In the Shadow of the Fifth Fleet: “five months in custody, enduring beatings, torture, sexual assault and threats of rape……..”

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When a Bahraini hospital started to take in casualties from the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year, Rula al-Saffar was one of the first to volunteer. As a medical professor and president of the Bahraini Nursing Society, she was not on the staff of the overwhelmed Salmaniya hospital, but doctors needed all the help they could get. Saffar could not have known at the time that in stepping in to help save lives she was endangering her own. Within weeks she would be arrested, charged, convicted in a trial lasting minutes and sentenced to 15 years in prison, along with 19 other hospital medics………. Saffar was arrested on 4 April after receiving a late-night phone call ordering her to present herself to Bahrain’s Central Investigation Department for interrogation. “The minute I entered they just closed the gate, and suddenly I was blindfolded, handcuffed and started being pushed and cussed at the whole time. “I never knew why was I there. And then this woman started shouting at me, that you hate the system, that you were a protester against the system, against the king. “I kept saying: ‘No, this is not what happened,’ and of course the minute you say no they beat you up and they electrocute you … And I thought: ‘How dare you do this?’ Interrogation … as you see in a democratic country, I thought my country had the same thing, where you have a right for your lawyer, they read your warrant. But this is not what happened to us.” Saffar spent five months in custody, enduring beatings, torture, sexual assault and threats of rape… ……

Yes sir, those mercenary interrogators from Pakistan and Jordan are sure earning their pay. As do the local thugs of the regime. That must be what the billion-dollar a year GCC aid was intended for. I wonder if they had some of those Salafi shaikhs they have in their pockets sanction such behavior as kosher, in a Salafi Islamic sense. For a price, of course. As for our Wahhabi faux-liberals on our Gulf, many of them think it is alright, as long as the Salafi shaikhs say so. In the shadow of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Cheers
mhg



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