Trayvon Martin. Photo/Wikimedia

For years, my father, a federal employee with a top secret clearance, carried a copy of his birth certificate when he went into Baja California from our home in San Diego. Many times, when he tried to reenter the U.S., he was stopped by the Border Patrol.

My father had thick black hair and naturally dark skin, and the Patrol thought he was a Mexican brazenly trying to sneak back into the country by claiming to be married to the black-haired, blue- eyed, light-skinned woman he claimed was his wife. Once back home, he faced discrimination because neighbors thought he was Mexican; the ones who knew better discriminated because he was a Jew.

When I was 11 years old, we moved about 120 miles north to a suburb of Los Angeles. My parents bought a house in a new tract of about 150 houses, all owned by Whites and a few Hispanics. Three or four years later, a Realtor came by, plastering flyers on all the houses, announcing he had a special real good, one-time only deal. A few wouldn’t sell their houses at any price if it was a Black who was planning to move into the area. Someone in the tract finally took up the offer, and a Black family–he was a mechanical engineer–moved in. It didn’t take long before other White families began putting their houses up for sale. Only this time, they weren’t getting as much as the first family that sold out. Soon, the prices began tumbling as other Blacks and Hispanics moved in.

Eventually, the first Black family moved out. But my parents refused to sell their house. They had no intention of becoming involved with what was now known as “block busting.” A few of our Hispanic and Black neighbors wondered why we stayed; some even said we were crazy. But, until my father died in 1983, he owned that house in a neighborhood that went from almost 100 percent White to almost 100 percent Black, Hispanic, and lower-class White, refusing to be sucked in by racism.

Discrimination occurs throughout our country, whether we want to believe it or not.

At a synagogue in Sunbury, Pa., someone painted a swastika. In New York City, unidentified individuals threw several Molotov cocktails against a rabbi’s residence. These weren’t isolated incidents. The Anti-Defamation League says there were 1,239 reported incidents in 2010. [The 2011 number is still being tallied.]

Several American communities and the states of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, and Utah have enacted oppressive anti-immigration laws. On the surface, it appears they want to rid their areas of illegal immigrants, acting only to protect law-and-order. But, the deeper structure is that they fear Hispanics, more of them legal immigrants or citizens of the U.S. than undocumented workers, will get political, educational, and financial power and would reduce the influence of the ultra-conservative White population.

At the University of California at San Diego, a fraternity of Whites sent out invitations to a “ghetto-themed” party, which it called the “Compton Cookout.” The invitation noted that “ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes.” At that same school last year, a Klan hood was placed on a statue of Dr. Seuss.

At innumerable local schools, where the teachers had “cultural diversity” classes in college and on-the-job “diversity training,” it’s not unusual to hear a few teachers telling racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic jokes, not just among themselves in a faculty lounge but also with students.

White supremacists shout for “White Pride!” and Black militants call for “Black Power!” Each claims they aren’t planning to destroy any other race–although myriad Klan and Skinhead actions prove otherwise–but merely to strengthen their own. Add into the mix, a few who will shout “racism” when no racism occurs and, thus, make it difficult for those with true compassion for justice to separate the truth from the fiction. Peel the rhetoric, and the core is still fear.

And that may be why the death of Trayvon Martin is so important. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader in Sanford, Fla., killed Martin, Feb. 26. Zimmerman acknowledges he killed Martin, but claims it was in self-defense. Under Florida’s reactionary “stand your ground” law, borne from fear rather than logic, people who feel threatened can take whatever action they think necessary, even shooting Black teenagers who are armed only with a pack of Skittles.

There are numerous versions of what happened, all of them advanced by myriad people with social and political agendas rather than a search for justice, no matter what they claim. But, fear is at the core of the rhetoric. Mistrust and distrust, often fueled by the mass media with their own agendas, may lead some to irrationally believe that entire demographics of people—White, Black, Hispanic, gay, Jew, Muslim—may pose threats to their own safety, leading them to react as if the threats were real rather than imagined.

The reasons no longer matter to Trayvon Martin. The lesson however, should matter to the rest of us.

Walter Brasch is the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. distinguished service award. His latest book is Before the First Snow; a major theme of the book looks at issues of racism and bigotry. The book is available from Greeley & Stone Publishers or Amazon.

If there were a Nobel Prize for Tenacity, I would nominate half a dozen organizations that, in the face of years of lost court cases and rapidly graying hair, continue to seek justice for some of the most egregious victims of the Bush/Obama “war on terror.”

These legal bulldogs keep getting their lawsuits bounced out of one federal court after another – and keep coming back for more. They have names like the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty USA, and literally hundreds of others.

Consider this: The despicable practice of “extraordinary rendition” began in the Clinton Administration, expanded during the eight years of George W. Bush, and remains alive and well under President Obama.

At its most fundamental level, extraordinary rendition means the CIA kidnaps people it believes are terrorism suspects and ships them off, drugged and blindfolded, to the CIA’S own secret prisons or those operated by allied countries who have long and well-documented histories of systematically torturing prisoners.

For years, small groups of people who have survived the waterboarding and the electric shocks and the sleep deprivation have, with the help of human rights organizations, filed lawsuits against the US government, seeking to hold top American policy-makers accountable for their years of pain.

And each time the survivors bring such an action, the courthouse doors are slammed in their faces. Typically, the government invokes what is known as the “State Secrets Privilege.” This once-little-used legal quirk holds that disclosure of any of the secret evidence would compromise national security.

Some lawmakers have been discussing in committees revisions to this statute since the beginning of the Obama Administration, but no one has taken any action despositive whatever.

Consequently, not a single victim of the “war on terror” has had the opportunity to tell his story in a court of law and not a single senior US official has been held accountable.

Who are these victims who keep banging on the courthouse doors?

Here are three of the most prominent:

Jeppesen DataPlan is a subsidiary of The Boeing Company, and specializes in flight planning and logistical support services for aircraft and crews, including those used by the CIA to transport victims to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas, where they were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques and torture.

In the Jeppesen case, five British residents – all of whom were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay – sued Jeppesen for assisting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with logistics for the flights to Afghanistan and CIA secrets prisons where they were held incommunicado and tortured. The men claim they were victims of the U.S. “extraordinary rendition” program – and that Jeppesen was complicit in the process.

The judge rejected the ACLU’s claim that “abundant evidence” was already in the public domain, including a sworn affidavit by a former Jeppesen employee and flight records confirming Jeppesen’s involvement.

The ACLU appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.

Maher Arar: A Canadian citizen born in Syria, Arar was passing through Kennedy International Airport in New York on his way home in 2002 when he was detained by Customs officials. He was suspected of being a terrorist.

Subsequently he was flown against his will, first, to Jordan, then to Syria, where he was jailed by Syrian intelligence. In the year following, he was tortured, forced to falsely confess to attending an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and then released after a year without ever being charged with anything.

With the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and renowned Constitutional lawyer David Cole, Arar sued former Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and then Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, as well as numerous US immigration officials, challenging the rendition of a Canadian citizen to Syria, by the US government.

In his suit, Arar accused the government of violating his constitutional right to due process, as well as his right to choose a country of removal other than one in which he would be tortured. That particular right, as well as his rights under international law, are guaranteed under the Torture Victims Protection Act.

Arar’s lawyers, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), charged that Arar’s Fifth Amendment due process rights were violated when he was confined without access to an attorney or the court system, both domestically before being rendered, and while detained by the Syrian government, whose actions were complicit with the U.S.

Additionally, CCR claimed the Attorney General and INS officials who carried out his deportation also likely violated his right to due process by recklessly subjecting him to torture at the hands of a foreign government that they had every reason to believe would carry out abusive interrogation.

Arar also filed a claim under the Torture Victims Protection Act, adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1992, which allows a victim of torture by an individual of a foreign government to bring suit against that actor in U.S. Court.

Arar’s claim under the Act against Ashcroft and the INS directors is based upon their complicity in bringing about the torture he suffered.

But the Canadian Government took a very different approach. It convened a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the Arar incident. After a two-year probe, the Canadian government admitted it had made a serious mistake in the information it had supplied to the US on Arar. The head of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police was forced to resign, and Canada issues a formal apology to Arar and awarded him $10 million.

The US Government has steadfastly refused to even discuss the case, much less apologize. At a Congressional hearing soon after 9/11, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that the Arar case “wasn’t handled very well,” but came nowhere close to apologizing to anyone for anything.

Well, the human rights lawyers who bring these cases to court are, as one told me, “frustrated but ever-hopeful.”

It is that ever-hopeful quality that is now pressing ACLU lawyers to try yet another legal step. Denied their day in court by US Federal Judges, three Afghans and three Iraqis who say they were tortured while held by the American military at detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed a petition against the US with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IAHCR).

The men were part of a group who in 2005 sued then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and three senior military officials in federal court for torture and abuse. That case was summarily dismissed on immunity grounds before reaching the merits.

The current petition is equivalent to an international legal complaint. It asks the commission, which is an independent human rights body of the Organization of American States, to conduct a full investigation into the human rights violations and seeks an apology on behalf of the six men from the US government.

The ACLU claims that between 2003 and 2004, the men were detained in U.S.-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions and prolonged restraint in excruciating positions the petition charges. None of the men were ever charged with a crime.

“I think that I and the many others who suffered unfairly at the hands of the American government deserve justice,” said petitioner Ali Hussein, an Iraqi who was a 17-year-old high school student when he was detained and abused by American soldiers. “We want America to admit that what happened to us was wrong and should never be allowed to happen again to anyone anywhere.”

Hussein, who is now a law student, was shot in the neck and back before being arrested. He said that military personnel refused to provide him medical care for several hours, and when the bullets were eventually removed the procedure was done without anesthetic. He was then denied food, water and pain medication for almost two days after he was shot.

The petition states, “The US government’s own reports document that the torture and inhumane treatment that Petitioners were subjected to was not aberrational; on the contrary, it was widespread and systemic throughout the US-run detention facilities in the two countries. These same reports also document that the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees were the direct result of policies and practices promulgated and implemented at the highest levels of the US government.

The ACLU charged that “despite these reports and Petitioners’ and other detainees’ credible allegations of torture and inhumane treatment, the US government has failed to conduct any comprehensive criminal investigation, has not held accountable those responsible, and has not provided any form of redress to Petitioners and the many other victims and survivors of US torture and abuse.”

It added: “Since a remedy for these men has been denied in American courts, these six courageous men are seeking to hold the US government accountable on the world stage,” said Steven Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program.

“No high-ranking government officials have yet been held to account for their actions, and this petition seeks to do just that and to ensure that the government respects basic human rights, including the right of everyone to be free from torture and inhumane treatment.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on subjects ranging from human rights to foreign affairs for a number of newspapers and online journals.

Georgetown Law Center student Sandra Fluke testified February 23, 2012 about women's health and contraception. She had been blocked from testifying at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee the previous week on the 2010 health care law regulation requiring employers and insurers provide contraception coverage to their employees. Committee members noted that the previous hearing only had men as witnesses, leading Democratic leaders to call a separate hearing to let a woman's voice be part of the discussion."

The Republican Party must have a death wish.

It cannot win a national election without the support of (a) Latinos (b) Women (c) African-Americans, and (d) Independents.

Yet The Grand Old Party appears to be doing everything in its power to alienate these voters forever.

A couple of weeks ago, when California Representative Darrell Issa convened an all-male panel on birth control, he contended that the issue was not women’s health, but “religious freedom.” So he refused to invite Sandra Fluke, a young law student to speak.

Later, furious Democrats held their own hearing. As Diane Roberts recounts it in The Guardian, Fluke testified there that while Georgetown, the Roman Catholic-run university she attends, provides some health insurance, it does not include contraception – and the pill can cost $1,000 per year. Women take contraception for a variety of medical reasons, not only to prevent pregnancy, she said, recounting the story of a friend, a fellow student, who needed the pill to treat cysts. She couldn’t afford it, got sick and had to have an ovary removed.

Fluke’s reward for being candid? A profane and uninformed trashing by potty-mouth Rush Limbaugh, who called her a prostitute and a slut because she wanted to get paid (presumably insurance premiums) for having sex. He also demanded that she post videos of her sexual encounters on the Internet “so we could all see them.” Limbaugh lost a ton of sponsors, but conservative bloggers, radio interviewers and Fox News continued their attack on Fluke.

And the response of Republic Presidential candidates and their funders? Well, frontrunner Mitt Romney said meekly of Limbaugh’s insults, “it’s not the language I would have used.” Newt Gingrich blamed “the media” for exploiting the story and said there were far more important issues – Barack Obama’s “war on religion”, for example. Santorum’s Daddy Warbucks reminisced on television that “back in the day” women used aspirin to keep from getting pregnant: “The gals put it between their knees. Santorum himself described contraception as “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett said about a bill that would require ultrasounds for women seeking to have abortions, that those who didn’t want to see the fetal images could “just … close your eyes.”

And in another big GOP idea that will further endear the front-runner to women and independents, Romney’s is cheering up his Republican caucus in Congress by proposing to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood, which provides vital health services to women all over the country. Its abortion practice represents less than three per cent of its total care, and no federal tax dollars are involved in that part of the practice.  For many women, Planned Parenthood is their sole health care provider. So its destruction would be exactly what you’d propose if your mission was to completely lose your last vestige of credibility with women voters.

And Newt Gingrich’s view that African American kids have no model of the value of work because of the physical and familial environments they grow up in. His solution: Hire the kids to work as janitors in the public schools. Predictably, this from the GOP’s self-appointed “man of big ideas,” will not win him any awards from the NAACP.

There is also ample evidence that the vibes emanating from the three Presidential wannabees is having negative consequences for many of those who are on the so-called “down ticket” – Republicans who are running for lesser offices ranging from US Senator to town manager.

Case in point: The Republican candidate running for former Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s (D-AZ) seat on Friday responded to Santorum’s opposition to women serving in combat by saying she wanted to “kick him in the jimmy.”

Now, as for the Latino vote, the Republican Party has done zilch, zero, nada, to even acknowledge their existence. Gingrich has called Spanish “the language of the ghettos.”

Santorum, campaigning in Puerto Rico, said there could be no Statehood without “fluent command of English.”

However, Gingrich apparently favors some version of the Dream Act, while Santorum and Romney have both taken a hard line on immigration reform, as if to seal their death pact with this constituency.

It would seem that the wingnuts of the GOP have gotten snookered, first, by believing their own far-right propaganda about Obama’s birthplace, birth certificate, and suchlike, and second, by the demographic changes that have been taking place over the last decade.

Despite their presence in 2008, it doesn’t seem that Republicans understand or accept the reality that they will soon be presenting their ideas to a nation in which their traditional majority has become a minority.

More important, as pointed out by Tom Curry, national affairs writer with MSNBC, “The potential clout of Latino voters has become as familiar a story line as the gender gap. But what might make 2012 different is the edge Latinos could give President Barack Obama and the Democrats in battleground states which aren’t thought of as immigration portals or left-leaning strongholds.”

Curry notes that the 2010 Census revealed that in the past decade the adult Latino population has nearly doubled in Nevada, Virginia, and North Carolina. “Also, it’s increased by 60 percent or more in two Midwestern battleground states, Indiana and Ohio,” he says, adding:

“Obama won all five of those states in 2008 — two of them by very narrow margins — and they are likely to be decisive in next year’s balloting.”

“What the Census figures suggest is that the road to White House in 2012 may well go through the Hispanic community” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group that favors allowing illegal immigrants to work toward U.S. citizenship,” Curry says.

In Nevada, for example, Latinos were about 11 percent of registered voters in 2008, according to the Census’s Current Population Survey. About 90 percent of those registered actually voted, and according to exit polls, 76 percent of them cast ballots for Obama.

Likewise in Colorado, where Latinos comprised 9 percent of registered voters, with 87 percent of those individuals voting on Election Day. Obama won about three out of five Colorado Latino voters. .Nevada and Colorado were among the nine states that went for George W. Bush in 2004 but for Obama in 2008.

Based on 2008 exit poll data, Curry concludes, “if Latino voters were subtracted from the total, Obama would have lost two of the states that he won: New Mexico and Indiana. Even without those two states, he would still have won far more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, but those voters helped create a larger margin.”

No election is ever a slam-dunk. Voting day is months away, and – overnight – something could happen that could change the entire electoral calculus for November.

But even with that huge caveat, it’s difficult to see how the Republican Party – at least the one we used to know – which has so many really smart and well-informed members, could have ended up with three substandard candidates and a seemingly blissful ignorance of the societal factors that are likely to seal their fate.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on subjects ranging from human rights to foreign affairs for a number of newspapers and online journals.

Kans Gov. Brownbeck and the anti-abortion hordes want to take away Dr. Neuhaus's medical license and clap her in jail. Photo/Angela C. Bond

A few hundred years ago in colonial Massachusetts, the theocratic fascist men who ran that society had a way of dealing with free-thinking women in their midst: they burned them at the stake or drummed up hordes of frightened and unthinking neighbors to stone them to death.

Most of us today imagine that if we had lived in those dark times, we would have stood up against such an outrage. Now is the time to find out.

Salem, Massachusetts of 1690 is alive and well in the state of Kansas, where a thuggish regime of charlatans currently led by Republican Governor Sam Brownback and supported by the terrorist organization Operation Rescue have been hounding doctors who have dared to provide desperate pregnant women of the Midwest with access to safe abortions out of business and literally to death. (It was after a botched attempt by these theological fascists to charge and convict Dr. George Tiller of operating his abortion clinic in the state illegally that Scott Roeder, a fevered backer and confidante of activists in Operation Rescue, made the decision to kill the doctor, shooting him in the face as he greeted parishioners at his church on Sunday.)

Today, the target of Gov. Brownback and his fellow women haters and religious fanatics is Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus. A courageous physician, Neuhaus was long one of the few doctors in this benighted state, dubbed Brownbackistan by Neuhaus and her journalist/farmer husband Michael Cadell, to offer abortions. From 1999-2007 she acted as a consultant to whom Dr. Tiller could refer women and young girls — many the victims of rape and incest — for a second opinion required by the state.

The urgent issue today is a hearing, set for March 8 — ironically on International Women’s Day — of the Kansas Board of Healing Arts — a body that oversees the licensing of doctors, chiropracters and other medical professionals. This board has been stacked over the years of Republican control of state government with hacks and shills for the anti-abortion movement, including people with close links to Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion organization that has terrorized women seeking abortions at clinics across the country, and that has inspired a number of clinic bombings and even the murders of abortion doctors. Some of the members aren’t even doctors. For example, a recent Brownback appointee to the board was Rick Macias, a lawyer for Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion organizations.

Neuhaus’s problems began in 2006, when a convicted felon, Cheryl Sullenger (who served time in federal prison for her role in a 1988 plot to blow up a California abortion clinic, who was and is a close associate of Roeder and who is a senior policy advisor to Operation Rescue), filed a complaint with the Board of Healing Arts, alleging on no evidence that Dr. Neuhaus had not been adequately evaluating the women seeking abortions at Dr. Tiller’s clinic, or properly documenting their files.

During a lengthy investigation, based upon the word of this convicted felon, the board used lies and deception to steal Dr. Neuhaus’s confidential patient medical files, first asking her to bring them with her to a hearing “for reference purposes,” with the promise that they would not be taken from her, and then confiscating them all at the hearing.

Visit ThisCantBeHappening.net to read the rest of this report.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

In fact, for months Iranian authorities have been targeting everyone from students, lawyers, religious leaders and bloggers to political activists and their relatives as they unleash a wave of repression, including a new “cyber army” to block Internet and social media networks, thus cutting off access to the outside world, Amnesty International charged yesterday.

“The Iranian authorities have unleashed their “cyber army’ in an effort to cut off their citizens’ access to information,” said Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

“Meanwhile those who dare express any unapproved thoughts on the Internet can expect to be slapped with a prison sentence of more than a decade,” she said, adding, “The Iranian government is going to extraordinary lengths to impose a total information blackout on the Iranian population.”

These charges are contained in the report, “We Are Ordered To Crush You: Expanding Repression of Dissent in Iran.” The report says “anything from setting up a social group on the Internet, forming or joining an NGO, or expressing opposition to the status quo can land individuals in prison.”

The report documents a wave of arrests in recent months that it said “lays bare the hollowness of Iran’s claim to support protests in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Amnesty also called on the global community “not to allow tensions over Iran’s nuclear program or events in the wider region to distract it from pressing Iran to live up to its human rights obligations.”

Amnesty says Iran’s security forces — including the new cyber police force — can now scrutinize activists as they use personal computers in their own homes.   A new and shadowy “cyber army” reportedly linked to the Revolutionary Guards, has carried out attacks on websites at home and abroad, including Twitter and the Voice of America.

“In Iran today you put yourself at risk if you do anything that might fall outside the increasingly narrow confines of what the authorities deem socially or politically acceptable,” said Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s interim deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“This dreadful record really highlights the hypocrisy of the Iranian government’s attempts to show solidarity with protesters in Egypt, Bahrain and other countries in the region.”

Iran’s current actions also confirmed that there will be no change, no “softening,” in the brutal tactics the government employed in the brutal crackdown following parliamentary 2009 elections. In the 2009 demonstrations, Western media were regularly provided with photographs of the violence. Most were taken with cell phone cameras.

According to Wikipedia, in the wake of protests called by opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi in February 2011, the Iranian authorities steadily cranked up repression of dissent and the situation has worsened over the last few months in the lead up to the parliamentary elections this Friday (March 2).

The Amnesty report finds that in recent months a wave of arrests has targeted lawyers, students, journalists, political activists and their relatives, religious and ethnic minorities, filmmakers, and people with international connections, particularly to media.

Embarrassed and humiliated by the fierce and prolonged protests following the highly controversial 2009 Iranian presidential elections, the Iranian Government has apparently decided to adopt the same strategy should massive protests erupt across Iran next week.

According to Wikipedia, the Iranian government suppressed the protests and stopped the mass demonstrations in 2009, with only very minor flare-ups in 2010. However, not many of the protesters’ demands were met. Hundreds of citizens were thrown into jail. Iran’s basij — its motorcycle-borne militia — roamed Tehran and other cities, beating citizens with batons. The government also employed security forces with tear gas, water cannon, rubber bullets and, finally live rounds.

Wikipedia’s account of what happened then: For a time, the protest movement went relatively quiet. Then, the 2010–2011 Arab world protests spread across the Middle East and North Africa. After the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia on 14 January 2011, millions of people began demonstrating across the region in a broad movement aimed at various issues such as their standards of living or influencing significant reforms, with varying degrees of success. With the successful ousting of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 following that of President Ben Ali of Tunisia, renewed protests began in Iran.

On 27 January, the opposition Green Movement of Iran announced a series of protests against the Iranian government scheduled to take place prior to the “Revolution Day” march on 11 February.

On 9 February, various opposition groups in Iran sent a letter to the Ministry of Interior requesting permission to protest under the control of the Iranian police. Permission was refused by the relevant government officials. Despite these setbacks and crackdowns on activists and members of opposition parties, opposition leaders such as Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, called for protests.

On Feb.14, a man displayed a poster of one of those killed during the 2009 election protests. Feb. 15 was publicized as “The Day of Rage”. But, the day before the protests were due to begin, opposition leaders Mousavi and Karroubi were placed under house arrest and denied access to telephones and the Internet. Their homes were blockaded and they were not allowed visitors. On 14 February 2011, thousands of protesters began to gather in a solidarity rally with Egypt and Tunisia. There was a large number of police on the streets to keep an eye on the protesters, but thousands were still able to gather together in Tehran’s Azadi Square. The number of protesters has been given by different sources, from “thousands” to “hundreds of thousands”.

The solidarity protests turned into an anti-government demonstration during which the police fired tear gas and paintballs at protesters. To protect themselves, protesters responded by setting fires in garbage bins. Video footage showed one civilian being violently beaten by a group of protesters. Two protesters were fatally wounded in Tehran. Both were university students. According to reporter Farnaz Fassihi, they were both shot by men on motorcycles who their friends identified as Basij members.

Protests were also reported in the cities of Isfahan and Shiraz, which police forcibly dispersed, as well as in Rasht, Mashhad and Kermanshah.

The protests that occurred on this day marked a setback for the government of Iran, as the regime has campaigned that Mousavi’s Green Movement had lost momentum, but the revived uprisings helps prove otherwise.

According to some reports, 1,500 Hezbollah fighters assisted in the suppression of the protests in Azadi Square. Following the initial protests, Hezbollah fighters allegedly continued to participate, assisting local forces in suppressing protests.

On 18 February, thousands of pro-government supporters called for the execution of opposition leaders after Friday prayers. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said that the opposition leaders had lost their reputation and are as good as “dead and executed.” He said there should be more restrictions on Mousavi and Karroubi. “Their communications with people should be completely cut. They should not be able to receive or send messages. Their phone lines and Internet should be cut. They should be prisoners in their homes”

On February 19, the Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar stated that the protests set for Sunday, February 20, will “be confronted as per the law”.

Amnesty reports that electronic media is seen as a major threat. In January a senior police officer said Google was an “espionage tool,” not a search engine. The same month, the recently established Cyber Police required owners of Internet cafes to install CCTV and to register the identity of users before allowing them to use computers.

Blogger Mehdi Khazali was this month sentenced to four and a half years in prison, followed by ten years in “internal exile,” and a fine for charges believed to include “spreading propaganda against the system,” “gathering and colluding against national security,” and “insulting officials.” It is not clear whether his “internal exile” will in fact be served in prison.

Having been originally charged in 2011 and released on bail, he was arrested again in January. He is being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where he has been on hunger strike for more than 40 days in protest at his detention, raising fears for his health.

Harassment, arrest and imprisonment of human rights defenders, including women’s rights groups, has also intensified and several NGOs have been shut down.

Abdolfattah Soltani, a founder member of the Centre for Human Rights Defenders, was arrested in September and is held in Evin Prison awaiting the outcome of his trial on charges which include his acceptance of an international human rights prize. He has been threatened with a 20-year sentence.

The pressure on independent voices has extended to those outside Iran.

Earlier this month, the BBC said family members of its Persian language service had been subjected to harassment, including one who was arrested in January and held in solitary confinement and others whose passports were confiscated.

Amnesty International said the attacks on dissenting views come against a backdrop of a worsening overall human rights situation in Iran.

There were around four times as many public executions in 2011 as in 2010, a practice that Amnesty International said was used by the authorities to strike fear into society.

Hundreds of people are believed to have been sentenced to death in the past year, mainly for alleged drugs offenses. Iran continues to execute juvenile offenders — a practice strictly prohibited under international law.

Amnesty International called on the international community not to allow tensions over Iran’s nuclear program or events in the wider region to distract it from pressing Iran to live up to its human rights obligations.

“For Iranians facing this level of repression, it can be dispiriting that discussions about their country in diplomatic circles can seem to focus mainly on the nuclear,” said Harrison.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on subjects ranging from human rights to foreign affairs for a number of newspapers and online journals.

"Blogger" Milt Shook

These links demonstrate that Milt Shook has been an idiot–and, as TPR editor-at-large and co-founder Jason Leopold noted on Twitter Tuesday during an exchange with Shook–has lacked “reading comprehension skills” for quite some time. He attempts to speak as an expert on “a wide-range of subjects,” many of which he clearly knows nothing about as demonstrated by the idiotic screed on his blog about a report Leopold wrote about a lawsuit that Milt Shook complained was too long and “biased” or something like that. In any case, it was long-winded. Milt Shook spends most of his time attacking journalists, like Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann, and the rest of his time defending the Obama administration from the tiniest of criticisms. That Milt Shook runs a blog called PleaseCutTheCrap while disseminating so much, well, crap, is the epitome of irony. He mainly uses his blog to showcase his idiocy. The evidence of Milt Shook’s dumbfuckery speaks for itself. The headlines to these posts (which you should click on) about Milt Shook says all you need to know about this fraud.

UPDATE: Milt Shook’s analysis on National Defense Authorization Act is “Jonah Goldberg level stupid.” This was published on the blog Balloon Juice and is a nice example of Milt Shook’s sloppiness as a “blogger” and how his “analysis” is wrong and dangerous for the public to listen to.

The Stupidest Poster On USENET, milt.shook, Is A Documented Moron <LOL>

Milt Shook, Usenet village idiot claims we can make electricity from “simply air”

How stupid is Milt Shook today? example #1

Example #2

Example #3

Worst legal analyst in American history: milt shook

Milt Shook, too dumb to understand simple legal issues

Milt Shook Desperately Denying That He Said What He Said..

Milt Shook continues to support his sock puppet claims.

the no talent loon, Milt Shook, has left the Usenet group

The word on the street is that Milt is now engaged in a desperate attempt to find and weed out the folks on the chatroom circuit who are laughing about his loony behavior in usenet. Poor Milt thought he could keep his ignorant statements from popping up on the rest of the internet.

Who is this Milt Shook person?

From what I gather is that he’s a paralegal aspiring to be a political pundit. One whose schtick is to bash the left endlessly on obscure forums.

Why is he worth considering, especially considering the fact that I can read the same sort of crap here on DU everyday

He is insulting, and apparently clueless, and simply not worth listening to.

Re: # Milt Shook is up the First Amendment creek without a paddle… again

This one is priceless given his attack on Leopold’s report about a lawsuit filed against the CIA last week about: Milt Shook continues to advertise his ignorance of the law…. will he never learn?

Milt Shook, internet moron and posuer, invents a law

No matter how many times I point out that every one of his cases supports MY argument and undermines HIS, he still doesn’t see it…

Milt Shook claiming that Bush could pardon OJ Simpson

Milt Shook’s greatest hits!

“Bush can pardon ANYONE for ANYTHING. The purpose of the pardon power
in the first place was so that the president would have the power to right a judicial wrong, even at the state level. Since probably at least 90% or more of crime is prosecuted at the state level, it wouldn’t make sense to only give him the power to pardon federal crimes.”
–Milt Shook claiming that Bush could pardon OJ Simpson. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.society.liberalism/msg/4f4fe748216d1e2e?hl=en

“In fact, being married actually CUTS Social Security benefits for both.”
–Milt Shook disagreeing with the social security people http://groups.google.com/group/alt.society.liberalism/msg/e76631f45f458651?hl=en

“It doesn’t matter if it’s state property or not; the state doesn’t
have to power to limit access to a public area. They can charge to access it, but they can’t force people to have a state ID card or something. It’s right in the 14th Amendment; if you allow one person to get in for free, then all people have to be allowed in for free, if it’s public property.”
–Milt Shook.. more ignorance of the law http://groups.google.com/group/alt.society.liberalism/msg/83e117a21b818c9b

“I’ve explained it to you before; it’s because the state is
obligated to protect your First Amendment rights, even from private parties. ”
–Milt Shook claiming that private parties are subject to the First Amendment
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.society.liberalism/msg/49833dff86ea3447

“You cannot fire someone for something that
has nothing to do with their job.”
–Milt Shook …wrong again…
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.society.liberalism/msg/c85065e97f69d9e0?hl=en

“And one of the ironies of this entire discussion is that a company
that pays corporate income taxes one year can deduct them as a business expense the next.
–Milt Shook, Feb 4, 2008 who claims to have been a business consultant and have his own corporation. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.society.liberalism/msg/b0151278e691117b

Milt Shook is like Keyser Soze in the final scene of The Usual Suspects. I can see him now saying, “back when I was picking beans in Guatemala…” In other words, Milt knows everything, has done everything, and everyone is wrong about everything except Milt Shook. In Milt Shook’s world, GW Bush could have pardoned OJ Simpson.

Matt Casey is a graduate of Boston College and is currently working on a novel set in New York City during the 1920s.

Judith Miiler, frequently a panelist on Fox News Watch. Photo/WIkimedia

Judith Miller, you may recall, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-New York Times journalist who left the paper after it was discovered that she was Bush-era Vice President Dick Cheney’s “stenographer.” A Times investigation found serious errors in many of her stories about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War.

She also spent three months in jail for refusing to reveal her sources in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

Well, Judy’s at it again!

She is trying to gin up support for two Egyptian men who have been convicted of corruption, and who are currently in exile.

The subjects of Miller’s current defense are Youssef Boutros Ghali, the former finance minister of Egypt, who Miller says was “once the highest-ranking Coptic Christian in the country since the revolution,” and Rachid Mohamed Rachid, who became Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Industry in July 2004. Two years later, the ministry was expanded to include domestic trade within Egypt and was renamed the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI). He has been described as the first businessman ever to hold a cabinet position in Egypt and as a reformer.

Writing in the conservative journal, Newsmax, Miller says, only a year ago, Ghali was among Egypt’s most prominent officials. “With a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had given up a lucrative post at the International Monetary Fund to return to Cairo 18 years ago to help transform his nation’s moribund state-owned economy.”

She added, “On several key issues, the reformers had finally won, making Egypt what the IMF called an ‘emerging success story,’ one of the region’s ‘fastest-growing economies’.”

“But since the January 2011 uprising at Tahrir Square, which toppled President Hosni Mubarak in only 18 days, the military-led civilian transitional government has been waging a judicial jihad against Ghali and others who helped free Egypt’s economy,” she wrote.

Characterizing the two exiles as economic heroes, Miller said, “Once credited by U.S. officials for policies producing annual growth of some seven percent for several years – foreign and domestic investment in industries that private investors had once shunned, and robust job creation – they have now been blamed not only for a culture of corruption that is nearly as old as Egypt’s pyramids, but also for Mubarak’s political failings.”

“Although the free-market policies resulted in a more equitable distribution of income than that of India, Mexico, Brazil, and several other emerging economies, the reformers are now hunted men,” she said.

Convicted by a Cairo criminal court of “squandering public resources,” based on often bogus evidence in sham trials that in Ghali’s case lasted only six minutes, they are either in jail, in exile, or on the run.

“Travel bans and Interpol warrants have been issued for them, passports canceled, visas revoked, and their property and other assets in Egypt have been frozen…The scapegoating of the reformers and the reversal of their policies have increased the likelihood of an economic meltdown,” she wrote.

In an interview, Rachid said that to reignite growth, Egypt must restore security, install a government that can rule for three or four years, rather than three or four months, and finally, stop attacking the free-market system for short-term political gain. “Without this, investor confidence in Egypt will not be restored,” he warned.

Miller continues: “The reformers are now widely dispersed, exchanging news and political gossip through emails and by cellphone.”

Some, like Ghali and Rachid, “the first businessman ever to hold a senior Cabinet post in Egypt, have sought refuge in other countries. Others, like Ahmed Maghrabi, the former minister of housing, and Yusuf Wali, the former agriculture minister who hails from one of Egypt’s most prominent land-owning clans, are in jail.”

“Once-powerful men courted by the world’s financial elite, they are now largely isolated, abandoned by the country they struggled to change. Most have been assailed by Egypt’s vituperative, scandal-mongering press,” she wrote.

After the six-minute trial in June, Ghali was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 30 years in prison for allegedly using a Finance Ministry printer in 2010 to produce election materials for his campaign for parliament. American officials say he was also convicted of squandering public money by using 102 cars held in customs for his personal use.

Ghali’s lawyer had said that the cars had been impounded for customs duty violations, and that Ghali had given them not to family or friends, but to fellow ministers and his own deputies who were entitled to official cars, but whose cars were old and kept breaking down. The transaction had saved Egyptian taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds, Miller wrote.

She continued: “Diplomats say Ghali’s efforts to reform Egypt’s bureaucracy required creative maneuvering. In 2004, the Finance Ministry, with its 20,000 employees and $50 million budget, had almost no computers.

The ministry’s two word-processors were reserved for the minister’s office, which meant that Egypt’s budget, all 49,000 accounts of it, had to be calculated and consolidated by hand. No ministry knew the size of another’s budget, and the military liked it that way.”

“The revolution, with its insistence on Islam as the source of Egyptian identity, coupled with the military’s traditional hostility to Christians, does not bode well for secular, pro-Western activists like Ghali.”

“Until he was named finance minister, no Copt had ever risen to so high a civilian post in modern times. Even then, a few extremist Salafi sheiks issued fatwas denouncing his promotion: Islam prohibited putting Christians in charge of Muslim treasure, they opined.”

Miller wrote that many of the “most savage attacks on Ghali in the Egyptian press have directly or indirectly touched on his religion, implying that a Christian’s loyalty to Egypt may be questioned.”

Miller concludes: “Many Egyptians, friends say, are gradually acknowledging that those they have banished may not be corrupt, and that even if some of them are, Egypt’s poverty and income disparities cannot be mainly their fault.”

Seeking confirmation of Miller’s assertions, we sought the opinion of one of a widely respected Egypt scholar, Egyptian-born Samer Shehata, professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University.

Here’s what he told us:

“I read the article when it came out and it is filled with inaccuracies and distortions. For example, Ms. Miller claims that, until Ghali, no Copt had ever risen to such a high position. In fact, his uncle Boutrus was Foreign Minister under Sadat.”

Shehata concedes that “Ghali might not have been as corrupt as Ahmed Ezz (the billionaire steel tycoon who has emerged as perhaps the most hated symbol of the old system) but there is absolutely no doubt that he misused the 100 plus cars for personal use and advantage. We know this beyond doubt.”

Shehata continues: Ghali was part of a criminal regime justifying their actions, economic, political, etc. And although there were likely some bigoted reports about him in the press, the primary reason he is despised in Egypt has nothing to do with his religion (nor is it framed as such) but about his real estate tax plan, being part of the regime, and other more specific allegations.”

Shehata concludes: “Miller is hardly a serious journalist.”

Welcome back, Judy. Dick Cheney would be proud of you.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

It was in 2002 and 2003, when the drumbeats of impending war were being pounded by our political leaders and dutifully transcribed by most (though not all) of the supine bunch of stenographers we call the mainstream press.

Although many analysts at the CIA were skeptical, the dominant narrative in Washington was that Saddam Hussein not only had weapons of mass destruction, but he had stockpiles of them. You just about had to go to the “alternative” press on the Internet to hear any other side of the story.

The incessant drip-drip-drip from the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine, including allusions to the mushroom cloud, stirred up a witch’s brew of fear among the population. And that fear was constantly being stoked into hysteria, based on the certitude that Saddam Hussein played a big part in 9/11 – didn’t he meet with some al Qaeda agent in Vienna? — and the display of actual weapons parts by Colin Powell at the UN. And Colin Powell was a man we had all come to trust and respect, wasn’t he?

Well, I’m getting a feeling of deja vu all over again listening to Administration officials talking about whether Iran will have its bomb in a year or two years, the US assuring the Ayatollahs that no aspect of American power was off the table, the Israelis releasing their crop of “top secrets everyone should know” to talk about when and if they’re planning to bomb Iranian nuclear installations. Just listen to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who claims Israel “does not want to take military action against Iran over its nuclear program, but at some point may have no other option. The
Jewish state at this point did not intend to launch a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, but retained the option as a ‘last resort,’

And, in case you haven’t noticed, this main narrative is being burnished on a pretty regular basis by other scary-sounding developments by both sides, or all three sides. The Iranians hatched a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to Washington in the U.S. Unexplained explosions ripped through one of Iran’s major nuclear installations. The Iranians sentenced an American to death for spying for the Israelis. Then they threatened to close the Straight of Hormuz, through which passes a big chunk of petroleum that’s shipped by sea. The Iranians were also busy discussing cutting off oil supplies to Europe, and the West was conjuring up ever more draconian sanctions.

But are we being sandbagged again? Doesn’t anyone disagree with the conclusions reached by the US and Israeli administrations? Well, yes, lots of them, but people’s misgivings are being reported in only a tiny fraction of the mainstream press, and they’re difficult to find.

For example, Whistleblower Sibel Edmunds’ Web site, Boiling Frogs, brings us an article by William Blum, for many years one of the most credible critics of US foreign policy.

“Is USrael (Blum uses this contraction to indicate the two nations’ singularity of purpose) actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran?” Blum asks.

He answers: “In case you’ve forgotten…In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [then Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.”

He goes on: In 2009, “A senior Israeli official in Washington” asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.”

And in 2010, “The Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, ‘believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons’.”

Early last month, Blum continues, “US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.”

“A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that “three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.”

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: “People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.”

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. … There are “certain things [the Iranians] have not done” that would be necessary to build a warhead.

Blum concludes: “Admissions like the above — and there are others — are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted — On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: “But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.” Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No …”

Nobody (except Iran) believes Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a plus for Iran or its neighbors, or for the Israelis or the US. All the parties to this dangerous epidemic of saber-rattling ought to step back and take a deep breath.

Unless, on the other hand, it’s true that every American president needs to have at least one war on his watch to establish his street creds. Well, our current president is dealing with two wars, but maybe these don’t count because they were inherited.

President Obama has tried, early in his term, to extend a hand of friendship rather than a clenched first to the Iranians. Thus far, that approach has failed.

There are a few things that could reverse that situation. The IAEA is back inside Iran doing inspections. Let us await the IAEA’S report at the conclusion of its current inspection. Then perhaps the Iranians will want to sit down with the Quartet for a serious discussion, not only of the nuclear issue, but of a whole range of issues – notably to include human rights – that separate Iran from the other nations of the world.

Second, a bit further down the road we should be able to assess how effective the sanctions have become. If there are signs that the Iranians are beginning to feel the pinch, conversations and negotiations might be more practical than they have been in the past.

Finally, if Iran makes good on its promise to close the Straight of Hormuz, it will surely have shot itself in the foot. The simple reason is that Iranian oil has to move through these same waters to get to market. The prospective supply shortfall will likely result in a spike in oil prices that will help no one, save speculators.

There is and will be continuing political risk for the Obama Administration, especially in a presidential election year. Republicans will rail against any kind of dialogue with the Iranians. But they’ll rail whether we talk or not. And, if talks actually do take place, they could be a humiliating failure.

Is this worth the risk? Talking – or at least trying to get the parties to meet one another again – is preferable in every way to Shock and Awe. Just keep in mind how long it took us to extricate ourselves from the last Shock and Awe.

Originally published by Prism Magazine.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Denied a visa was Richard Sollom, deputy president of the US-Based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), who was hoping to attend the trial of doctors and nurses that treated injured protestors during months of unrest last year.

He left for Dubai, from where he told The Washington Post, “I am quite stunned. This was the first time a member of an international rights organization came to Bahrain after authorities promised to respect human rights and told us we can come and see for ourselves.

“We can see now that not much has changed,” he added.

Sollom thus became the second huan rights executive to be denied entry to Bahrain. Brian Dooley of Human Rights First, a major US-based human rights organization, applied for a visa but received a letter from Bahrain’s Minister for Human Rights and Social Development, Fatima Al Booshi, on January 11th suggesting he should delay his entry until the end of February.

In his reply, Dooley reminded the Minister that she told him on November 24th 2011 that non-government organizations (NGOs) would have access to Bahrain if they gave “five days’ notice of their arrival”. Brian informed the “Human Rights” Ministry of his proposed visit next week, on December 20th.

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa, also assured human rights groups that NGOs would have “unfettered access to Bahrain.”

In his letter to the Minister, Dooley also noted  that, at the release of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report in November, King Hamad had assured the world that ‘any Government which has a sincere desire for reform and progress understands the benefit of objective and constructive criticism,’ and that the day of the report of the BICI report ‘turns a new page of history.’ ”

Calling this a backward step for the Kingdom, Faisal Fulad, President of the Bahrain Human Rights Society (BHRWS), said: “His Majesty the King has made it clear that Bahrain has nothing to hide when he opened the country up to the world in October, facing the truth of an independent commission which reported last year’s democratic protests.”

He added: “So why are we now back to this? By not allowing a human rights activist to enter the kingdom, we are giving conflicting messages to the world that will now be asking, once again – is Bahrain a free and democratic country or not?”

He suggested a “return to an offer of talks put on the table last March” by the Crown Prince and the Deputy Supreme Commander.” Members of the opposition have made similar calls.

The Crown Prince had proposed a National Dialogue that included talks on seven key points: A parliament with full authority; a government that represents the will of the people; a review of naturalization; fair voting districts; the combating of corruption; state property; and addressing sectarian tension.

Bahrain’s King and his family are Sunni Arabs. Most of the Bahraini population consists of Shia Muslims and foreign workers. The Shias have long-standing complaints of discrimination against them in jobs, housing and social acceptance.

“Bahrain’s leadership has taken many brave steps forward in the last year to show that democracy is alive in the kingdom, but this move seems to take us back to stage one,” Fulad said, adding:

“I believe this is a time for the second phase of dialogue and to concentrate on HRH the Crown Prince’s seven points. At the same time, reforms should be stronger so that people will believe reform is happening.”

Meanwhile, human rights defenders, medics, students and others targeted by the Bahraini government in its crackdown on pro-democracy efforts continue to face abusive detention despite growing calls for their release.

One of those calls came from United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called for the unconditional release of all Bahraini detainees imprisoned after a military trial. Human Rights First (HRF) noted that the Bahraini government had failed to comply with that request and, in fact, “is taking steps to delay the appeals of those accused.”

“Yesterday, a group of students from the University of Bahrain who were sentenced to 15 years each by the military court had their appeal hearing postponed until March. Five of them remain in Bahrain’s Jaw Prison,” said HRF’s Dooley.

“Their case and others like it make clear that Bahrain’s leaders are ignoring key calls for reform issued by Commissioner Pillay and even the Kingdom’s own Bassiouni Commission,” he said.

In addition to the students, the Bahrain regime continues to contest the appeals of others sentenced by the military court, including 20 medics who appear to have been prosecuted for treating injured protestors and telling the media about the nature and extent of injuries.

Dr. Nada Dhaif is one of the medics sentenced to 15 years after a trial in military court. Dr. Dhaif was summoned by the police for a four-hour interrogation on December 25.  During that interrogation, she was warned to keep a low profile, an apparent government response to her decision to speak with the media and human rights organizations about how she and others were tortured in detention.

Dr. Dhaif told Dooley, “I am being targeted for telling the world the continuing truth about Bahrain. Members of my family are also being harassed by the regime. I have only ever advocated peaceful reform but am being threatened for my human rights advocacy.”

Local human rights activists also report ongoing concerns about treatment in custody. Hassan Oun, aged 18, was rearrested today after speaking to a local human rights organization. During previous interrogations, Oun said he was raped by a security officer.

That officer allegedly later called Oun after his release and threatened to rearrest him and rape him until he died. According to Maryam Al Khawaja of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Oun was recently arrested again in what she said was revenge against him for speaking to their center.

Every indication points away from the Royal Family’s willingness to engage in discussions of reform and reverse the variety of heinous human rights abuses committed by the country’s security apparatus.

For most democracies in the international community, the King’s double-dealing has triggered a profound sense of disappointment and betrayal. Hopes soared high when the King, in a first-of-a-kind move in the Middle East, commissioned and accepted a genuinely independent report prepared under the leadership of a distinguished judge from Egypt. That report found that Bahrain was guilty of unacceptable human rights violations, including widespread torture in detention.

The King urged dialogue. But that word is not being heard much these days. It seems obvious that His Highness is attempting to sandbag the world, stalling for time.

Meantime, little is being heard from the US, where President Obama finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Bahrain is of strategic importance to American interests, as it is not only a supplier of oil, but host to the US Fifth Fleet.

Bahrain has hired a small army of PR people in the US and the UK to promote the notion that the “unrest” is over. No need to worry about it anymore. These communications gurus also want to see the Bahrain Grand Prix, the Kingdom’s Formula One racing event, rescheduled. It was cancelled earlier because of the violence in the country.

But now, there is an opportunity for the folks who supervise Formula One to show the world that the unrest was never over and is far from being over now. Just last week, two children died from inhaling tear gas fired at them by the security forces.

Formula One can honor these children and demonstrate that there are things more important than money. Helping to ensure the basic rights of a people is surely one of those things. And if Bahrain really values Formula One for its tourism and economic development, that gives the organizers enormous leverage.

We need to urge them to use it.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Mohamed M. ElBaradei, Director-General, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, captured during the session 'Stopping the Spread of Nuclear Weapons' at the Annual Meeting 2007 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2007. Photo/Wikimedia

After months of performing like Egypt’s Cinderella leader, jet-setting between Cairo and his old home in Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei has finally reached the limits of his frustration.

At a press conference last week, ElBaradei said the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took over from Mubarak, had governed “as if no revolution took place and no regime has fallen”.

“My conscience does not permit me to run for the presidency or any other official position unless it is within a democratic framework,” the former head of the UN nuclear watchdog said.

His surprise resignation came as a protest to the ruling military council’s failure to put the country on the path to democracy. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, a group of the Egypt’s highest military officers, took over as “interim rulers” of the country immediately after the February 11 resignation of 30-year-dictator Hosni Mubarak, Mubarak, now 83 years old, is currently on trial along with a number of high-level political and military figures for corruption and for killing peaceful demonstrators in Tahrir Square, where the Arab Spring revolution was born.

In the pre-Tahrir Square days, ElBaradei was among prominent Egyptians constantly mentioned for the post of president, should the revolution succeed. He played a somewhat coy game during this period, expressing reservations about taking on the monumental task of leading his countrymen into a new era of non-corrupt, transparent and responsive government.

The Nobel laureate, regarded as a driving force behind the movement that forced the former president Hosni Mubarak to step down, told the Guardian newspaper that the conditions for a fair election were not in place.

With Parliamentary elections to the lower house over, and the parties of the Muslim Brotherhood and the yet more conservative Salafists winning more than enough seats to effectively control the lower body, it was highly doubtful that ElBaradei could have won enough support from the Liberal parties to gain the presidency.

But it would be a big mistake to count the Nobel-prize-winner out just yet. The historic journey along Egypt’s road to good governance has barely begun.

The polished international diplomat again called on the SCAF and their puppet civilian government to move with all possible speed to enact fundamental political reforms. The citizens of the Arab world’s largest nation were “yearning desperately for economic and social change” and that without drastic improvements, a “Tunisia-style explosion” in Egypt would be unavoidable, he told the Guardian.

Nearly half of the country’s 80 million citizens live on less than £1.25 a day, and despite record GDP growth the majority of the population has become poorer in real terms over the past 20 years. Unemployment is epidemic, Graduates with PhD degrees are driving taxies or working as waiters. Many of the members of the last two graduating classes of Cairo University have never held any job for which they were trained.

However, Baradei has rejected the idea of a “second revolution” – a huge gathering in Tahrir Square, much like those of the recent past – because of the very real possibility of widespread violence and death.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.