest and most recent protests, but in doing this we tend to

Bahrain Torturers Must Be Held Accountable

It's been two years since the King of Bahrain commissioned human rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni to investigate the events of February and March 2011. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) duly conrmed in November 2011 what Human Rights First and other leading international human rights organizations had already reported -- that dozens of people had been killed, thousands had been

The King promised to put things right and implement all of the recommendations made in the BICI report. It hasn't happened. The culture of impunity identied in the BICI hasn't been properly addressed, and this month has seen a new spate of torture allegations. Prominent human rights defender Naji Fateel claims to have been tortured in custody, including being electrocuted in his genitals, suspended from the ceiling and threatened with rape. Read More

Bahrain and the Kissinger Cables

In early April, Wikileaks released a gigantic trove of declassied US diplomatic documentsthat shed light on the diplomatic maneuverings of the United States and other governments in the tumultuous 1970s. The magnitude of this collection was such that the websites founder Julian Assange referred to it as the single most signicant body of geopolitical material ever published. These are strong words from the curator of such high-prole