UN scrutinizes Saudi Arabia's anti-terror laws and Prince Turki Al-Faisal's alternative facts

UN scrutinizes Saudi Arabia's anti-terror laws and Prince Turki Al-Faisal's alternative facts

    Thursday, May 04, 2017   No comments

UN scrutinizes Saudi Arabia's anti-terror laws

A UN rights expert has been given unprecedented access to review the Saudi kingdom's terrorist legislation. However, he has been denied access to journalists and rights activists detained on terror charges.

After a series of meetings with kingdom's senior prosecutors, UN Rapporteur Ben Emmerson reported on Thursday that Saudi Arabia's counter-terrorism laws present an "extremely mixed" picture.

In his preliminary findings, Emmerson expressed grave concerns that Saudi Arabia's legislation contained an "unacceptably broad definition" of terror-related crimes that suppressed free speech and did not comply with international standards.

"I strongly condemn the use of counter-terrorism legislation and penal sanctions against individuals peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression", religion, or association," he said. Source








Video of Prince Turki Al-Faisal and his alternative facts

Here is why no government should ever be trusted with human rights protection: governments are always the culprit when it comes to HR abuses

Here is why no government should ever be trusted with human rights protection: governments are always the culprit when it comes to HR abuses

    Wednesday, May 03, 2017   No comments

The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch condemned the U.N.’s election of Saudi Arabia, “the world’s most misogynistic regime,” to a 2018-2022 term on its Commission on the Status of Women, the U.N. agency “exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.”

“Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. “It’s absurd — and morally reprehensible.”

“This is a black day for women’s rights, and for all human rights,” said Neuer. Interview: Why Saudis Joined Women’s Rights Body

“Saudi discrimination against women is gross and systematic in law and in practice. Every Saudi woman,” said Neuer, “must have a male guardian who makes all critical decisions on her behalf, controlling a woman’s life from her birth until death. Saudi Arabia bans women from driving cars. Why did the U.N. choose the world’s leading oppressor of women to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women?”


Saudi women feel betrayed by the UN. “I wish I could find the words to express how I feel right know. I’m ‘saudi’ and this feels like betrayal,” tweeted a self-described Saudi woman pursuing a doctorate in international human rights law in Australia.

“Today the UN sent a message that women’s rights can be sold out for petro-dollars and politics,” said Neuer, “and it let down millions of female victims worldwide who look to the world body for protection.”

sources: UN Watch, WashPost...

Trump: Saudi Arabia must pay for US protection... Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly

Trump: Saudi Arabia must pay for US protection... Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly

    Friday, April 28, 2017   No comments

Pro-regime propaganda in Saudi Arabia

President Donald Trump complained on Thursday that U.S. ally Saudi Arabia was not treating the United States fairly and Washington was losing a “tremendous amount of money” defending the kingdom.

In an interview with Reuters, Trump confirmed his administration was in talks about possible visits to Saudi Arabia and Israel in the second half of May. He is due to make his first trip abroad as president for a May 25 NATO summit in Brussels and could add other stops.

"Frankly, Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly, because we are losing a tremendous amount of money in defending Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Trump’s criticism of Riyadh was a return to his 2016 election campaign rhetoric when he accused the kingdom of not pulling its weight in paying for the U.S. security umbrella.

"Nobody’s going to mess with Saudi Arabia because we’re watching them," Trump told a campaign rally in Wisconsin a year ago. “They’re not paying us a fair price. We’re losing our shirt.”  source

Saudi youth agitate protesting lack of jobs and corruption; government restores perks to state employees to fend off unrest

Saudi youth agitate protesting lack of jobs and corruption; government restores perks to state employees to fend off unrest

    Thursday, April 27, 2017   No comments

Calls have been growing on social media for Saudi Arabia's jobless to protest on Sunday, after a similar appeal before the government

Demonstrations are banned in the conservative kingdom, and the previous calls for civic action led police to flood Riyadh on April 21.

Media access is also controlled, though Saudis are very active on social media including on Twitter, where many post anonymously with fabricated usernames.

Under the hashtag "Unemployed rally April 30", several Saudi Twitter users posted calls for demonstrations outside government employment offices on Sunday.

"Because of the April 21st movement, the benefits were returned, my brother citizen do not deprive yourself and come out on April 30, may God assist you to overcome your troubles," wrote one Twitter user under the name @Hussain_Khalid.

Another using the hashtag wrote "we are only looking for jobs," while another posted: "We're not Daesh, we're not with Iran, all we want is to be employed, nothing else."

The comment referred to Saudi Arabia's regional rival Iran and the jihadist Islamic State group, known by the Arabic acronym Daesh.

A post from another user accused the government of spending money on projects abroad while it is "in deficit to the people" at home.

The new campaign appeared modelled on a similar movement on social media that had called for demonstrations last Friday over a range of political and economic issues.

There were no signs of major demonstrations on Friday and the Sabq online newspaper, which is close to authorities, reported that the day had passed quietly with no protests.

But on Saturday King Salman announced an end to austerity measures that Saudi authorities had imposed in September -- including a freeze on salaries and limited benefits for civil servants -- as part of austerity measures following a collapse in global oil prices since 2014.
restored benefits to civil servants last weekend.

Government agents and government supporters, too, took to social media to talk up the ruling family leadership and connection to the public.


Sample of the pro- and anti-government posts on social media:

Trump keeps Syria-Sarin Evidence secret

Trump keeps Syria-Sarin Evidence secret

    Wednesday, April 19, 2017   No comments

Trump Withholds Syria-Sarin Evidence
Exclusive: Despite President Trump’s well-known trouble with the truth, his White House now says “trust us” on its Syrian-sarin charges while withholding the proof that it claims to have, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

After making the provocative and dangerous charge that Russia is covering up Syria’s use of chemical weapons, the Trump administration withheld key evidence to support its core charge that a Syrian warplane dropped sarin on a northern Syrian town on April 4.
A four-page white paper, prepared by President Trump’s National Security Council staff and released by the White House on Tuesday, claimed that U.S. intelligence has proof that the plane carrying the sarin gas left from the Syrian military airfield that Trump ordered hit by Tomahawk missiles on April 6.



The paper asserted that “we have signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence,” but then added that “we cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due to the need to protect sources and methods.”

I’m told that the key evidence was satellite surveillance of the area, a body of material that U.S. intelligence analysts were reviewing late last week even after the Trump-ordered bombardment of 59 Tomahawk missiles that, according to Syrian media reports, killed seven or eight Syrian soldiers and nine civilians, including four children.

Yet, it is unclear why releasing these overhead videos would be so detrimental to “sources and methods” since everyone knows the U.S. has this capability and the issue at hand – if it gets further out of hand – could lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia.

In similarly tense situations in the past, U.S. Presidents have released sensitive intelligence to buttress U.S. government assertions, including John F. Kennedy’s disclosure of U-2 spy flights in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan revealing electronic intercepts after the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983.

Yet, in this current case, as U.S.-Russian relations spiral downward into what is potentially an extermination event for the human species, Trump’s White House insists that the world must trust it despite its record of consistently misstating facts.

source: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/12/trump-withholds-syria-sarin-evidence/

How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media

    Wednesday, April 12, 2017   No comments

Scott Ritter, Contributor

For the first time since President Obama, in August 2011, articulated regime change in Damascus as a precondition for the cessation of the civil conflict that had been raging since April 2011, American government officials articulated that this was no longer the case.  “You pick and choose your battles,” the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told reporters on March 30, 2017.  “And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”  Haley’s words were echoed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who observed that same day, while on an official visit to Turkey, “I think the… longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.”

This new policy direction lasted barely five days. Sometime in the early afternoon of April 4, 2017, troubling images and video clips began to be transmitted out of the Syrian province of Idlib by anti-government activists, including members of the so-called “White Helmets,” a volunteer rescue team whose work was captured in an eponymously-named Academy Award-winning documentary film. These images showed victims in various stages of symptomatic distress, including death, from what the activists said was exposure to chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian air force on the town of Khan Sheikhoun that very morning.

Images of these tragic deaths were immediately broadcast on American media outlets, with pundits decrying the horrific and heinous nature of the chemical attack, which was nearly unanimously attributed to the Syrian government, even though the only evidence provided was the imagery and testimony of the anti-Assad activists who, just days before, were decrying the shift in American policy regarding regime change in Syria. President Trump viewed these images, and was deeply troubled by what he saw, especially the depictions of dead and suffering children.

The images were used as exhibits in a passionate speech by Haley during a speech at the Security Council on April 5, 2017, where she confronted Russia and threatened unilateral American military action if the Council failed to respond to the alleged Syrian chemical attack. “Yesterday morning, we awoke to pictures, to children foaming at the mouth, suffering convulsions, being carried in the arms of desperate parents,” Haley said, holding up two examples of the images provided by the anti-Assad activists. “We saw rows of lifeless bodies, some still in diapers…we cannot close our eyes to those pictures.  We cannot close our minds of the responsibility to act.”  If the Security Council refused to take action against the Syrian government, Haley said, then “there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”

...

Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.  If the Russians are correct, and the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.

The counter-narrative offered by the Russians and Syrians, however, has been minimized, mocked and ignored by both the American media and the Trump administration. So, too, has the very illogic of the premise being put forward to answer the question of why President Assad would risk everything by using chemical weapons against a target of zero military value, at a time when the strategic balance of power had shifted strongly in his favor. Likewise, why would Russia, which had invested considerable political capital in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons capability after 2013, stand by idly while the Syrian air force carried out such an attack, especially when their was such a heavy Russian military presence at the base in question at the time of the attack?
...
Source

How many alternative facts could the spokesperson for this White House, Sean Spicer, pack in 3 sentences? answer: 3

How many alternative facts could the spokesperson for this White House, Sean Spicer, pack in 3 sentences? answer: 3

    Tuesday, April 11, 2017   No comments

Alternative fact: “We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II."

Fact: the United States used two nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 250,000 civilians and disfigured more than 150,000, many of whom still live with illness caused by these weapons of mass destruction.

Alternative fact: "Someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons.”

Fact:  More than 250,000 Jews were killed between 1942 and 1943 in Hilter's gas chambers.


Alternative fact: “Hitler was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.”

Fact: Just before the WW's, 300,000 and 500,000 Jews lived in Germany, they were German citizens. By the end of WWII, Nazis killed between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews.

_____________

An administration with this kind of handle on historical facts can hardly be trusted when it claims that the Syrian government is behind the chemical attack/explosion and launch a military attack against a sovereign nation before any credible investigation and fact finding process.

 On that subject, Peter Ford's assessment of the attack on Syria is noteworthy:

Former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, on the US attack on Syria: not based on facts

Former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, on the US attack on Syria: not based on facts

    Tuesday, April 11, 2017   No comments

Former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, told the BBC on Friday chemical weapons are now "more likely" to be used in Syria because jihadis know a "fake flag" attack will trigger the US to attack Assad.

"It's not going to end here ... because Trump has just given the jihadis a thousand reasons to stage fake flag operations," Ford said. "Seeing how successful and how easy it is with a gullible media to provoke the West into intemperate reactions."

"They will very likely stage an operation similar to what they did -- and this was documented by the United Nations in August last year -- they mounted a chlorine gas attack on civilians and they tried to make it look like it was a regime operation," he said.

"Mark my words, you hearing it here, and it will happen," Ford said. "And we'll get all the warmongers coming to tell us that that Assad is defying us and we must go in more heavily into Syria, this will be fake flag."

Sacha Llorenti's statement at the emergency UN Security Council meeting on Syria April 7, 2017

Sacha Llorenti's statement at the emergency UN Security Council meeting on Syria April 7, 2017

    Saturday, April 08, 2017   No comments

Sacha Llorenti, whose government called for the emergency UNSC meeting, requested that the meeting be a closed session. U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, whose is presiding over the UNSC during the month of April, rejected Llorenti’s request, perhaps thinking that she will be able to shame countries who challenge the legitimacy of the US attack on Syria, arguing that “any country that chooses to defend the atrocities of the Syrian regime will have to do so in full public view, for all the world to hear.” In the light of the Llorenti's statement, she may live to regret that decision.

Sacha Llorenti, delivered a powerful statement reminding the world about the importance of international law and the consequences of violating that law.  He criticized Trump’s decision to take unilateral action against Syria, which he described as being “an extremely serious violation of international law.”

Llorenti reminded the council of what transpired on Wednesday February 5, 2003, when then-US secretary of state Colin Powell “came to this room to present to us, according to his own words, convincing proof that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Llorenti held up a photograph of Powell taken on that day, when he held up a model vial of anthrax to demonstrate the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein and his alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

Here is Sacha Llorenti's full statement: 

Scotland Yard is looking into allegations of war crimes against Saudi Arabia, committed in Yemen

Scotland Yard is looking into allegations of war crimes against Saudi Arabia, committed in Yemen

    Monday, April 03, 2017   No comments

A statement from the Metropolitan Police said: "On Thursday, 30 March 2017 the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) received a referral of an allegation of war crimes, made against Saudi Arabia committed in Yemen.

"Following receipt of the referral, the MPS war crimes team (part of the Counter Terrorism Command) began a scoping exercise and contacted those making the allegations.

"There is no investigation at this time, and the scoping exercise continues."

Britain's potential role in the ongoing conflict in Yemen has been controversial, with the British government being urged to stop exporting arms to Saudi Arabia.

News outlets, activists, and NGOs have pointed to evidence that British-made bombs and weapons are being used against civilians in Yemen, in what would constitute a war crime.

This is a charge that Saudi Arabia vehemently denies, saying the weapons seen in these reports are older, and that the cluster bombs were in fact dropped in 2009.